The Nexenta Blog

OpenStorage Summit, presented by Nexenta Systems, to be held in conjunction with Open Server Summit October 22-24

Angela Ausman — Thu, 05 Sep 2013 21:11:00 GMT

Santa Clara, Calif., September 4, 2013– Open Server Summit, a leading Silicon Valley conference for the server industry, has announced that this year’s meeting will join forces with the OpenStorage Summit presented by Nexenta. The combined Summits will be held at the Santa Clara Convention Center from October 22-24, 2013.

The expanded format will offer attendees exposure to both tracks of Summit content, expanding the breadth of the Open Architecture in the Server Industry to include for the first time in-depth insight into OpenStorage. Dr. Lance Levanthal, Open Server Summit Chairperson, said “The joint event further cements our dedication to serve the needs of a global audience focused on open design initiatives in the server industry.”

“After hosting several OpenStorage Summits over the years throughout the United States and Europe, we are thrilled to be joining forces this year with Open Server Summit for the US event,” said Bridget Warwick, CMO, Nexenta Systems. “By creating a more integrated environment of conference content, customers, partners and members of the OpenStorage and Open Server communities will experience a more holistic view of how to create open solutions for today’s data center.”

About Open Server Summit

Open Server Summit (“OSS”), produced by Conference ConCepts (and formerly called Server Design Summit) will take place October 22-24, 2013 at the Santa Clara Convention Center. OSS focuses on the design of nextgeneration servers with topics ranging from semiconductors and network interface cards through powerful high-end systems and overall infrastructure design and operation. The conference also covers data center efficiency, cloud storage, virtualization, ultra-low-power server clusters, DC power, PCIe flash caching, and liquid cooling. Industry visionaries will address the use of SSDs, ARM-based microservers, software-defined networking, software-defined storage, and other efforts toward combining industry-standard hardware with open-source software.

For more information about The Open Server Summit, visit www.openserversummit.com
Follow us on Twitter: www.twitter.com/openserverevent
Visit us on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Server-Design-Summit/

About Nexenta Systems
Nexenta Systems is the world leader in Software-Defined Storage. Its flagship software platform, NexentaStor, delivers high-performance, ultra-scalable, cloud and virtualization-optimized storage solutions. Built upon ZFS technology and running on a broad choice of industry-standard hardware, NexentaStor eliminates vendor lock-in and enables open, unified storage management at significantly lower total cost than legacy systems.

More information about Nexenta Systems, and free trials of the ZFS-based Nexenta products, can be found at www.nexenta.com. Partners selling Nexenta-based storage solutions can be found at: http://www.nexenta.com/corp/store/resellers-search.

Media Contacts
Melissa Kallos,Open Server Summit
+1.408.234.0379
Press@OpenServerSummit.com

Emily Gallagher / Laura White
Touchdown PR for Open Storage Summit
+44 1252 717040
nexenta@touchdownpr.com

Tarkan Maner (@tarkanmaner) Joins Nexenta (@nexenta) as Chairman and CEO

Bridget Warwick — Wed, 28 Aug 2013 17:47:00 GMT

Tarkan Maner (@tarkanmaner) Joins Nexenta (@nexenta) as Chairman and CEO

Nexenta to Redefine the $6B Software Defined Data Center (#SDDC) Market with Innovative Solutions

Santa Clara, Calif., August 28, 2013—Nexenta, the leading provider of Software-Defined Storage (#SoftwareDefinedStorage) solutions, today announced the appointment of Tarkan Maner as Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. An accomplished entrepreneur, executive leader, investor, advisor and philanthropist, Maner brings over 20 years of experience working with disruptive and revolutionary technology solutions that lead to better living in a better world. Maner succeeds Mark Lockareff who has served as Nexenta’s interim CEO since February 2013.

“I am excited to join the Nexenta family, the leading market-disrupting software-defined storage company with a super passionate team, loyal customers and inspired partners. I look forward to working with our extended global team to bring the most innovative solutions and unmatched quality experience and success to our customers and partners all around the world,” said, Maner.

"With his extensive industry knowledge, technology vision, global business network, leadership and business execution skills, deep experience in fast-growing disruptive technologies and passion for innovation through collaboration, Tarkan Maner is the right leader to take Nexenta and software-defined storage segment to the next level. We couldn't be happier to have him on board, and look forward to accelerating the growth of our business under his leadership," said Evan Powell (@epowell101), Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer at Nexenta. "Mark Lockareff (@lockareff) did a wonderful job for Nexenta during his time as interim CEO, from closing our series D round of financing to overseeing continued product innovations, as well as strengthening our key alliances with VMware, Dell and Cisco. We thank him for his distinguished service and welcome him to our Board of Advisors."

Maner brings to Nexenta an impressive resume of experience with leading technology companies, as a global executive operator as well as an investor and advisor. His operational and investment areas of focus include infrastructure software, social media, mobility, virtualization, converged infrastructures, contextual intelligence and cloud computing. He had leading executive roles at Dell, Wyse, CA, IBM, Quest, and Sterling Software. He is the founding chairman of TechAmerica’s cloud computing commission. He has been serving on the boards of the Bay Area Council, World Economic Forum's Cyber-Security Alliance, Silicon Valley Education Foundation, and Silicon Valley Leadership Group, a coalition of senior executives to improve the quality of life for all citizens of the region and the world through its advocacy around public and private policy issues, from the mecca of innovation and progress; Silicon Valley. He is involved in leading, advising and fund-raising for several global not-for-profit organizations and programs around economic development , poverty elimination, entrepreneurship, education and social justice including; Ernst & Young Entrepreneurship, Strategic Growth and Innovation Programs, Americas Society/Council of Americas (AS/COA), MIT’s Collaborative Infrastructure Initiatives, Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE), Project Skolkovo (Russia), and eLearning Africa. He has been an advisor to several IT start-up companies and boards. He is the winner of the 2012 and the lead judge of the 2013 Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award Programs in California and a frequent speaker, commentator and author on current business, economic and social issues in the media and academic circles. He graduated from Istanbul Technical University in Turkey with a B.S. degree in Engineering Management. He received an MBA degree at Midwestern State University in Texas. He also attended Advanced Management Program at Harvard Business School.

Nexenta invites everyone at VMworld 2013 in San Francisco to visit the Nexenta booth #2337 where the company will be showcasing its recently launched Nexenta VSA for VMware Horizon View^{T M,}, software-defined storage for VMware Horizon View which includes application-defined storage acceleration. (Nexenta VSA for Horizon View will also be featured in VMware’s tech session #EUC5708). Nexenta will be present at various events at VMworld 2013, including at #plusultravmworld2013 event at St. Regis Hotel’s Yerba Buena Terrace across from the Moscone Center on Wednesday, 8/28/13 at 5 pm.

Connect with Nexenta via Twitter, Facebook & LinkedIn

About Nexenta

Nexenta is the global leader in Software-Defined Storage. Its flagship software platform, NexentaStor, delivers high-performance, ultra-scalable, cloud- and virtualization-optimized storage solutions. Built upon an “open platform” and running on a broad choice of industry-standard hardware, NexentaStor eliminates vendor lock-in and provides open, secure and scalable unified storage management at significantly lower total cost than legacy systems. Nexenta’s global partners include @Dell, @Cisco, @VMware, and other leading IT leaders.

More information about Nexenta, and free trials of Nexenta solutions, can be found at www.nexenta.com. Partners selling NexentaStor-based storage solutions can be found at: http://www.nexenta.com/corp/store/resellers-search

Why the Application Needs to Define the Storage

Michael Letschin — Tue, 27 Aug 2013 01:06:00 GMT

Software-defined: This seems to be the buzz word over the last year or two, from the SDDC, the software-defined datacenter by VMware, to SDN, software defined networking with Nicira, to SDS, Software-Defined Storage for which just about every storage vendor seems to have their own story. The problem is that that's exactly what we have is a lot of stories. Aesop's Fables are stories, and depending on when you hear them or read them, they all vary slightly. Eventually in history, we came to a good intersection of each of the stories but to this day people want to find better ways to interpret the meanings.

Software defined storage is at a tipping point of what it truly means, Nexenta has led the way with a software based model that was the first of its kind to offer enterprise class storage to users without the vendor lock-in of traditional vendors, but the model does not fully encompass what a software defined storage solution can really be. I looked throughout the Internet and never found one good concise definition of SDS, so I will take a stab at it here:

Software-Defined Storage (n): A methodology to provide hardware abstraction while enabling computing nodes to store data blocks as determined by the software resident on the nodes.

That sounds fancy doesn't it? What I feel is missing is what the application truly needs. In comes the next generation of storage: Application Defined Storage. This model utilizes SDS principles to build storage but the performance and data protection is defined by the application. The application in turn provides the data that is truly needed by the end user, as illustrated by Steve Duplessie in his video blog. This is only possible via the use of a hyper-visor technology today to abstract the software management from the hardware that is providing the storage.

Application based backups and replication have been the norm since NetApp released SnapManager many years ago, but to date, the idea of providing application based storage for primary data has not been fulfilled. Introduce the use of an application defined Virtual Storage Appliance (VSA). Utilizing a VSA allows for storage to be provisioned on an application basis when combined with a management appliance or console to determine what the specific application needs.

Having a hard time envisioning what Application Defined Storage might look like? Take a look at what I consider to be the first example of the future of SDS and an Application Defined Storage solution, Nexenta VSA for VMware Horizon View (NV4V). NV4V starts off by finding out the application storage needs, in this case VMware Horizon View. The deployment continues by analyzing what storage is available to the vSphere hosts and returning a response to the user with a correlation between the application’s needs and the storage requirements. Once the user determines that the application performs as needed, then NV4V provisions storage as defined by the software.

Stories are told every day by companies around the globe, the idea that they will mature and become the basis for how we deploy technology is the Shangri La of every start up and enterprise. Maybe, just maybe the idea that the needs and the technology will meet in application defined storage could be that story we finally write down.

