Assureon Appliances Secure archiving appliances for SMBs and Departmental applications Assureon System Secure and scalable high availability archive solutions for larger applications

Assureon® from Nexsan is a new breed of intelligent, disk-based archiving solutions - complete hardware/software systems that give users powerful and cost-effective choices for the protection, retention and long term care of their information assets.

Assureon's secure storage architecture delivers a comprehensive array of intelligent features including constant monitoring of file integrity, Lifecycle Management, file authentication, missing file alerts, and support for remote replication, along with optional file-level encryption.

Simple to use, with instant file retrieval, Assureon® provides secure protection and immediate access to archival information at a fraction of the cost of comparable legacy solutions. Assureon eliminates the need for outdated tape libraries and offline media while introducing an unmatched level of care and reliability around archived information that has simply been unavailable until now.

And Nexsan's award-winning Assureon® is now available in compact, easy-to-implement appliance versions that allow simple integration for archiving, e-discovery, email, and more.

Three Assureon Models
SA Archive Appliance	NX Archive Appliance	Assureon System

Assureon Advanced Features

• Single Instance Store: Assureon's CAS technology enables single instance store, whereby only one copy of a data object is kept. For example, if different individuals in multiple departments are all saving the same PowerPoint presentation, Assureon can identify that they are duplicates based on their CAS address, and only store one copy resulting in less storage needed, reduced network bandwidth and overall cost.
  
• Authentication and Integrity: Assureon technology verifies that all files and file metadata has not been tampered with or corrupted.
  
• Immutability: An object placed under Assureon management cannot be changed or erased until the end of its retention period.
  
• WORM disk functionality: the Assureon system provides Write Once, Read Many functionality
  
• Business Continuity Protection: Assureon supports remote replication of assets across the WAN and can be configured toenabling usersto keep duplicate files at a remote site.
  
• Fail-safe CAS Technology: Assureon utilizes a dual cryptographic process (hashing algorithm) to create its unique CAS address, which ensures the integrity of the file and no loss of information through potential data collisions.
  
• File Level Retention Enforcement: Assureon enforces retention polices at the object level allowing different retention periods to be placed on files based upon their importance to an organization.
  
• Assignment of Retention Periods: Assureon will assign a retention period based either upon a 3rd party application (ex. document management system or an email management package) or Assureon can place the appropriate retention policy based upon its own file watcher program.
  
• Access Speed: Assureon enables immediate online access to reference data as opposed to traditional offline storage.
  
• Enabling Information Lifecycle Management (ILM): ILM requires more than storage hardware and software to be successfully implemented. Assureon is a powerful tool that automates the operational steps (Classify, Place, Protect, Archive, Access, Expire) of the lifecycle process for reference data within an organization.
  
• Audit Trails for Compliance: Assureon meets many requirements of the numerous compliance laws and privacy regulations including:
  . Digital Time Stamped Records - a requirement of FDA regulations
  . Serialization - a requirement of SEC regulations.
  . User Access Trail - a requirement of HIPAA

Assureon Technology

Assureon is based upon a combination of CAS (Content Addressable Storage) with advanced 256-bit AES encryption and other security and data protection technologies. CAS technology produces a unique file identifier or "fingerprint"for all objects, based on their content. Assureon's object storage model stores files, images, recordings, web pages, etc, as objects with a unique universal identifier. This approach differs from traditional file system models, where an application or user names the file and then places it in a hierarchical file system. Traditional file system models suffer from a lack of scalability and a high management cost.

In an object model, the archived physical object is completely separate from the logical location or application. Administrators can be relieved of performing typical storage housekeeping tasks, such as formatting file systems, creating volumes and binding LUNs (logical unit numbers).

Assureon's CAS technology provides

Immutability - because each file fingerprint is based on the specific bit pattern of that file, if a bit is changed then the file fingerprint would be different. Assureon does not allow changes and will detect if any tampering has occurred.

Single-instance storage - one copy of each file is stored, regardless of how many users write that file to storage, giving significant storage-use efficiency.

Scalability - Additional storage can easily be added

Reduces Storage Management Cost - Storage housekeeping tasks, such as formatting file systems, creating volumes and binding LUNs are not necessary
Load Balancing - Enables a uniform distribution of files across available storage locations. Assureon's load balancing enhances performance and enables storage to scale into the petabytes

Assureon uses a dual cryptographic process (MD5 and SHA-1 hashing algorithms) to create its unique file identifier (UFID). The dual cryptographic process offers fail safe security against the occurrence of a collision.

www.nexsan.com