Nexsan Unity NV12000 Puts 15.72PB of NVMe Flash in 10U With 122.88TB QLC SSDs

Nexsan has introduced the Unity NV12000, a 2U dual-controller unified storage array that takes 24 122.88TB QLC NVMe SSDs for nearly 3PB of raw flash in the head unit. Four of the company’s new U2F226 NVMe expansion enclosures, at 26 bays each, bring an all-flash system to 15.72PB raw in 10U, which works out to about 1.57PB per rack unit. Nexsan rates the platform at up to 3 million IOPS, and it is available now through the company’s solution providers.

Unified Storage and Data Protection

The NV12000 serves block storage over iSCSI and Fibre Channel, file over NFS and SMB, and S3 object storage through NexObject, so one array can back virtual machines, file shares, and object buckets together. Nexsan aims it at AI and HPC datasets, data lakes, analytics, media production, and virtualized environments on VMware, Proxmox, Hyper-V, and Xen, and lists Scale Computing among its supported third-party platforms. It joins the NV4000, NV6000, and NV10000 in the Unity NV-Series.

Unity Immutable Snapshots lock retention settings once they are applied, which Nexsan says helps prevent unauthorized modification or deletion of protected recovery points. NexObject adds S3 object locking, and the platform includes AES-256 encryption, Kerberos-secured NFS, and optional integration with Nexsan’s Assureon archive. Snapshots run to 2,048 per LUN, and replication is asynchronous at the storage pool level. For Veeam backup targets, Nexsan sells the separate VHR-Series hardened repository.

“AI, analytics and modern enterprise applications are creating unprecedented demands on storage capacity, performance and data protection,” said Vincent Phillips, CEO of Nexsan. “The Unity NV12000 addresses these challenges by delivering petabyte-scale, all-flash capacity in an exceptionally compact footprint, alongside the unified data services and immutable protection organizations need to support critical workloads.”

Unity OS 7.4 and Expansion

The NV12000 runs Unity OS 7.4, which Nexsan has also made available across the rest of the NV-Series. Licensing is all-inclusive, covering immutable snapshots, S3 object locking, the Cloud Connector for S3 edge caching, multi-factor authentication, inline compression, deduplication, replication, and FASTier caching. Nexsan says the release adds new capabilities but has not listed them. Each controller carries 512GB of DDR5 on what the company describes as an end-to-end PCIe 5.0 architecture.

The 2U U2F226 is the all-flash expansion path, and four of them alongside the head unit reach the 15.72PB NVMe maximum. The 4U U2G478 takes SAS SSDs or 7,200 RPM hard drives up to 26TB, with as many as eight enclosures and 648 drives in 34U. Nexsan lists 19.17PB raw for that configuration with hard drives and 22.1PB with SAS SSDs, and in hybrid systems FASTier uses flash to cache the hard drive tier.

Nexsan has not published usable capacity, throughput, or the test conditions behind the 3 million IOPS rating. The company cites up to 9x data reduction from deduplication, which will depend on the data.

Nexsan Unity Product Page