Nexenta on Display at VMworld 2013

Michael Letschin — Thu, 22 Aug 2013 16:59:00 GMT

VMworld US 2013 Opens on Sunday August 25, 2013 at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco. VMworld is one of the largest IT conferences and by far the largest for virtualization fans around the globe, with an estimated 20,000 people in attendance. The tradeshow floor is packed with new and innovative technologies and Nexenta is excited to be exhibiting at our own booth at the show, as well as with some of our partners. We are also working with lots of other groups to sponsor some of the best events and activities at the show.

With all these activities, it seemed appropriate to help provide a quick guide on all the ways to find out about Nexenta and to join in the fun.

Sunday Night we will kick everything off at the Welcome reception from 4-7 PM on the tradeshow floor. Come by our booth #2337 to see a demo of our 2 newest products, Nexenta VSA for VMware Horizon View^TMand Nexenta MetroHA. We will have staff and executives at the booth throughout the week to give you a walkthrough of the latest we have to offer.

We follow up the welcome reception as a sponsor of the always famous VMunderground (http://goo.gl/p06NGu) party. This years event is being held at Terra Gallery and Nexenta is excited for continue to be a sponsor as we have the last few years. Make sure to stop by and see the Nexenta staff to get a poker chip to play the Nexenta Slots anytime during the week including during the Hall Crawl on Tuesday. A poker chip means you get 2 chance to win at the slots.

Then things get down to business, as the tradeshow floor is open from 11 to 6 on Monday and Tuesday and till 5 on Wednesday. We would not want it to be all business all the time however so stop by our Booth on Tuesday evening between 4:30 and 6:00 to test your luck with the Nexenta Slots. We will transition our booth into a large slot machine, where everyone wins something. The winning could continue on Wednesday at 1:00 when we will raffle off a Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 10.1 tablet. Make sure you are there for this one, since you have to be present to win.

Stop by the community lounge throughout the week as well to catch some of the great vBrownbag content that is outside the normal sessions. If you go by at 11 on Monday and 1030 on Tuesday-Thursday you can catch our own Michael Letschin, a vExpert himself moderating the vExpert Daily, a now yearly panel discussion with a different group of VMware vExperts each day.

Also, you should try to make the end user computing session EUC5708 – Low-Cost, high performance Storage for Horizon Desktops. Courtney Burry, Tristan Todd, and Donal Geary, all from VMware, will be presenting on some of the latest storage enhancements to make your VDI deployment better. This will include Nexenta VSA for VMware Horizon View.

If you want to meet with anyone with Nexenta please come by booth #2337 or even better schedule some time with us using this form.

We are not the only one exhibiting Nexenta so make sure you stop by some of our partners as well.

Supermicro – Showcasing their robust product line of servers and JBODs with a full reference architecture built on Nexentastor that can be found in booth #2205

Cisco – As a NV4V launch partner you can see the latest UCS hardware including the E-Series ROBO system that NV4V helps achieve 55 desktops on for the all-in-one branch office experience, as well as the C240 an ideal platform for NexentaStor. You can also view their reference architecture here.

sTec – sTec will be showcasing its s3000 all-flash storage appliance with NexentaStor. Focusing on benefits specifically for VDI, the demo will feature how the sTec/Nexenta solution delivers:

· Outstanding IOPs, critical for successful VDI deployments

· Support for most commonly used VMware protocols, NFS and iSCSI

· Easy configuration and provisioning

Check out the demo at sTec’s booth #705

Raidundant - Providing flexible, reliable storage solutions that feature the new industry standards and technologies for security, performance and data management. Raidundant deploys purpose built hardware platforms based on the NexentaStor platform. Visit them at booth #216

LoginVSI – The latest in desktop performance validation software, stop by to learn how NV4V was validated using their latest performance analysis suite in booth #740

Aberdeen – A Nexenta Premier partner will be showcasing the AberSAN Z-Series. This scalable storage platform brings the simplicity of network attached storage (NAS) to the SAN enterprise storage environment by utilizing the innovative ZFS file system. They can be found in Booth #2434

Nexenta Launches Nexenta VSA for VMware Horizon View™

Bridget Warwick — Tue, 20 Aug 2013 13:15:00 GMT

Nexenta Launches Nexenta VSA for VMware Horizon View™

Storage optimization and deployment solution for VDI that delivers unmatched gains in performance, affordability and improved user experience

SANTA CLARA, Calif., August 20, 2013--Nexenta Systems, Inc., the leading provider of Software-Defined Storage solutions, today released Nexenta VSA for VMware Horizon View™: application-specific storage management and acceleration software that allows Horizon View administrators to auto-configure, tune, deploy and optimize storage for their VDI environment from their management console. Installed on VMware vSphere®, the Nexenta VSA for VMware Horizon View™ storage optimizer accelerates storage performance even without the use of SSDs in the configuration and does not require additional memory (RAM) to deliver this boost. The net effect is an increase in the number of desktops a given configuration can support even while delivering an improved user experience and offloading traffic from the storage network (tests show up to 38x during I/O storms generated by desktop provisioning for example). The solution drives down the cost per desktop, reduces the amount of storage required for a View deployment and provides real-time visibility and management of individual desktop users using the storage resources.

VDI Proof of Concept Benefits

Nexenta VSA for VMware Horizon View™ allows administrators to profile a VDI deployment before it “goes live” which allows for a full understanding of the performance and efficiency levels that will result. By taking the guesswork out of VDI deployments and allowing the application to uniquely auto-tune and configure the underlying storage, it is expected that Nexenta VSA for VMware Horizon View™ will significantly increase the adoption rate of VDI deployments in enterprise environments of all sizes.

“Nexenta VSA for VMware Horizon View™ takes the promise of Software-Defined Storage and makes it a reality; defined by the application itself, it is storage that delivers real customer benefit,” said Bridget Warwick, Nexenta Systems CMO. “This is software that takes an application’s storage preferences and best practices and uses that knowledge to auto-tune, configure, deploy and accelerate access to whatever storage the system is using.”

“The Software-Defined storage landscape is still forming with many vendors trying to re-cast their offering to fit the evolving definition. In the meantime, Nexenta is actually delivering on the promise with application-defined or, put more accurately, data-defined storage that has tangible, measurable value for VMware Horizon View™ deployments,” said Brian Garrett, VP ESG Lab, Enterprise Strategy Group. “Nexenta VSA for VMware Horizon View™ is not only delivering that value as advertised during ESG Lab testing, it’s also amazingly easy to deploy and use as it cost-effectively addresses the performance and management challenges that are blocking a growing number of organizations from realizing the compelling benefits of VDI.”

Certified with Cisco Systems

Nexenta VSA for VMware Horizon View™ has already been certified as part of the Cisco UCS Platform VDI reference architecture whereby up to 1600 desktops can be deployed on a single UCS blade chassis with UCS C240s providing storage. This is the only VDI solution running entirely on a Cisco UCS platform. It provides a comprehensive environment with compute, networking, storage and virtualization functionality. Details of this reference architecture can be found at http://www.cisco.com/en/US/solutions/collateral/ns340/ns517/ns224/ns836/ns978/nexenta_ref_arch_wp_co_branded_v1c.pdf

“Nexenta VSA for Horizon View is purposely designed storage for VMware Horizon View™,” said Mason Uyeda, senior director, technical and solution marketing, End-User Computing, VMware. “The solution, which includes validations from VMware and Cisco and Nexenta, is optimized for the VMware Horizon Fast Track architecture program to enable fast deployment, cost-effectiveness and linear scalability.”

"After extensive research based on the offerings from multiple vendors, a large hospital system selected Nexenta VSA for VMware Horizon View™ for several reasons," said Mark Melvin, CTO at ePlus, a leading Cisco, Nexenta, and VMware Partner. "ePlus consulted with the hospital to develop an architecture for its environment, determining the requirements and the best possible solution. Nexenta offered a highly-competitive licensing model and the potential for large OpEx savings. This was based on the cost per host of VSA that reduced the overall SAN cost. This helped us bring the validated Cisco solution to the customer with a higher degree of confidence.”

“Storage performance and configuration cost per seat are commonly the deciding factor on whether or not a VDI POC is successful and will be rolled out,” said Marc Staimer, founder, senior analyst, and CDS of Dragon Slayer Consulting. “Nexenta VSA for VMware Horizon View™ can make a huge difference in both meaningfully improved VDI performance and significantly lowering total storage cost. I would recommend anyone implementing VDI take a long look at optimizing the storage component of their Horizon View deployment with Nexenta VSA for VMware Horizon View™.”

Availability

Nexenta VSA for VMware Horizon View™ is available for purchase immediately and a 45 day trial version can be downloaded from the company’s website. Nexenta plans to demo Nexenta VSA for VMware Horizon View™ at VMworld® in San Francisco on August 25-29, as well as VMworld Europe in Barcelona on October 15-17.

About Nexenta

Nexenta Systems is the world leader in Software-Defined Storage. Its flagship software platform, NexentaStor, delivers high-performance, ultra-scalable, cloud- and virtualization-optimized storage solutions. Built upon ZFS technology and running on a broad choice of industry-standard hardware, Nexenta software eliminates hardware vendor lock-in and provides open, unified storage management at a significantly lower total cost of ownership than legacy storage systems.

More information about Nexenta Systems, and free trials of Nexenta products, can be found at www.nexenta.com.

VMware, VMworld and VMware vSphere are registered trademarks or trademarks of VMware, Inc. in the United States and other jurisdictions. The use of the word “partner” or “partnership” does not imply a legal partnership relationship between VMware and any other company.

Are your SSDs the weakest link or is it your file system?

Michael Letschin — Mon, 05 Aug 2013 16:37:00 GMT

The latest in storage trends today rely on flash or solid state storage, which seems a great method to speed up applications, speed up virtual machines and overall, to make your system run faster; but what happens when that same fast SSD fails? Jon Toigo does a good job explaining SSD failures here - http://goo.gl/zDXd2T. The failure rate on SSD, because of the cell technology involved is of huge concern. Many companies have looked for ways to solve this: from adding in wear leveling, or cell care, or even adding capacity that is not advertised just to have cells to put data writes that are new, while deleting the old blocks in the background. This is completely dependent on the drive manufacturer to save your disk.

