Nexsan this week rolled out a new storage array that scales from 336TB to a whopping 4PB in capacity and is energy-efficient too.

The DATABeast integrates Serial ATA and Serial Attached SCSI drives into a high-density array designed for small and midsized enterprise businesses. The array also features Nexsan’s AutoMAID technology, which reduces energy use by either parking the head on the disk, slowing the disk down or putting the disk to sleep.

Nexsan’s AutoMAID technology is user configurable. Level 1 AutoMAID technology parks the head of the drive; Level 2 slows the drives to 4,000 RPMs and saves about 40% of the energy; and, Level 3 puts the drives asleep, saving as much as 60% of the energy.

The DATABeast also includes management tools that allow thin provisioning, storage pooling, tiering and virtualization, as well as mirroring, snapshots and replication.

With the DATABeast, all components are pre-installed, preconfigured and ready for operations in a 42U or 25U rack mount configurations.

The array features 4GB Fibre Channel interfaces for access to block-level data and NAS interfaces for access to file-level information.

The DATABeast fits between Nexsan’s smaller SAS and SATABoy products and its SAS and SATABeast arrays and it’s high-end Assureon disk-based archiving system.

The DATABeast is priced at between $1,800 and $2,700 per terabyte.

Deni Connor is principal analyst for Storage Strategies NOW.