Nexsan Assureon

Disk-based archival solution

The Nexsan Assureon system integrates a variety of features, including CAS (Content-Addressable Storage), encryption technology, and ILM (information lifecycle management), onto a single platform designed to help organization protect their data on a system designed for long-term archival & retention.

eDiscovery & regulatory compliance

The Nexsan Assureon is designed to address the regulatory issues facing many IT departments today. In addition to the challenges SOX presents, other SEC, FDA and industry-specific regulatory efforts such as HIPAA have made it difficult to maintain compliance for efforts such as eDiscovery. The Nexsan Assureon assists with regulatory requirements with features like:

• data integrity authentication
• record retention
• audit trails and chain-of-custody with digital time & data stamp
• asset serial numbers
• data encryption
• automatic data destruction after retention period expires
• automatic data verification
• replication

All designed specifically to help satisfy regulatory requirements.

Integrated Management

From a single management interface, administrators can choose which data to archive and retain, setting policy-based rules for different types of data from different sources. All data is automatically protected with 256-bit AES encryption technology, and WORM can be implemented to ensure against data tampering, either intentional or accidental.

The authenticity and integrity of data is integrated into the Assureon solution, which can verify and support that data has not been tampered with or corrupted. Once administrators set a defined retention period, the Assureon enabled immutability, eliminating the ability to change or erase the data.

The Assureon CAS data retention solution is compatible with NAS, CIFS, NFS & other Pull technologies, and administrators have file-level granularity when it comes to setting various retention policies. Retention policies can also be set by third-party application in addition to Nexsan’s file watcher program.

Information Lifecycle Management

The Nexsan Assureon intelligent archival platform automates the various steps of ILM (information lifecycle management):

• classify
• place
• protect
• archive
• access
• expire

The Nexsan Assureon is also compatible with offline media stored on tape or optical formats. This enables IT departments to continue to leverage their existing investments while taking advantage of the SIS (single-instance-store, or deduplication) and ILM capabilities of the Assureon systems, using legacy equipment as a continuing part of their records retention and long-term archival projects.

Once data has reached the deletion stage of its retention lifecycle period, the Nexsan Assureon can perform a seven-step military-strength destruction of the data once an administrator authorizes it. The object or file is scrubbed, as well as the associated key to the deleted data, making the information completely unreadable or recoverable. This can be performed on data on the Assureon system, as well as the devices that the Assureon manages.

Resiliency Features

The Nexsan Assureon has integrated self-healing capabilities, and constantly verifies data integrity under its management with a unique method that scans the data and compares unique identifiers with the original copy. If a discrepancy is detected, an error message is generated, and the file is replaced with the mirrored copy.

Fault tolerance is built into the Assureon system, automatically load balancing loads across various nodes, and redirecting processing & journaling to new locations in the event of a failure.

Integrated Data Reduction

Data deduplication is built into the Nexsan Assureon system, which ensures that only one copy of each data object is kept. This helps preserve data capacity, by eliminating the need to store redundant data with a CAS architecture designed to save costs.

Transparent Search & Access

The Assureon system provides the ability to search through the metadata and content of many files in a single, integrated interface. Administrators can provide users with the ability to search for content by keyword, author, phrase, department, filetype, date and other fields, based on the configuration options provided to them.

Search results are displayed in a format similar to many online search engines, with the ability to display the content within the file in the search results. Users can be provided with a convenient shortcut on their desktop that allows them to search their own archived files, and use and retrieve them as needed, while access and permissions can be managed with Active Directory.

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