Now the important question – Did you get a choice when you bought your enterprise storage as to what manufacturer’s SSD were your “fast” drives? Unlikely, and, without it you wouldn’t know if your drives will be the fast rabbit that never slows down to win the race, or the one that stops on the side of the road which could easily be overtaken by the tortoise.

This is a situation in which using a ZFS based file system like Nexenta could help not only solve, but let you know exactly what you have, and how you need to manage the life span and speed of your enterprise class storage. Nexenta is based on the ZFS file system, and uses commodity drive solutions, so the first problem of not knowing what drive you have is instantly solved, because you can now use best of breed, SSD or flash, and replace them as newer technology arises.

The real secret sauce comes into play when you combine the best in class SSD protection with a file system built to optimize the usage of the SSD, opting to use DRAM as much as possible and isolate the read and writes needed for normal usage. ZFS utilizes the hybrid storage pool for all data storage. ZFS inherently separates the read and write cache, each using its own SSD such that it should be selected specifically for the use case. SSD wear is more commonly known for write operations, in ZFS, the ZIL, or ZFS Intention Log handles this. For ZIL drives it is recommended to use SLC (Single Layer Cell) drives or RamSSD, like ZeusRAM. SLC drives have a much lower wear rate. To see an analysis of different types of SSD look here - http://goo.gl/vE87s. Only synchronous writes are written to the ZIL, and only after they are first written to the ARC, (Adaptive Replacement Cache) or the server's DRAM. Once data blocks are written to the ZIL a response is sent to the client, and data is asynchronously written to the spinning disk. The writes from the client are not the only SSD writes done. When using a tiered storage methodology, blocks of data must be written to the read cache prior to being read. This is the case with ZFS and hybrid storage pools also, however the differentiator is how often the blocks are written to the L2ARC, Layer 2 Adaptive Replacement Cache. The L2ARC is normally placed on MLC or eMLC SSD drives and is the second place that the system looks to find data blocks that are commonly used after the ARC/DRAM. It is not uncommon for other files systems to use a similar approach, however they use least recently used (LRU) algorithm. This does not account for if the data blocks may be used on a frequent basis but a large data read is done, from a backup for instance, and the blocks are shifted. The algorithm used for ARC and L2ARC accounts for these blocks and maintains data blocks based on both most recently as well as most frequently used data. Specifics are found here - http://goo.gl/tIlZSv.

The way that data is moved from and to SSD with ZIL and L2ARC is impactful not just for the wear time on the SSD but also on power consumption, that is paramount in the datacenter of the future. Using this approach allows systems to be built using all SSD footprints and minimal power, or even slower drives for the large capacity, while maintaining high level performance.

In many ways, the tortoise and hare analogy plays well in what we’ve been discussing. Leveraging the power of SSD, and the proper ones at that, will allow you to place the sheer power and lean nature of the Hare, while employing the economy and efficiency of the Tortoise. This, in a way, is the nature of ZFS. Power and economy wrapped up in one neat package. The real magic comes from the ability to tune the system either upward or down in an effort to get it to perform just the way you’d like it to. This is easily done simply by adding or removing SSD to the mix either in ZIL or L2Arc capacities.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with being a tortoise, but, to be a hare, well designed, and performing at peak efficiency, but also enduring for the entire race, really seems like the best way to go, doesn’t it?

A few observations from OpenStorage Summit about SDS

Evan Powell — Thu, 06 Jun 2013 22:00:00 GMT

OSS EMEA was one of the more inspiring few days I've experienced recently at Nexenta. It was not a marketing event. It was war stories about the shift to OpenStorage and Software Defined Storage shared in sessions, over demos, and, yes, over beers.

A few things I learned included:

SDS is already real and leverages commodity hardware. I had the opportunity to facilitate a cloud panel where I learned that the top hosting and cloud companies in Northern Europe are using NexentaStor as software defined storage – right now. SDS is not done – we are furiously adding capabilities as is the broader community. More below on that subject. But – Schuberg Phils presented on how they manage NexentaStor via Chef and use it as the basis of their cloud infrastructure TODAY. And how the use of commodity hardware means cost savings now and in the future and also – greater flexibility and supportability. Schuberg Phils is rapidly moving towards an infrastructure comprised almost entirely of commodity hardware and software, including their use of CloudStack, KVM, Arista, Nicira, and open approaches to security and load balancing as well.
SDS is about to take the next step. While approximately 190 customers and partners attended OSS and discussed in part their usage of NexentaStor as a version of software defined storage – the booths attracting the most attention were those showing forthcoming Nexenta capabilities that add infinite scalability of the management framework through further separating the control and the management frameworks as well as those that map application requirements to storage software and hardware configurations.
SDS isn't just about deep and cheap. While many larger enterprises use NexentaStor initially as second and third tier storage to save money – over time customers often use NexentaStor for the flexibility of the solution and for the ability of NexentaStor to perform when used as hybrid flash or or all flash storage. Marik Lubinski, LeaseWeb's Virtualization and Storage Engineer, reported that as one of the largest hosting companies in Europe, with operations extending to the United States, they have used just about every legacy storage solution available on the market today. And he reported that, by far, NexentaStor is "the fastest storage by far, of any storage we run."

SDS and its foundation, OpenStorage, are not just about marketing. Despite many blogs and statements from legacy vendors arguing either that they already have SDS or that they soon will have SDS, the simple fact is that they have neither the open approach and software only business model needed OR – as last week reminded me - the people, the community and the sheer number of progressive users that OpenStorage based SDS has accumulated. Together we are making a reality a fundamentally better approach to enterprise class storage.

Evan

Congratulations to EMC! | by Evan Powell, CSO, Nexenta

Evan Powell — Mon, 06 May 2013 19:35:00 GMT

Contributed by Evan Powell, Chief Strategy Officer, Nexenta Systems, Inc.

Congratulations to EMC and their software teams for announcing ViPR. Since we have been selling software defined storage for a number of years – and now have many more times customers than Vmware did when EMC bought them (and more than 10x than 3PAR when they went public for example) – I take exception to the lead in the press release proclaiming ViPR as "the world's first Software Defined Storage platform…"

Nonetheless, ViPR appears to be a real step forward towards software defined storage. And EMC deserves a lot of credit for again showing a willingness to risk aspects of their core business in order to keep up with customer requirements.

If you are one of the folks to read this blog regularly, you know we have shared a simple definition of SDS. You can read more about it here. Our definition is based on countless discussions with our cloud and enterprise customers who have shared with us why they started down the journey to software defined storage in the first place.

Basically it is 1) Abstract away the underlying hardware. 2) Achieve flexibility through the ability to handle multiple data access methods and data types. 3) Be truly software defined – through an architecture and set of APIs that allows, for example, orchestration software to manage the storage and to determine to what extent it is meeting application requirements.

If you look at what we know about ViPR – I think it is software that is policy driven that delivers object storage and that also manages and possibly virtualizes block and file storage. I gathered this especially from the more detailed write up over on EFYTimes.

It’s difficult to glean much from a press storm and I know that things will be much clearer once we see more detail from EMC and customers but let's look at early indications of how ViPR might shape up based on those criteria.

Abstraction
Achieve flexibility. The basic difference is that NexentaStor is broader and more flexible that we think ViPR will be when it ships thanks, again, to controlling everything from the on disk format to the access methods. On the other hand, while Nexenta has sponsored open source object approaches we are not shipping today a object storage solution whereas ViPR will include object. Whether we will ship object by the time ViPR ships is yet to be seen.
Being software defined this is arguably the most vague section of our fairly vague definition of software defined storage.
Today, however, IF ViPR is routing data sets based on application requirements to the right underlying array – per the point above – than it may well have the architecture necessary to close the application management loop. By comparison, NexentaStor can absolutely eliminate the need for deep storage engineering with solutions like VSA for VDI. In this solution the customer must simply enter the number and type of desktops and NexentaStor – with integration code for VDI – does the rest AND, crucially, tests and manages the system to insure that the requirements are being met.

A Few Impressions from Dell's Banking Day in NYC | By Evan Powell

Evan Powell — Wed, 01 May 2013 18:32:00 GMT

Three Somewhat Surprising Trends

Contributed by Evan Powell, Chief Strategy Officer, Nexenta Systems

Last Thursday I was thrilled to discuss Software Defined Storage at Dell's banking day in their offices in One Penn in NYC. I was one of two guest speakers, the other was Gartner's Joe Unsworth who did a great job outlining the transition to flash-based storage. After our fairly brief presentations and some Q&A there was an open round table discussion. The attendees were a who's who of global financial IT leaders including CIOs and VPs of technology and storage of most "too big to fail" banks; we had a couple of already highly referencable customers in the audience as well which was great. A friend at Dell estimated that the collective IT capital purchases of the attendees were approximately $20-$30bn per year. I cannot thank Dell enough for the opportunity and for the partnership.

As an aside - I think all of us in IT owe Dell a debt for their willingness to shift towards enterprise and towards a vision of enterprise IT that, for me, is more compelling, more open, and much more dynamic than many legacy system vendors from which Dell is rapidly taking market share. Maybe I should blog sometime soon about why we are Dell fans – I'd welcome the input of folks that read this blog. For now, suffice it to say that I think Dell is doing a good job leveraging their strengths including supply chain management and global support to both enable and benefit from the ongoing re-platforming of IT. Yes – I am biased since Dell recently started paying their sales teams on NexentaStor – so take those comments with a grain of salt. On the other hand – we targeted Dell as a preferred tier one vendor because they are so well positioned so our money and focus is where our mouth is.

The nature of the Banking Day conversations is that they are closed door and vendor neutral. I did not try to sell Nexenta's products or even the Dell hardware and services we leverage to deliver software defined storage. Instead I tried to kick off a real conversation.

Here are a few observations. First – some comments and themes I expected and then 2-3 really surprising comments.

As expected, these buyers are more interested in agility than they are in cost savings. And, with one or two exceptions, they assented freely to the notion that legacy storage is done, finished, a thing of the past; it feels like the transition to a software defined data center is just the straw breaking the legacy camel's back.

