NexGen Storage Inc. n5-150 Storage System

The NexGen Storage Inc. n5-150 Storage System grabbed the silver cup in the enterprise storage systems category in Storage magazine's/SearchStorage.com's 2012 Products of the Year competition. Get all the results in our 2012 data storage products guide. 

Startup NexGen Storage designed the n5 Storage System to deliver storage quality of service (QoS). That means IT administrators can guarantee performance to each application and isolate workloads from one another on the SAN. Its users can provision performance in the same way they would provision capacity, so they can apply QoS to multiple applications simultaneously.

NexGen Storage's hybrid iSCSI systems use Fusion-io PCI Express (PCIe) flash cards along with hard drives, and tier data in real-time with their Dynamic Data Placement feature. The n5-150 is the largest of NexGen's three models. It scales from 2.4 TB to 4.8 TB of SSD capacity, and from 48 TB to 192 TB of overall storage capacity.

Judges gave NexGen high scores for innovation, with one calling out its QoS and use of PCIe solid-state drives (SSDs) in a hybrid architecture.

NexGen Storage offers a performance guarantee for the n5-150, promising to double the system's capacity or improve performance by 50% for free if it doesn't increase performance of a user's previous disk system by 10 times, triple IOPS per rack unit of hybrid storage or triple the capacity per rack unit of all-SSD arrays.

Find out the other winners in the Storage Systems category.