Nexsan Assureon

The Nexsan Assureon is marketed as a storage security product and oddly enough, that's just what it is. Another way of looking at it, is as a Content Addressable Storage (CAS) disaster recovery solution. The Assureon uses multiple servers and storage devices and can be located in multiple sites for wide area replication.

The Assureon is not a piecemeal solution. Before it is shipped to site, it is built to order by Nexsan and requires a lot of pre-planning between both the customer and Nexsan field engineers. There are several versions, depending on the complexity and storage requirements of the customer but the basic components consist of servers, storage appliances, a 25u or 45u rack to hold everything and some software.

The servers in the Assureon are Dell PowerEdge 2950's. These are 1u servers with a pair of Intel Xeon 3.06GHz dual core processors; 2GB RAM and up to four local Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) hard disks. The number of servers that you have depends on your preferred configuration and this is determined by performance and resilience. In a typical evaluation system, Nexsan would ship just a single server. In a production environment the minimum recommended configuration becomes two servers, one for the front-end (user facing) one for the back-end (data-facing).

The storage units are normally Nexsan SATABoy devices, each holding up to 7TB of storage although you could use the Nexsan SATABeast which supports 21TB of storage in a single enclosure. Each Assureon contains two separate storage appliances although it can contain more as you build out your solution over time.

The Assureon comes in an APC rack. This is to enable factory configuration and ensure that the customer has a working solution when it arrives on site.

Nexsan ships two standard configurations, the SX and the GX plus. The SX is designed for a single site while the GX is intended for users needing to keep data at different sites.

Nexsan perform the pre-configuration of the Assureon based on information provided by the customer prior to delivery. The customer will then go through their own configuration work. Configuration is something that should not be taken lightly. Ideally, the issues and problems with configuration will have been dealt with during the pre-sales meetings.

The Assureon comes set as its own Windows 2003 domain. This is to keep it separate from existing systems and to reduce the security footprint. In order for it to work you need to create a trust between the Assureon domain and your existing systems. This is a one way trust from the Assureon to your domain and is only done after the Assureon has been delivered. If you have multiple Assureon solutions, each will be a separate domain. Once you add it to your systems, you will need to make DNS entries so that users from different sites can connect to it.

Administration is done through the Assureon Admin which is a standard web-based GUI. Here Nexsan have been smart and kept the same look and feel as their storage products - SATABoy and SATABeast.

The Assureon uses Microsoft Windows Server 2003 as its operating system and Microsoft SQL Server 2005 to maintain the indexes and other information. Although this is a hardened version of Windows Server (it conforms to Evaluation Assurance Level 4 (EAL-4)) there are still issues over security and other patches. Despite Microsoft efforts to remove the need for reboots when patches are applied to their software, this is not always possible, nor does Microsoft make it clear when you will need to reboot. Nexsan takes control of this for you and Nexsan Canada test all patches to see what does need a reboot. The Assureon is redirected to Nexsan Canada to pick up all patches and updates.