Perhaps most surprising to me were a few items:

Increased recognition of the inevitability of cloud-based approaches. I'll call this acquiescence #1. Many financials have been fighting the easy on-ramp of AWS for years as they struggled to get their thousands of developers to keep their IP on premise and protected. There seems to be a sense that only by building a better, safer, more performant and massively easier to deploy and manage IT platform could they attract developers to stay within the enterprise. I sensed a lot less willingness to fight their own users than in the past and much more confidence in their ability to deliver a better solution that will retain users.
Acquiescence #2 – BYOD is here to stay. Again, maybe I'm just out of touch however RIM and blackberry rose to prominence in part because of the mandates of buyers (and their colleagues in the government). And now the iPad and Android devices and similar are a fact of life that Software Defined Storage and the rest of the IT has got to accommodate.
Nobody believes today's all flash landscape will be with us in 18 months. Here I may be stealing Joe and Gartner's thunder slightly. Suffice it to say that he presented a fairly provocative view of likely changes and everyone agreed that today's apparent leaders are unlikely to win longer term. Hybrid players like Nexenta-based solutions and Nimble did receive more support.

I'd be remiss if I didn't point out one final acquiescence which may be why the event was so well attended – I think there is more uncertainty over the fundamental structure of IT than I've seen since I first startedpartnering with and selling to these buyers 10-15 years ago. The storage teams feel like they are under threat – and they are. In a way it is similar to what I experienced when building Clarus Systems (now Riverbed) and the voice teams were realizing that voice and video convergence with the IP networks could mean "career convergence" as well. As the software defined data center progresses, you'll see much more need for a true DevOps mindset and skill set. Service engineering is now the hot commodity and folks that know a particular silo really well are increasingly being flanked by those that build IT platforms that deliver on the agility promised by software defined data centers.

Hopefully these few nuggets are of interest. All in all, it is tremendously exciting to see some of the most credible and financially powerful IT buyers and partners (again – thank you Dell!) assent to the notion that software defined storage has got to happen for IT to remain relevant and to deliver on the promise of a more agile platform. I learned a lot from the conversations.

Nexenta Systems-Powered Storage Solution Achieves 1.6 Million IOPS

Conor Self — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 16:49:00 GMT

Configuration Demonstrates Power of Nexenta’s Software-defined Storage in Delivering High-end IOPS and High-Availability at an Unmatched Price

Santa Clara, Calif., March 19, 2013 — Nexenta® Systems, the world leader in Software-defined Storage, together with its Premium Partner Area Data Systems, today announced they achieved 1.6 million IOPS (Input/Output Operations per Second) and high-availability with no single point of failure. Comparable solutions from proprietary vendors cost significantly more than the Nexenta and Area Data Systems solution and cannot guarantee high-availability. With the combination of Nexenta’s Software-defined Storage, NexentaStor™, and high-performance, all-flash hardware, there is now a clear enterprise-class alternative to meet the scalability demands of big data.

“Our customers can now reach well over one million IOPS and capitalize on big data opportunities without breaking the bank on proprietary storage technologies that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars,” said Bridget Warwick, Chief Marketing Officer, Nexenta Systems. “This is further proof that Nexenta’s Software-defined Storage is changing the economics of the enterprise storage market.”

Nexenta is demonstrating the 1.6 million IOPS storage configuration at Intel® Solutions Summit 2013 from March 19-21, 2013 in Los Angeles, Calif. Nexenta is a Silver Sponsor and will be at its booth in the storage zone to discuss the enormous opportunity for Intel channel partners to drive ideal storage solutions, powered by Nexenta, to their customers.Architecture recipes using Nexenta and Intel products are listed on Intel’s website at: http://www.esaa-members.com/recipes/advSearchList/182.

“As an ongoing Nexenta partner, we are impressed with the results that have been achieved with NexentaStor and the Intel® Xeon® E5 Server Platform,” said David Brown, director of marketing for Intel’s Enterprise Products and Systems Division. “By choosing the Intel Xeon E5 processor, Nexenta is taking advantage of key technologies like Intel® Integrated I/O to deliver outstanding storage performance and scalability to end-users.”

Area Data Systems leveraged its expertise with NexentaStor’s ZFS file system to achieve the 1.6 million IOPS milestone with a configuration of NexentaStor, dual Intel Xeon E5-2643 3.3GHz processors, and DataON Storage’s external storage stack, DLS-1640S (“Delivering Lightning Speed”). An elite Nexenta Partner, DataON Storage’s solution is based on Nexenta-certified, best-of-breed components: DataON 24 bay 2u JBODs, LSI Serial-attached SCSI (SAS) host bus adapters (HBAs) and switches, and STEC enterprise-class, SAS solid-state drives (SSDs).The overall cost of Area Data Systems active/active high availability 9.6TB flash-based solid state solution is an estimated $75,000.

“Our customers trust us to architect unified storage solutions that can adapt to their business today and provide the performance needed for the future. Nexenta’s Software-defined Storage changes the game by enabling Area Data Systems to offer high availability, clustered high-IOPS solutions that are more resilient and more affordable than those offered by the pure flash storage purveyors,” said Trenton Baker, vice president of business development, Area Data Systems.

About Nexenta Systems:
Nexenta Systems is the world leader in Software-defined Storage. Its flagship software platform, NexentaStor, delivers high-performance, ultra-scalable, cloud- and virtualization-optimized storage solutions. Built upon ZFS technology and running on a broad choice of industry-standard hardware, NexentaStor eliminates vendor lock-in and provides open, unified storage management at significantly less cost than legacy systems.

More information about Nexenta Systems, and free trials of the ZFS-based NexentaStor, can be found at www.nexenta.com or by calling (855) 639 3682. Partners selling NexentaStor-based hardware/software appliances can be found at http://www.nexenta.com/corp/store/resellers-search.

Contacts:
Merrill Freund or Lauren Whitehouse
Schwartz MSL
(415) 512-0770

Fueled by Growing Market Shift to Software-defined Storage, Nexenta Announces Phenomenal Growth, $24 Million in Series D Funding, and Additions to Leadership Team

Conor Self — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 12:31:00 GMT

Y/Y Revenue Growth Doubled; 1PB+ Installations Increased Ten Fold; Evan Powell assumes Chief Strategy Officer Role — Mark Lockareff Joins as CEO and Bridget Warwick as CMO

Santa Clara, Calif. — February 27, 2013 — Nexenta^® Systems, the world leader in Software-defined Storage, today announced that it closed out 2012 with business growth that exceeded the company plan in terms of revenue, partner growth, partner sales, and customer adoption. Faced with this growth and opportunity, the company has secured $24 million in Series D financing. Nexenta also announced the appointment of Mark Lockareff as chief executive officer, with former CEO Evan Powell assuming the new role of chief strategy officer. With 25 years’ experience growing, leading, and investing in disruptive technology companies, Mark Lockareff will drive Nexenta’s next stage of growth as Software-defined Storage rapidly changes the dynamics of the IT technology market.

Nexenta’s over-subscribed Series D financing is being led by new investor Four Rivers Group, with participation by existing Nexenta investors Menlo Ventures, TransLink Capital, Javelin Ventures, Sierra Ventures, Razor’s Edge Ventures, and West Summit Capital. In addition to Four Rivers, new strategic investors Presidio Ventures and UMC Capital participated.

This round of investment is testament to the momentum and growth that the company has experienced in the last 12 months and to the company’s leadership of the transformation of the storage industry. Key highlights include:

The number of Nexenta-powered storage deployments of one petabyte or greater grew by a factor of 10.
Revenue growth doubled year-over-year; the company has experienced triple digit growth for three consecutive years.
Adoption of NexentaStor exceeded the 5,000 customer deployment milestone, while follow-on sales to existing customers expanded by 475 percent.
Total storage under management now exceeds 660PB and Nexenta has enabled an estimated $400 million in hardware storage sales for its reseller partners.
The company’s global reach continues to expand with active partners growing by 75 percent since January 2012. Nexenta has established official subsidiaries and teams in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, China, South Korea, and Japan.
Nexenta expanded its product portfolio with the launch of NexentaVSA for View for managing and deploying virtualized environments.

New CEO Lockareff has led or invested in a number of enterprise infrastructure, software and internet companies during their key growth stages including: ParAccel, Agiliance, Softricity, Model N, Riverbed, Acopia, ProofPoint, and Facebook.

In addition to Lockareff’s appointment, Bridget Warwick is joining Nexenta as chief marketing officer. Warwick previously held senior marketing positions at BlueArc Corporation (acquired by Hitachi Data Systems) and NetApp. These strategic additions to the executive team follow the October 2012 appointment of Rick Martig as CFO, and reflect Nexenta’s transition from a disruptive and explosive start-up to the trusted and innovative storage partner for thousands of companies all over the world.

“Nexenta provides the ideal storage to support Hosting.com’s cloud hosting services and our customers’ mission-critical applications. No other technology can match Nexenta’s price-to-performance, which has helped us offer competitive and differentiated services to companies all over the world. We look forward to a long and mutually beneficial relationship between our two companies,” said Hosting.com CTO Matt Ferrari.

“Our task at Nexenta is simple: we must build a company that is up to meeting the enormous opportunity of leading the transformation of the storage industry. The transition to Software-defined Storage is accelerating because customers must have greater flexibility, performance, and savings in their storage if they are to compete. I’m confident that Mark and Bridget will help us do an even better job for our customers, resellers, and strategic partners,” said Powell.

About Nexenta Systems
Nexenta Systems is the world leader in Software-defined Storage. Its flagship software platform, NexentaStor, delivers high-performance, ultra-scalable, cloud- and virtualization-optimized storage solutions. Built upon ZFS technology and running on a broad choice of industry-standard hardware, NexentaStor eliminates vendor lock-in and provides open, unified storage management at significantly less cost than legacy systems.

More information about Nexenta Systems, and free trials of the ZFS-based NexentaStor, can be found at www.nexenta.com or by calling (855) 639 3682. Partners selling NexentaStor-based hardware/software appliances can be found at: http://www.nexenta.com/corp/store/resellers-search.

