Healthcare - Archiving your data

NexSAN's Assureon has been designed to to address the long term storage and management of fixed content and compliance information. For the medical industry, this is good news. The PACS just keep growing and we know we can't go back to the "old" hard copy that we used for decades.

The biggest problems faced by this medical market are compliance and yes the files tend to grow significantly and there is an associated cost as these images need to be kept for a predetermined period of time.

The NexSAN Assureon can be your savior.

The NexSAN Assureon is fast, manages itself, self auditing and healing, is very reliable, is secure, offers longevity, easy to grow and is very simple to own and use.

Nexsan Assureon adds value in many different ways:

• Securely archives PACS images to meet long-term retention policies
• Meets mandatory HIPAA requirements
• WORM storage ensures image immutability
• Continual auditing to ensure image integrity and authenticity
• Provides audit trail of user access
• Archived images can be encrypted to ensure patient security and privacy
• At the end of an image’s retention period, either the retention period can be extended or the images can be permanently deleted
• Provides local or remote replication for Business Continuity
• In remote replication: when primary site is down, applications transparently fail over to secondary site.
• When primary site is back up and active, Assureon’s automatic self-healing replication re-synchronizes the two sites.
• Solution in place for satellite offices, local or worldwide.

This is not the easiest solution to explain in written words. Basically it will adapt to your environment.

Assureon has been certified or is compatible with:
PACS Certified: GE, AGFA, Plasmon.
PACS Certification in process: Siemens, Cerner and McKesson

Bottom line it works and is significantly less expensive than the competition and offers additional features.

Please contact me at Sunstar Company and rather quickly we can determine if the Assureon is a match.

Gavin@sunstarco.com 800.663.5523

Thanks

Gavin
www.sunstarco.com

42TB in a single chassis

Sunstar Company is proud to introduce to you the NexSAN SATABeast. No just like any other SAN, the SATABeast will save you money.

Interested in going green, save power.

The SATABeast employs Nexsan's revolutionary AutoMAID™ energy saving technology. AutoMAID transparently places SATABeast disk drives in an idle state reducing power consumption and operational costs. AutoMAID delivers the cost-saving benefits of MAID (Massive Array of Idle Disks) without the limitations of slow access times and special host software. Nexsan's AutoMAID is granular to an individual drive or RAID set and enables users to determine the level of access speed and energy savings desired. AutoMAID is the first MAID architecture that supports VTL (Virtual Tape Libraries), full file format D2D and standard RAID implementations.

NexSAN's award-winning Performance SATAT RAID controller architecture utilizes dual RAID engines on each SATABeast controller to provide extremely high throughput performance across 42 spindles. SATABeast's 42 high capacity drives can be segmented into multiple RAID sets or a single large storage pool. LUN Mapping allows users to easily configure the massive disk capacity for dozens of servers or one.

• Highest storage density in the industry - up to 42 TB in only 4U
• NexSAN's revolutionary AutoMAID™ energy saving technology greatly reduces power consumption and operating costs.
• Full Enterprise class performance and reliability
• Dual function Fibre Channel and iSCSI connectivity with wire-speed performance. Flexible, scalable and completely OS independent, SATABeast easily supports a broad range of storage infrastructures.
• High performance – over 700 MB/s sustained throughput
• Integrated Fibre Channel and iSCSI connectivity for flexible implementation
• Reduced energy consumption and costs through AutoMAID™ technology.
• All active components are redundant and individually hot-swappable
• Highest density per rack inch
• Completely OS independent. No special software drivers or server-based management applications required.
• Supports RAID 0, 1, 1+0, 4, 5 and 6 & supports multiple RAID sets and multiple volumes per set.
• Up to 2GB cache per controller and supports up to 32 LUNS per controller.
• Online SATABeast delivers access to data up to 500 times faster than tape libraries and 20x faster than other MAID systems.
• Embedded web-browsable GUI over 10/100/1000 port, supports email alerts and SNMP traps
• Horizontal midplane design promotes superior airflow and alleviates insertion stress points
• Anti-Accumulative Rotational Vibration design enables maximum drive reliability.
• WorldView™ - Provides ability to manage and configure multiple Nexsan units from a single GUI
• Warranty - three years
• Reliable - YES

Looking for more than 42TB, look at the DataBeast, in essence, multiple SATABeasts and more.

More spped, well the SASBeast (not confirmed) is not yet on the market, consider the NexSAN SASBoy, very similar to the 14 drive SATABoy , however SAS drives and very fast.

