Nexsan SATAbeast Provides Video-On-Demand Capabilities
High-capacity Serial ATA-based storage system used for storing Holocaust testimonies.WOODLAND HILLS, Calif., January 31, 2006 – Nexsan Technologies, the leader in innovative storage solutions, today announced that Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority, has implemented two SATABeast™ enterprise-class storage arrays as part of its Archive collection repository enabling visitors to access thousands of films and videotaped testimonies of survivors that serve as documentation of the history of the Jewish people during the Holocaust period.
Established in 1953, Yad Vashem is Israel’s Holocaust memorial. Yad Vashem’s 45-acre campus on the Mount of Remembrance in Jerusalem contains a variety of unique museums, memorial sites and monuments. The campus is also home to Yad Vashem’s education and research facilities. As part of a multi-year development plan, Yad Vashem is working to digitize much of its archives and library,which are expected to contain some 100 million pages of documentation, 500,000 photographs, tens of thousands of videocassettes and more than 110,000 titles of books and several thousand journals, by the end of the project.
Nexsan’s SATABeasts are being used to power video-on-demand services for Yad Vashem’s Visual Center, which allows visitors to view Holocaust-related films, documentaries and tens of thousands of video testimonies of survivors. Yad Vashem, together with the Shoah Foundation, are planning on increasing SATABeast capacity to more than 200TB of storage.”In attempting to meaningfully commemorate the legacy of the Holocaust to younger generations, we understood that the basic tools of remembrance and education were changing dramatically,” said Michael Lieber, CIO of Yad Vashem. “We realized that the complete computerization of our documentation system, including video testimony of Holocaust survivors, was the best way to ensure that the story of the Shoah will be passed on to future generations.
Nexsan’s SATABeasts will ensure that this testimony is preserved and readily available to those who seek it out.”SATABeast’s innovative combination of technologies delivers unsurpassed performance, reliability and cost savings for primary and near-line storage, disk-to-disk backup, secondary storage and fixed content archive applications. An extreme density design – 21 terabytes of storage capacity in just 4U of rack space – provides a compact footprint and can scale to 210 cost-correct terabytes of capacity in a single rack. The SATABeast’s unique design extends individual drive life and provides significant savings year over year, while its AutoMAID™ (Massive Array of Idle Disks) function allows SATABeast to place its disk drives to an idle state to conserve energy yet provide near-instantaneous access to data.
“We are proud and honored to be part of this wonderful project at Yad Vasem” said Philip Black, Nexsan CEO. “By providing the storage capacity for Yad Vashem’s video-on-demand system with our SATABeast arrays, we are helping to memorialize the stories of the people who suffered during the Holocaust while providing an education for future generations as to the importance of this event in world history.”Nexsan’s SATABeast is engineered to meet necessary enterprise-class availability requirements with the inclusion of fully redundant components that are individually online hot swappable, including drives, controllers and power supplies. This advanced design provides increased ROI by eliminating the need to replace an entire multi-drive blade should a single drive fail. Each RAID controller is configured with dual high-performance 2 Gigabit Fibre Channel host ports powering the SATABeast to sustained throughput speeds of over 700 MB/s.
The advanced architecture of the SATABeast features an innovative horizontal midplane design that promotes superior airflow and alleviates insertion stress points. Triple intake fans along with dual redundant 760-watt power supplies with tachometer-monitored blowers provide maximum power and cooling. The system’s Anti-Accumulative Rotational Vibration (ARV) design enables maximum performance and long-term reliability.