Media Contacts:
Merrill Freund or Lauren Whitehouse
Schwartz MSL
(415) 512-0770
nexenta@schwartzmsl.com

Evan's predictions for 2013

Evan Powell — Wed, 09 Jan 2013 14:00:00 GMT

Now that 2012 is over, I guess it’s time to start looking at what’s coming down the track in 2013. Here are my top five predictions for the year ahead:

1. ZFS will be recognized as the most broadly deployed storage file system in the world.

Okay, so I cheated on that one. It already is. We alone have half as much storage, we figure, under management as NetApp claims. Add Oracle and you’re already bigger than any one-storage file system. Add all Solaris and illumos deployments on top of that and you are 3-5x larger than NetApp’s OnTap. In fact, the number of ZFS users is larger than those using NetApp’s OnTap file system and EMC’s Isilon file system combined.

2. “Other” will again be the only storage vendor growing product sales year on year

Take a look at EMC’s recent earnings results. They show that while EMC is gaining market share, it is dropping year on year product sales. Results from NetApp are similar; again, it is likely gaining share versus the much, much larger system vendors while dropping sales quarter on quarter.

Given that storage spend is actually increasing, the only explanation that makes sense is that “Other” is taking more and more share within storage and is taking ALL of the revenue growth in the space.

What this means is you are out of touch if you are not at least evaluating “Other”. Companies like Nexenta are pioneering software defined storage that offers superior enterprise class performance and data protection without the vendor lock in and ridiculous pricing of legacy storage vendors.

3. Software defined storage will be more disruptive and more difficult than the rest of the software defined data centre

There are about $1.2 billion reasons software defined networking was hot in 2012, such as VMware acquiring Nicera for $1.2 billion. And with good reason. Fixing, making more flexible, networking is an important part of fixing the data centre.

But storage is the real bottleneck. At current rates of growth, storage is on pace to consume more dollars than networking, security, and compute put together by 2014. That’s simply not sustainable.

Perhaps even more importantly, storage is hard and data is heavy. You can move network port definitions around with a VM and have a software infrastructure in place plus the hardware to forward those packets accordingly and achieve software defined networking. You cannot move the data around.

Repeat after me, you cannot move the data around. You cannot move zetabytes of data here around because the speed of light has not changed and it takes time to get that data over the network. So it’s increasingly important to work out what SLAs are acceptable from compute and networking to deliver per application performance on the storage. Perhaps this will be done increasingly by performing compute ON the storage, such as in our VSA for View product.

4. SaaS and web companies will continue to vote against IaaS offerings from major vendors

Take a poll of the CEOs of the top SaaS companies and they’ll all tell you, “No legacy IaaS company has a clue how to run infrastructure for the enterprise”. They cannot match the price point of those based on commodity hardware. Relatively few data center providers pass muster.

5. NVMe and anti-competitive behavior by flash factories will shift the flash storage world towards openness

With recent moves by the four or five companies that make pretty much all the world’s NAND for SSDs and consumer devices to limit global supply in the hope of restraining price drops, vendors and users reliant on flash are concerned about locking themselves into a single vendor.

NVMe offers some hope. Unlike FusionIO, which is getting users to adopt a proprietary set of APIs to get to their data, NVMe is a standard approach to accessing data on flash-enabled systems. Nexenta and most other storage vendors will support NVMe, which should level the playing field somewhat.

In either case, openness is important. And software defined storage that abstracts the underlying hardware dependencies away is important if storage and compute buyers want to avoid more vendor lock in as the world shifts towards flash.

That’s my top five for 2013 but I also have a bonus prediction for you: All flash isn’t a company, it’s a feature

Every storage system vendor will have all flash capabilities in their product offering in 2013. We launched ours earlier in 2012 with partners announcing systems based on NexentaStor achieving over 1 million IOPS, more than 3x faster than proprietary all flash systems on the market.

Our users don’t want to sacrifice enterprise class requirements like data protection, NAS access and 24x7 around the clock support in order to have all flash appliances. So they won’t. They’ll buy all flash from legacy vendors or from other suppliers like Nexenta and our partners, including Dell, SGI, Wipro, Racktop, Cisco and others that have a track record of making many thousands of customers successful.

To paraphrase John Chambers of Cisco and many other leaders of the IT industry, when industries shift, they shift. All we can do as companies is try to anticipate and then keep up with the shift.

With increasing coverage in mainstream IT and in analyst reports – and mounting interest on the part of Wall Street, including countless public investors and bankers with whom I’ve been spending time – the storage industry is shifting right before our eyes. In 2012 all major vendors saw declining core product sales despite a fast growing overall storage sector. We also saw confirmation that an originally general-purpose file system, ZFS, passed the legacy storage vendors in terms of capacity under management. And with software defined storage gaining visibility I’m confident that by the end of 2013 we will look back on the early 2000s storage industry and wonder, “what were we thinking”.

The world has changed. And openness and flexibility has come to storage. The result will be a better IT industry and a smarter world. But that’s a subject for another blog.

What do you think about my projections? What did I miss? What is the most likely to occur? What is least likely?

Nexenta Powers Cisco UCS to New VDI Performance Records

Nexenta Systems — Wed, 19 Dec 2012 08:01:00 GMT

Key Points

Nexenta’s Solution delivers the Best Performance Density on a B230 M2 UCS Blade
Nexenta’s Solution delivers the Most Number of VDI Users per B230 M2 UCS Blade
Nexenta’s Solution costs under $500/seat, 40% less expensive than recent certifications
Nexenta’s Solution was achieved with NO hardware or software acceleration

We are pleased to announce that we have joined the Cisco Developer Network as a Registered Developer within the Unified Computing technology category. NexentaVSA for View 2.0, has successfully completed interoperability testing* with the Cisco B230 M2 and the C240. The reference architecture is now a Cisco Compatible Solution.

The Cisco Developer Network (CDN) unites Cisco with third-party developers of hardware and software to deliver tested interoperable solutions to joint customers. As a Registered Developer, Nexenta offers a complementary product offering and has started to collaborate with Cisco to meet the needs of joint customers. With offerings such as NexentaVSA for View 2.0, customers can more quickly deploy a broad range of Cisco Compatible business applications, devices, or services that can enhance the capabilities, performance, and management of their Cisco network. For more information on NexentaVSA for View’s interoperability with the Cisco B230 M2 and C240, go to: https://marketplace.cisco.com/catalog/companies/nexenta-systems

Our new Cisco Home Page is here: http://nexenta.com/cisco.

We are also pleased to announce that we have surpassed existing Cisco benchmarks for the B230 M2 by achieving 196 users(@139 IOPS) for the Cisco blade computer. Nexenta’s performance benchmark for the B230 also indicated a sustained rate of 155 users (@215 IOPS) per desktop for the B230 M2 with storage latency, via the C240, of less than 3ms on average. This is more than 2X better than similar enterprise storage arrays, for the UCS platform.

For more information on this benchmaek

To learn more about Cisco-approved UCS VDI solution, go to https://marketplace.cisco.com/catalog/companies/nexenta-systems.

To download NexentaVSA for View for a complimentary 45-day trial, visit

http://www.nexenta.com/corp/downloads/nexentavsa-for-view.

Nexenta Guest Blog: Hardware, Software, what about Valueware?

Nexenta Systems — Fri, 14 Dec 2012 16:00:00 GMT

Greg Schulz wrote a great piece on "Valueware", and I wanted to syndicate it here. He frames it in terms of "TrueValue Hardware", a place where I spend a decent amount of money. He rightly urges vendors to consider the Value of what they are providing. So, Here it is:

I am surprised nobody has figured out how to use the term valueware to describe their hardware, software or services solutions, particular around cloud, big data, little data, converged solutionstacks or bundles, virtualization and related themes.

Cloud and virtualization building blocks transformed into Valueware

Note that I’m referring to IT hardware and not what you would usually find at a TrueValue hardware store (disclosure, I like to shop there for things to innovate with and address the non IT to do project list).

For the rest of the blog, see:

http://bit.ly/SY35Os

JP Morgan and the Rise of Other (in the storage industry)

Gilbert Lee — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 02:01:00 GMT

In 1881, John Pierpont Morgan’s home on Madison Avenue in New York City became the first private home in the world to be lit entirely by electricity. Morgan invited the crème de la crème of New York society to witness this amazing technological display where he boldly declared, “Electricity as the future.” Despite electricity’s successful debut, Morgan’s father, Junius Spencer Morgan, dismissed the technology as the “stuff of carnivals and fairs” and admonished the younger Morgan for investing in this emerging and unproven technology. The elder Morgan had a point. He was after all the legendary financier who built the “House of Morgan.” How can this upstart technology possibly challenge Standard Oil and its stranglehold on kerosene?

Just as electricity changed the world, OpenStorage and Software-define Storage are revolutionizing the storage industry as we know it. Nexenta Systems, the leader in Software-defined Storage solutions for the enterprise, is on the forefront of this revolution. A recent IDC study showed that the quarterly factory revenues for EMC, NetApp and other storage industry incumbents are on the decline. Conversely, the revenues of upstart storage companies (“Others”) are on the rise. In fact, factory revenues for EMC, NetApp, IBM and Hewlett Packard all declined from Q2 to Q3 this year. EMC fell 2.2%, NetApp dropped 2.9%, IBM slipped 9.4% and Hewlett Packard tumbled 10.4%. In contrast, factory revenues for “Others” increased by 49% from Q2 to Q3 this year. If the current trends continue, “Others” will surpass the quarterly factory revenues of EMC in the fourth quarter of 2012.

Nexenta Systems Launches Nexenta EcoSystem Alliances Program (NESA)

Conor Self — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 18:40:00 GMT

New Nexenta EcoSystem Alliance Partner Program Extends Opportunities for Technology Partners

San Jose, Calif. — November 14, 2012 — Nexenta^® Systems, the leader in Software-defined Storage solutions for the enterprise, today launched its Nexenta EcoSystem Alliance (NESA™) program to facilitate and grow the market for OpenStorage solutions that provide enterprise-class features.

