The SATABoy, SASBoy, and SATABeast products from Nexsan are rack-mountable disk arrays boasting both FC and iSCSI connectivity options. As their names imply, the devices ship with SATA or SAS drives.

Features common to the products include:

- Management via NexScan, the vendor's Web-based GUI. Features of NexScan include access via LAN/WAN connections or direct connections (via a serial port and an ANSI terminal emulator); status reporting (disk drives, power supply, voltage, temperature, battery, etc.); the ability to verify an array prior to placing it into production, and automatically perform "parity scrubs" every 24 hours thereafter; cache management; support for E-mail alerts and warnings; and more

- The vendor's AutoMAID (Automatic Massive Array of Idle Disks) technology, wherein individual drives or RAID sets can be transparently placed into an idle state for power savings purposes. The vendor states that the technology supports multiple levels of energy savings to balance performance vs. power conservation efforts.

- Redundant, hot-swappable components, including RAID controllers

- Support for RAID levels 0, 1, 1+0, 4, 5 and 6

- Integrated FC and iSCSI connectivity

- Support for single or dual active/active controllers

The SATABoy is a 3U unit loaded with 14 SATA drives. Dual 2 Gb/sec FC ports and dual iSCSI ports are included per controller, (four SCSI ports are available on single controller offerings). Up to 32 LUNs per controller can be defined.

The SASBoy is also 3U and is loaded with up to 14 SAS drives. Dual 4 Gb/sec FC and dual iSCSI ports are included per controller, and up to 255 LUNs can be defined per controller.

Finally, the SATABeast is a 4U component with support for up to 42 SATA drives. It also supports dual 4 Gb/sec FC and dual iSCSI ports, with up to 256 LUNs possible per controller. The vendor now notes that the SATABeast supports use with VMware ESX 3.5 and ESX 3i virtual machines.

Also available from the vendor is the SATABeast Xi, a 4U, 42 drive SATABeast designed specifically for use with Xserve and Mac Pro systems.

The SATABoy, SASBoy, and SATABeast products are available now. Visit the Nexsan Web site for further information.