Interested, contact me at Sunstar. (800) 663.5523 or info@sunstarco.com

Cheers

Gavin

iSCSI Storage here to stay

It's easy to install - almost as fast as Fibre attached storage and yes reliable. So why not purchase an iSCSI SAN?

Actually many companies are going the iSCSI root, however it is not the ideal solution for all. If you need very fast storage and are working with large databases - perhaps it will be best to stay with Fibre attached storage. Not all vendors agree and some vehemently state - "ours is fast enough". This might indeed be the case, however most primary storage in enterprise accounts tend to stick with a particular manufacturer and Fibre has worked in the past so why not continue.

We at Sunstar Company do recommend iSCSI Attached Storage for many many of our clients. For the most part they are easy to install, reliable and yes fast. Most manufacturers that do offer an iSCSi solution have in the past paired the unit with SATA drives, thus good but not great performance. Now with the new SAS drives, we are looking at a higher performing solution.

We tend to offer the following solutions when we have a client looking to purchase iSCSI:

• NexSAN - Their line of storage supports a choice of Fibre and iSCSI ports or SAS and iSCSI ports. In conjunction with The Edge that SATABeast or SATABoy will now supports NAS with a choice of SATA or SAS drives.
• iQstor - iSCSI storage with software functionality, choice of Fibre or SATA drives.
• RELDATA - iSCSI Gateway (use your existing storage) or purchase the head with storage. iSCSI - add NAS, replication and more.
• Arena- basic box - add drives and you are ready to go.
• StoreVault from NetApp - Twelve drive solution - SATA drives - NAS options and software.

All these manufacturers support iSCSI and you have a choice when connecting to your network. Download the Microsoft iSCSI drive (free) and install or purchase a TOE [network interface cards with TCP/IP offload engines] . Not absolutly necessary - however some folks tend to think that they do offer an advantage. Personally I have not see too much of a diiference in performance.

Contact us at Sunstar and let us steer youi to the solution that best fits your requirements and budget.

info@sunstarco.com (800) 663-5523

Thank You

Gavin

NAS with your existing Storage

So you have an existing SAN with excess storage or perhaps you need to look at some of the capacity as file based rather than block.

Sure you can purchase a new NAS with some storage. An alternative is to carve up some of your existing storage with the help of a RELDATA NAS Gateway.

Highly scalable, Clusterable and High Availability

By leveraging industry-standard Fibre Channel, SCSI, SAS or iSCSI storage arrays, the RELDATA 9240-enabled IP storage systems provide the performance and throughput of more expensive Fibre Channel or enterprise NAS solutions at a much lower cost.

• Its modular architecture lets organizations easily expand block and file-based storage capacity to meet demand, seamlessly consolidate underused storage assets, and ensure availability of data.

RELDATA Unified Storage Gateways feature vendor-agnostic storage resource interoperability and consolidation. They offer:

• Interoperability with industry-standard Fibre Channel, SCSI, SAS and iSCSI disk and tape storage resources
• Certification with disk arrays and tape libraries of leading storage vendors
• Software RAID levels 1, 4, 5 and 6
• Ability to use simple JBOD arrays for storage consolidation or expansion
• Seamless extension of existing Fibre Channel SAN
• Active-passive failover and load balancing features
• Unified SAN & NAS Storage Provisioning over IP

RELDATA solutions deliver scalable truly parallel iSCSI SAN and NAS storage from a single pool of shared storage. In today’s heterogeneous Windows, Linux or Unix environments, the RELDATA Universal IP Storage Gateways provide:

• Dedicated block-level iSCSI target volumes, or CIFS and NFS file systems
• Centrally managed virtualized storage volume pool
• Boot-over-IP capability eliminates any need for the direct attached storage.

The Gateway also provides:

• IP-based data replication features on block- and file-level
• Point-in-time volume snapshots including writable snapshots
• Snapshot-based incremental volume replication
• Local and remote volume mirroring
• Disk-to-disk and disk-to-tape backups of files
• IPsec encryption and CHAP authentication
• NAS that’s fully integrated with both Network Information Services (NIS) and Active Directory Services.

The RELDATA Gateway is available from Sunstar Company.

Also available is the RELATA Unified Storage solution, basically the Gateway with drives and fully configured.

Do contact us if we can be of assistance: info@sunstarco.com or 800.663.5523

Gavin