More information about the Nexenta EcoSystem Alliance can be found at: http://www.nexenta.com/corp/nexenta-ecosystem-alliance-program-nesa.

Working with an ecosystem of technology partners is fundamental to the objective of providing “enterprise class storage to everyone,” a main tenet of Nexenta’s business philosophy.

This program was created to address the growing breadth of Nexenta’s technical partners. Its mission is to provide technical and marketing assistance to those partners that help to deliver a complete Software-defined Storage solution to the market. It also provides customers of Software-defined Storage guidance on the products and vendors that make up the Nexenta EcoSystems.

By joining NESA, partners can extend the sales and market reach of their organizations and promote their products to Nexenta’s resellers and customers. NESA is designed to co-market joint solutions through collaborative marketing, selling, and lead-generation activities. Partners also can take advantage of the Nexenta lab for certification, customer demos, and proof of concept (POCs).

Nexenta’s long standing technology partners immediately become charter members of the program and can start taking advantage of its benefits.

“Our technology partners play a huge role in Nexenta’s overall success,” Evan Powell, CEO of Nexenta. “Investing in programs like NESA allows us to reward our existing partners with a variety of benefits and attract additional partners to deliver complete storage solutions.”

“We are excited to see Nexenta, a key partner in Software-defined Storage, take this next step in its growth by launching the NESA program,” said Brent Blanchard, senior director of worldwide channel sales and marketing, LSI Corporation. “We have been working closely with Nexenta since its earliest days and believe that the NESA program will help drive adoption of certified OpenStorage solutions using our HBAs, SAS Switch and Nytro™ portfolio of PCIe flash adapters.”

“The exceptional level of storage performance with NexentaStor and STEC’s SSDs is a reflection of the close, symbiotic relationship between STEC and Nexenta,” said Farzin Baz, director of channel sales at STEC. “The NESA program gives STEC the opportunity to certify more products quickly and take advantage of multiple options for joint marketing, leveraging both of our storage expertise.”

“We at SuperMicro have seen Nexenta as a natural ally in the mission of delivering Software-defined Storage with industry standard, Intel-based hardware. We always have seen the benefit of testing and certifying solutions together so as to give our customers and channels the confidence they seek in their enterprise storage solutions,” said Wally Liaw, vice president of sales and co-founder of SuperMicro. “We see the NESA program streamlining this process. It gives us a perfect way to grow our market share in storage while promoting our joint value through Nexenta.”

Along with formalizing partner relationships with key existing partners, NESA will address the growing list of new partners wishing to join in the OpenStorage revolution. Nexenta’s goal is to not only accommodate system, HDD, and SDD vendors but also vendors in areas that complete the data center storage ecosystem.

The NESA program offers a tiered model with three membership levels: Affiliate, Certified, and Elite. Each level provides an increasing number of benefits and commitments from Nexenta, and serves as the foundation for a technical relationship with the company.

This program assures Nexenta customers that there is a solution in the ecosystem to address all their needs. Some of the recent additions to NESA include CommVault and LakeSide Software.

The program also includes product certification to ensure interoperability and time-to-market delivery of the latest innovations in Software-defined Storage solutions. As the result of a stronger relationship with technology partners, customers can focus on growing their OpenStorage infrastructure, confident in their technologies’ interoperability.

About Nexenta Systems
Nexenta Systems is the leader in Software-defined Storage solutions. Its flagship software-only platform, NexentaStor, delivers high-performance, ultra-scalable, cloud- and virtualisation-optimised storage solutions. Built upon ZFS technology, and running on industry-standard hardware, NexentaStor eliminates vendor lock-in and provides open, unified storage management at a fraction of the cost of legacy systems.

More information about Nexenta Systems, and free trials of the ZFS-based NexentaStor, can be found at www.nexenta.com. Partners selling NexentaStor-based hardware/software appliances can be found at: www.nexenta.com/partners.

Media Contacts:

North America:
Lauren Connelly
Schwartz MSL
(415) 512-0770
nexenta@schwartzmsl.com

Europe:
Emily Gallagher / Eric Dragt
Touchdown PR
+44(0)1252 717040
nexenta@touchdownpr.com

Nexenta Finds U.S. Federal Departments Overspending on Data Storage

Nexenta Systems — Mon, 05 Nov 2012 13:00:00 GMT

Public Records Demonstrate Urgent Need to Reduce Costs of Expensive Legacy Storage Platforms by Embracing Next-Generation Software-defined Storage Solutions

Santa Clara, Calif., November 5, 2012 – Nexenta ^® Systems, the world leader in Software-defined Storage, today announced the results of its research into public sector spending on legacy storage giants EMC and NetApp. Since 2001, the U.S. Federal Government has awarded at least $1,234,842,449 in non-classified contracts to these legacy storage vendors, who lock in customers with proprietary systems that are subject to costly and inconvenient price hikes. Because Nexenta’s Software-defined Storage solutions can save 60-70 percent over time versus legacy systems, the non-classified portions of the U.S. Federal Government could have saved at least $493,936,979.60 by switching to Software-defined Storage solutions such as Nexenta’s. Total potential savings, from classified and non-classified programs, are estimated to exceed $1 billion annually.

“With the looming fiscal cliff and assorted federal budget challenges ahead, U.S. agencies are paying much closer attention to cost-effective IT solutions across the board,” said Jonathan Spalter, former CIO of the United States Information Agency. “This includes the trend towards software-defined next-generation storage solutions, which are significantly reducing costs on a critical top line item in most CIO budgets.”

Nexenta’s findings indicate that the federal information technology procurement practices are not in accordance with public commitments to reduce costs and increase competition -- especially given the proliferation of new storage vendors and technologies that have entered the market in recent years. At $0.40 per gigabyte, the cost of storing data with proprietary EMC or NetApp technologies is up to three times more than for higher performance, open alternatives.

“Federal IT managers preparing for Big Data while facing potential across-the-board budget cuts urgently need more cost-effective and innovative alternatives to the storage strait-jacket of last-generation, inflexible and expensive legacy solutions such as EMC’s and NetApp’s,” said Evan Powell, CEO, Nexenta Systems. “Nexenta’s Software-defined Storage vision is a demonstrably more cost-effective, scalable and adaptable solution for keeping our nation’s information safe and available.”

An increasing number of private- and public-sector organizations are saving substantial sums by embracing Software-defined Storage, including the U.S. Army, KT (Korea Telecom), the U.S. Department of State, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation , NOAA, several U.S. National Labs, LeaseWeb and Budd Van Lines. More successful Nexenta customers can be found at: http://nexenta.com/corp/case-studies.

Nexenta’s original research found the following:

EMC Corporation

Since 2001, EMC Corporation has been awarded $850,311,037 in 3,626 awards by the U.S. Federal Government.

EMC’s five largest federal buyers, by dollars awarded, include:

Department of Defense ($409 million)
General Services Administration ($145 million)
Social Security Administration ($126 million)
Department of Justice ($24 million)
Department of Commerce ($19 million)

NetApp

Since 2001, NetApp has been awarded $384,531,412 in 1,928 awards by the U.S. Federal Government.

NetApp’s five largest federal buyers, by dollars awarded, include:

Department of Defense ($717 million)
Department of State ($57 million)
Department of Homeland Security ($20 million)
Department of Health and Human Services ($19 million)
Securities and Exchange Commission ($18 million)

Methodology

Nexenta Systems conducted research on USASpending.gov and submitted Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to the U.S. Departments of Homeland Security, Treasury and State, as well as the U.S. Army, Marines, and Air Force.

Tweet This: @Nexenta releases #federal #storage research: departments overspent by $500 million since 2001: http://bit.ly/YeCRIf

About Nexenta Systems:

Nexenta Systems is the world leader in Software-defined Storage. Its flagship software-only platform, NexentaStor, delivers high-performance, ultra-scalable, cloud- and virtualization-optimized storage solutions. Built upon ZFS technology, and running on industry-standard hardware, NexentaStor eliminates vendor lock-in and provides open, unified storage management at less than half the cost of legacy systems.

More information about Nexenta Systems, and free trials of the ZFS-based NexentaStor, can be found at www .nexenta .com or by calling (855) 639 3682. Partners selling NexentaStor-based hardware/software appliances can be found at: www .nexenta .com /partners.

###

Nexenta Systems Enables Queen Elizabeth’s Grammar School to Half its Storage Costs

Conor Self — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 09:00:00 GMT

London, UK — 1 November 2012 — Nexenta Systems, the leader in Software-defined Storage solutions for the enterprise, today announced that Kent based secondary academy, Queen Elizabeth’s Grammar School, has implemented two NexentaStor SAN solutions to support its entire VMware virtual environment.

With more than 900 pupils, Queen Elizabeth’s Grammar School in Faversham has an outstanding reputation for providing first-rate education. The school recently was struck with the common issue of effectively storing increasingly growing amounts of data. The school’s aging Intel SAN storage solution was rapidly reaching capacity and, as a result, was slowing down and not providing the performance required.

As the Intel solution was unsuitable for expansion, the school’s IT Network Manager, Dave Munro, reached the decision that the storage infrastructure required an upgrade. Under pressure to make the most out of the school’s allocated IT budget, Mr Munro enlisted the help of high performance computing specialists VA Technologies. The aim was to find a flexible and reliable storage solution at a competitive price. After evaluating a range of solutions, Mr Munro implemented two NexentaStor solutions with the advice and guidance provided by VA Technologies.

Dave Munro explains: “Nexenta’s OpenStorage solution is a clear example of value for money. The solution provides us with enterprise-class features, including hybrid storage pooling, unlimited snapshots, deduplication, and thin provisioning but at half of the price of other traditional storage vendors. The impressive features set also is complimented by its flexibility, is extremely adaptable, and easily can grow with us in the future.”

