Nexsan is the global pioneer of highly reliable, cost-effective enterprise-class storage solutions. CASA Software is one of SA’s leading digital transformation organisations and Nexsan’s sub-Saharan Africa distributor.
“These enhancements are designed to make your environment more resilient and easier to operate,” says Byron Horn-Botha, CASA Senior Sales Specialist.
Unity has long been known for its unified approach to storage, supporting file, block, and S3 object protocols in a single platform. “It integrates seamlessly into any data storage ecosystem with support for a wide range of NVMe, HDD and SSD configurations, scaling from a few terabytes to multiple petabytes in just a single system. With this latest release, Nexsan has strengthened its role as a versatile platform and a dependable data storage target for organisations of all sizes.
Why These Enhancements Matter
Horn-Botha confirms Nexsan designed these updates around a core belief: storage should empower business, not complicate it. “From improving day-to-day efficiency to boosting long-term data durability and retention, Unity’s newest capabilities help remove operational friction so IT teams can stay focused on higher-value priorities,” Horn-Botha adds.
Key Enhancements in Unity NV-Series Software Version 7.3
- Deduplication for Dramatic Space Savings
The new built-in deduplication engine identifies identical or near-identical data blocks and stores them only once. This can dramatically reduce disk usage requirements, especially in environments with repetitive files, backup data, or large data sets.
Deduplication can be enabled:
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- At the storage pool level.
- Per file system.
- Per LUN.
“This flexibility ensures allows for optimisation across workloads,” confirms Horn-Botha.
Smarter Scrub Operations for Better Data Integrity
Unity now offers enhanced scrub controls, giving administrators the ability to run different scrub types—metadata-only, incremental, or CLI-only options. Scrub and re-silvering settings have also been refined to deliver better performance and more predictable recovery behaviour.
“The result is improved long-term data durability with less operational overhead,” he adds.
SMB Protocol Improvements
Admins can now decide which authentication method (Kerberos and/or NTLM) their SMB service should use. This added control helps companies to align authentication with internal security standards.
Customer-Generated Certificates
Unity now supports customer-generated certificates for secure graphical user interface (GUI) access. This gives organizations more control over their security posture and helps ensure compliance with internal policies and external legislation.
New U2G424 Expansion Shelf
To support growing storage needs, Nexsan has introduced a new Unity expansion chassis to include:
- Support for more capacity.
- Dual-port SAS for increased high availability scenarios.
- Redundant, hot-swappable PSUs, I/O modules, and fans.
Horn-Botha says Unity is a flexible and robust way to scale capacity without compromising availability. “Moreover, all Unity NV-Series models are ship fully loaded. Every Unity NV-Series system includes Nexsan’s full suite of enterprise-class data protection and performance features with no per-feature licensing including:
- Immutable snapshots for fast recovery.
- S3 object locking to safeguard backup data.
- Encryption.
- Inline compression.
- Replication.
- Sophisticated audit tools.
- Automated load balancing
- Intelligent caching.
- Multiple protocol support.
- Support for varying use cases in a single platform whether it’s for production storage, virtualisation, DVS, Backup, or a combination thereof – businesses can secure and retain their data on the Unity platform.
“Together, these capabilities help organizations boost performance, simplify operations, and improve recoverability across workloads.
“Storage remains the lifeblood of businesses in the digital economy. Secure, scalable and reliable storage is crucial to operations regardless of whether it’s a small business optimizing its data storage strategy or an enterprise architect managing petabytes of mission-critical data. CASA Software compliments Nexsan’s enhancements by offering services and solutions to bolster its data storage strategy and approach. This combined with professional services to deploy these solutions, ensure that clients get a best of breed approach from procurement to fulfilment,” concludes Horn-Botha.
