Low Total Cost of Ownership

TCO Reinvented!

Nextra's stands apart in providing high-level storage at a strikingly low overall cost of ownership. Nextra's low TCO is attributable to several factors:

Ease of management
The management effort required to configure and monitor the Nextra system is by order of magnitude less than for comparable systems, for several reasons:

• No planning of volume layout is required, as the system automatically lays out volumes on disks and modules
• No need to monitor performance levels and migrate volumes between modules to increase performance
• No need to use volume managers for performance-enhancing techniques such as representing many small volumes as a single large volume
• Powerful and simple user environment enables system management with practically no learning curve

Single architecture
The Nextra system is the first storage system to have a single architecture, answering all storage needs. A "single architecture" offers a simpler and more effective storage infrastructure, and saves costs:

• Fewer system types to support simplifies data center operations by reducing complexity and, consequently, the administration effort
• Eliminates any need to migrate between storage tiers as data becomes outdated or demands change, further reducing efforts
• Renders ILM redundant, freeing up resources otherwise spent on software licenses, administration effort and management attention

Reduced storage demands
The Nextra system enables any given applicative need to be answered with fewer Terabytes of storage, thanks to several features:

• Differential snapshots reduce storage consumption over traditional full copies
• Thin provisioning allows a reduction in actual storage purchased, with the expense distributed over a greater period of time

Lower power, cooling, and space consumption
The Nextra system can deliver the same storage requirements in TB at substantially reduced operational costs, due to the much greater effectiveness of SATA drive technology.

Investment protection via scalable architecture
Nextra's architecture scales from the smallest to largest system, all within the same architecture. There is never a need for upfront investment to be prepared for future demands, and never a problem of writing-off existing equipment when current demands change and a new architecture is required.

Competitive cost
Nextra can be much more cost competitive in comparison with traditional systems, due to its use of building blocks with high cost-benefit value:

• SATA drives, which are much more cost-effective than other alternatives
• Standard Intel-based servers and Gigabit Ethernet switches, which provide huge processing power and connectivity without hardware development