Two 12TB SANs provide the academy with a total of 24TB of raw storage capacity. NexentaStor is used to support the entire VMware infrastructure; the first SAN unit connects to three VMware host servers via fast 10GB SFP+ direct attached cables. This system acts as an ESXi data store using NFS, and the need for extra fileservers also is eliminated as it directly provides CIFS shares. In addition, this unit snapshots data at regular intervals throughout the day, allowing data to be effectively recovered by the schools IT Department when required. The snapshots are synchronised with the second 12TB SAN, which is stored in a separate location on site, providing a comprehensive data protection structure.

Dave Munro concludes, “By selecting Nexenta, we have increased the speed and performance of our IT infrastructure dramatically. Nexenta was significantly cheaper than any other storage solution. Automated email alerts provided by the NexentaStor system, combined with its straightforward usability, means that we have saved ourselves significant amounts of management time. The initial advantages of the Open Source unified storage solution are clear, and the team at Queen Elizabeth’s are confident that its flexibility will ensure that these benefits are continued into the future.”

Evan Powell, CEO of Nexenta. “Nexenta helps to make virtual machine management easier, as no other approach to storage can match the scale and flexibility of the commercially supported OpenStorage-based NexentaStor. It is a viable alternative to traditional legacy storage vendors and provides the peace of mind and data protection that Queen Elizabeth’s Grammar School requires.”

Media Contacts:
Emily Gallagher / Laura White
Touchdown PR
+44(0)1252 717040
nexenta@touchdownpr.com

Nexenta Systems Sbarca in Italia!

Nexenta Systems — Fri, 26 Oct 2012 16:53:00 GMT

Nexenta Systems ha recentemente aperto un ufficio in Italia. Il nostro country manager è Giuseppe Ferrari.

Ecco alcune delle nostre news recente:

25-Oct Bitmat Nexenta Systems sbarca in Italia <http://www.google.com/url?sa=X&q=http://www.bitmat.it/articolo/0000094282/48/20/Nexenta_Systems_sbarca_in_Italia.html&ct=ga&cad=CAcQAhgBIAAoATAAOABA1b-phAVIAVgBYgVpdC1VUw&cd=yrWDwGgnVGI&usg=AFQjCNEheON6-rIDQDadahCfywW0kErimQ>

25-Oct Storage-backup.com Nexenta Systems in Italia con Giuseppe Ferrari Regional Sales ... <http://www.google.com/url?sa=X&q=http://www.storage-backup.com/nexenta/nexenta-systems-in-italia-con-giuseppe-ferrari-regional-sales-manager-per-il-mediterraneo-e-il-medio-oriente-7562/&ct=ga&cad=CAcQAhgBIAAoATABOAFA1b-phAVIAVgBYgVpdC1VUw&cd=yrWDwGgnVGI&usg=AFQjCNEAOtf_bTi5ybuf6QHEXGs8ENcwaw>

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Nexenta Systems Powers LeaseWeb’s Cloud Platform

Nexenta Systems — Thu, 25 Oct 2012 09:00:00 GMT

Amsterdam, the Netherlands – 24 October 2012 – Nexenta Systems, the leader in Software-defined Storage solutions for the enterprise, today announced that LeaseWeb, a leading global hosting provider, has chosen its flagship solution NexentaStor to underpin its new cloud platform.

LeaseWeb provides a portfolio of hosted infrastructure solutions, including traditional dedicated servers, cloud, colocation, and hybrid solutions, all backed by a first-class worldwide network with a network uptime of 99.999% and capacity of 2.5 Terabytes per second.

With particular emphasis on its public cloud solutions, LeaseWeb officially launched its new cloud platform in March of this year. With a reputation as a provider of quality infrastructure with high availability, it needed a storage solution that was agile, reliable, and could handle the IOPS requirements for its new platform. After installing NexentaStor on top of commodity hardware, the company also cut out vendor lock-in, reducing LeaseWeb’s long-term storage costs.

Marek Lubinski, virtualisation engineer, LeaseWeb, explains: “We needed an enterprise feature-rich storage solution. Nexenta’s OpenStorage software provides advanced caching and, when coupled with SSDs, it offers the performance we needed. It also offers enterprise-class redundancy with replication capabilities, including unlimited incremental snapshots and cloning, meaning we can scale up and out without the worry of escalating costs.”

Powering LeaseWeb’s Cloud service are multiple NexentaStor SANs providing the company with more than 450TB of raw capacity. Other enterprise-class features include hybrid storage pooling, deduplication, and thin provisioning. NexentaStor also offers high availability, synchronous and asynchronous replication and, most importantly, airtight end-to-end data integrity with the ability to find and detect silent data corruption.

Robert van der Meulen, Manager Cloud with LeaseWeb concludes: “In a world in which data growth rates are exploding, innovative storage technologies have become the secret ingredient to rolling out cloud services. With its scalability, interoperability, and cost-effectiveness, Nexenta was the answer for our new cloud platform.”

Evan Powell, CEO of Nexenta says: “No other approach to storage can match the scale and flexibility of the commercially supported OpenStorage-based NexentaStor. NexentaStor helps make it possible for public clouds to be financially viable for companies that have massive scale and yet do not want to undertake the risk and cost of writing their own storage solution.”

About LeaseWeb:

LeaseWeb provides a portfolio of hosted infrastructure solutions including traditional dedicated server hosting, cloud and colocation. Since the best configuration for a business may involve more than one platform, LeaseWeb can help mix and match services to build the optimal hybrid infrastructure solution. All backed by a first-class worldwide network with a network uptime of 99.999% and capacity of 2.5 Tbps. As a leading member of the Ocom Group, LeaseWeb has been hosting and supporting mission critical websites, internet applications, email servers, security and storage services since 1997.

LeaseWeb’s growing infrastructure currently spans eight datacenters in the Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Brussels and Washington DC regions, connecting with major telecom carriers. LeaseWeb peers on Internet Exchanges in Amsterdam, London, Frankfurt, New York, Brussels, Copenhagen, Paris, Budapest, Bucharest, Warsaw, Prague, Bratislava, Milan, Vienna, Stockholm, Oslo, Luxembourg, Dusseldorf, Zurich and Madrid.

The company offers Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solutions to a wide range of industries, including accounting, banking and financial services, engineering, healthcare, manufacturing and technology, as well as the smallest start-ups seeking to develop a presence on the internet. Customers include Wikimedia, Heineken, BWM, Starbucks, Kelkoo, Univé, AFAS and Twenga.

LeaseWeb partners with the IT industry's leading enterprises, including Microsoft, VMware, IBM, Dell, HP, Cisco, Juniper, cPanel and Parallels, and was last year named HP Service Provider Partner of 2011

About Nexenta Systems

Nexenta Systems is the leader in Software-defined Storage solutions. Its flagship software-only platform, NexentaStor, delivers high-performance, ultra-scalable, cloud- and virtualisation-optimised storage solutions. Built upon ZFS technology, and running on industry-standard hardware, NexentaStor eliminates vendor lock-in and provides open, unified storage management at a fraction of the cost of legacy systems.

Media Contacts:
Emily Gallagher / Eric Dragt
Touchdown PR
+44(0)1252 717040
nexenta@touchdownpr.com

RCO — Real Cost of Ownership for Storage, Savings by Nexenta

John McLaughlin — Tue, 23 Oct 2012 19:00:00 GMT

Storage Costs Overview

Many IT organizations engage in financial fiction with management when analyzing their costs for IT. They call it TCO — Total Cost of Ownership. But most of the time, what they deal with is My Cost of Ownership or even My Cost of Acquisition. Rarely do they attempt to include all of the costs as they are spread over many departments.

For many IT departments, storage has become one of the largest, if not largest, budget item. It’s not hard to see why. Unstructured data keeps growing, media files keep getting larger and cheaper to produce, and there is sense that ‘big data’ will, somehow, be of great value. And nobody wants to throw any of that data away.

Organizing data into tiers and archiving old data to tape sounds like a great idea, yet few people do it; it’s often easier to just buy more storage. That’s getting harder as the total amount of storage under manage increases and IT is asked to do more with less.

Nexenta is a storage software company. We believe that we can help IT address their storage challenges and reduce the Real Cost of Ownership (RCO) by using software to exploit all of the attributes of modern storage hardware.

Real Costs

Business owners and senior management should be concerned about the RCO of storage when they do financial planning. But what should be included in RCO? Here are the areas to consider:

Cost of buying new gear
Operation of the gear for its useful life (five to seven years)
- Hardware / software support contract(s) for life of the gear
- Cost of power to run and cool the gear will be greater than the acquisition cost
- Data center costs (e.g., rack space, power usage effectiveness (PUE))
- Management / administration costs (people)
Disposal fees, license replacement, migrations fees:
- When you dispose of the old gear, do you also dispose of the software license? If yes, then you will need a new license.
- Cost of moving to the new gear
  - Cost of moving off the old gear

Cost of Buying New Gear

OpenStorage is an approach to building storage system from Open Source software and commodity hardware:

System software
- Storage access methods (file and block)
- Device management
- Data integrity
- Replication services
- Data management
Controller(s)
- Commodity x86 servers with large amounts memory for caching
- Optionally, cluster of two for high availability
- Commodity HBAs for SAS, FC, 10GbE, etc.
JBOD Enclosures
- With high-capacity, commodity disks at commodity prices
- With SSDs for IOPs

This is in contrast with proprietary systems that are built with similar components:

Propriety software
- All enhancements must come from one vendor: limited rate of adding new functionality
- All costs of development paid by that one vendor: keeping costs high
- Limited features, innovation: limited ability to exploit new technology
Propriety controllers
- Expensive (but profitable for vendor)
- Lag behind industry innovations
Proprietary disk enclosures
- Limited choice of disks, high prices
- Stops customers from just adding their own commodity disks

Nexenta’s software is based on the enterprise operating system Solaris (which became OpenSolaris, which, in turn, is the basis of the illumos operating system).

A key feature of the software is ZFS technology, which provides many capabilities, including data integrity, scalability, and the ability to mix ARC (memory), SSDs, and disks into a Hybrid Storage pool (HSP).

Operation of the Gear

A large percentage of the RCO for storage systems is power consumption for running the system and cooling it down.

Customers want these things from the storage system:

Capacity
Performance (IOPs and / or throughout MB/s)
Security
Reasonable costs
- Easier management

The choices that are made to obtain these attributes, and the vendor chosen, will have significant impact on power consumption.

Capacity:

Using fewer high-capacity disks (e.g., 3TB or 4TB) at lower speeds (e.g., 7200 RPM) will consume less power and take less space for a given capacity than using faster, lower capacity disks (10k RPM, 2.5” 900GB disks or 15k RPM, 3.5” 300GB or 600GB disks).

Performance:

With the ZFS Hybrid Storage Pool, the combination of SSDs, main memory caching, and high-capacity disks can deliver better performance than fast disks alone—while consuming far less power because there are fewer disks and the disk that are used are power efficient.

All SSD storage systems are exciting, but today, they have limited capacity and high costs. A storage system that can evolve from all mechanical disks, to SSD/mechanical, to all SSD is very attractive. That’s exactly what you can do with Nexenta powered storage.

Security:

Disks fail: RAID can be used to deal with disks that fail. And ZFS has enhancements that allow RAID protection with no special hardware. A group of two or more disks can be linked into a RAID device with one or more “parity” disks. A replacement disk is tasked with taking the place of a failed disk:

Automatically — hot standby, no operator intervention required
Manually — warm standby, disk is in system and online; operator instructs system to do the replacement
Resilvering — the process of writing the missing data to the replacement disk.

Bits in blocks of data become bad, firmware makes mistakes. This is a real problem for most storage systems. ZFS not only detects such bad bits, but it can correct them much like ECC memory can detect and correct memory errors.

Easier Management:

Nexenta’s Unified Storage solution allows one pool of storage to provide multiple storage services simultaneously. For example, file-based Network Attached Storage (NAS) services can be provided to one set of clients via the CIFs/NFS and, at the same time, Storage Attached Network (SAN) services can be provided to another set of clients via FC/iSCSI.

Disposal Fees, License Replacement, Migrations Fees

When a Nexenta powered storage solution reaches the end of its life, you can migrate the license to a new box and repurpose the old system.

This is much less likely to result in disposal fees.

As Nexenta support’s industry standard protocols, migrating to and from a Nexenta systems is fairly easy.

Summary

Nexenta’s OpenStorage approach allows IT organizations to do more with less while reducing the Real Cost of Ownership for IT’s biggest line item, which is storage:

Systems built with Open Source-based software and commodity hardware components cost less to acquire and maintain.
High capacity, scalable, unified storage means fewer boxes that are easier to manage.
Grow capacity by adding a JBOD or live-swapping older, smaller disks for newer, larger disks. This allow for “just-in-time” capacity that is rack-space efficient.
ZFS Hybrid Storage Pools lower power costs by using energy efficient SSDs for IOPS, along with a smaller number of efficient, high-capacity disks for capacity.
Industry standard, open protocols make migration easy.
Industry standard hardware is easier to repurpose and dispose of.
Nexenta’s capacity licenses are permanent and can be transferred to new systems.

Nexenta Optimizes Storage and VDI for VMware View® Business Process Desktop

Nexenta Systems — Tue, 23 Oct 2012 15:41:00 GMT

Forty percent of all vendors in the VMware Rapid Desktop Appliance program are based on NexentaVSA for View deployments.

Santa Clara – October 23, 2012 – Nexenta Systems, a world leader in Software-defined Storage solutions, today announced it has optimized storage infrastructure for VMware View® Business Process Desktop with its purpose-built storage appliance, NexentaVSA for View. Designed in collaboration with VMware, NexentaVSA for View directly supports Business Process Desktop by empowering customers to scale virtual desktops based on performance demand, drastically simplifying the deployment and management of virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and reducing the total cost of ownership.

“Integrating VMware View with enterprise-class storage optimization from Nexenta provides a robust solution for the business process outsourcing market by simplifying the management of IT infrastructure and protecting data across locations,” said Mason Uyeda, director, Technical and Solutions Marketing, VMware. “The flexibility of the virtual storage appliance and centralized management console, combined with the built-in compatibility with VMware View, delivers significant benefits for the enterprise and end users.”

VMware View Business Process Desktop delivers desktops as a managed service to business process outsourcing (BPO) contact center agents, offshore developers, and outsourced workers. The single NexentaVSA for View management console, which centralizes storage and desktop resources, is ideal for BPO services, allowing customers to deliver applications and information access to its outsourced employees securely and transparently. By utilizing the virtual storage appliance and attached storage devices, NexentaVSA for View also enables customers to scale quickly and effectively to accommodate storage demand and VDI performance. Finally, Business Process Desktop, combined with NexentaVSA for View, can reduce operational expenditure by centralizing and streamlining desktop management and support.

Simplifying the entire installation and configuration process, customers can now deploy these solutions with ease and with the highest levels of confidence. At present, forty percent of all vendors in the VMware Rapid Desktop Appliance program are based on NexentaVSA for View deployments. Partners include Pogo, Cisco, AMAX, and RackTop — with several more in the certification process.

“NexentaVSA for View is a virtual storage appliance designed specifically for VMware View Business Process Desktop,” said Evan Powell, CEO, Nexenta Systems. “By collaborating with VMware, we have optimized the storage components of VDI deployments with VMware View, tackling increased scaling, centralized management, and operational costs.”

To learn how to integrate NexentaVSA for View with VMware View Business Process Desktop and Nexenta-based Rapid Desktop solutions, check out Nexenta’s training videos on vBootcamp and VMware Certified Rapid Desktop Appliance at:

http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/vcl/poc.php

http://communities.vmware.com/community/vmtn/desktop/view/bpdbootcamp/video_7

Or, review the How to Guide: http://bit.ly/nexenta-bpd-howto

To download NexentaVSA for View for a complimentary 45-day trial, visit

http://www.nexenta.com/corp/downloads/nexentavsa-for-view.

About Nexenta Systems

Nexenta Systems is the leader in Software-defined Storage solutions. Its flagship software-only platform, NexentaStor, delivers high-performance, ultra-scalable, cloud- and virtualization-optimized storage solutions. Built upon ZFS technology, and running on industry-standard hardware, NexentaStor eliminates vendor lock-in and provides open, unified storage management at a fraction of the cost of legacy systems.

More information about Nexenta Systems, and free trials of the ZFS-based NexentaStor, can be found at www.nexenta.com or call +1 (855) NEXENTA.

VMware and VMware View are registered trademarks and/or trademarks of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. The use of the word “partner” or “partnership” does not imply a legal partnership relationship between VMware and any other company.

Contact:

Schwartz MSL
Lauren Whitehouse, 415-512-0770
nexenta@schwartzmsl.com

European Market Embraces OpenStorage as Nexenta Continues Growth

Nexenta Systems — Thu, 18 Oct 2012 15:03:00 GMT

LONDON, UK - October 18, 2012—Nexenta^® Systems, the world leader in Software-defined Storage solutions, today announced that it has grown 212 percent quarter-on-quarter in Europe for the first three quarters of 2012, with Q3 being the best in its history.

Fueled by an unmatched pace of product innovation, Nexenta has seen significant additions to its European customer base over the last 12 months. With a laser focus on building and supporting its channel programme, the company is seeing a dramatic demand for its award-winning OpenStorage software solution. Storage resellers in Europe, including Transtec in Germany, NAS in the UK, Q5 Switzerland, S3S Belgium and Layer8 in Sweden are all responding to the strong customer demand for a cost effective alternative to legacy proprietary solutions from proprietary storage vendors.

Nexenta solves a critical pain point for companies struggling to balance growing data volume with legacy business model lock-in and aging technologies. The company’s open business model and proven track record with large, enterprise-class customers, including Ballou, Hamburg University of Technology, LeaseWeb, National Library of Wales and Simply Mail, proves its product is the best suited storage solution for cloud deployments, virtualised data centres, and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) environments.

Other significant Nexenta milestones in 2012 include:

A 130% percent increase in active partners across Europe since the beginning of 2012
Employee growth in Europe by 89%
The debut of NexentaVSA for View, which simplifies the complexity of VDI deployments
Active partnerships with Dell, SGI
A slate of contributions to OpenStack in April
A partnership with Intel to optimise the Xeon E5 Server Platform in March

Jacco van Achterberg, sales director EMEA for Nexenta, said: “By delivering choice, flexibility, air-tight data protection and industry-leading price performance and breakthrough innovation such as NexentaVSA for View, we are achieving record-setting growth. A lot of the credit should go to our network of more than 100 reseller partners across EMEA, many of whom provide comprehensive storage solutions, powered by NexentaStor, for their customers.”

Evan Powell, CEO of Nexenta, said: “The proprietary storage industry has a stranglehold on IT innovation. OpenStorage solves this problem. Our NexentaStor platform delivers an unmatched breadth of capabilities, a software-only business model that enables hardware choice and industry-leading price performance particularly for high IO and high capacity unified storage workloads. In addition, NexentaStor is able to deliver massive improvements on storage total cost of ownership that the IT industry is demanding.”

About Nexenta Systems
Nexenta Systems is the leading supplier of Software-defined Storage solutions. Its flagship software-only platform, NexentaStor, delivers high-performance, ultra-scalable, cloud- and virtualisation-optimised storage solutions. Built upon ZFS technology, and running on any industry-standard hardware, NexentaStor eliminates vendor lock-in and provides open, unified storage management at a fraction of the cost of legacy systems.

Contacts:

Emily Gallagher / Laura White
Touchdown PR
+44 (0)1252 717040
nexenta@touchdownpr.com

Nexenta Systems Receives 2012 Cloud Computing Excellence Award

Nexenta Systems — Wed, 17 Oct 2012 17:39:00 GMT

NexentaStor Honored for Innovation

Santa Clara, Calif., October 16, 2012 — Nexenta® Systems, the world leader in Software-defined Storage for the enterprise, announced today that TMC, a global, integrated media company, has named NexentaStor as a 2012 Cloud Computing Excellence Award winner presented by Cloud Computing Magazine.

“With NexentaStor Software-defined Storage, cloud providers can develop a public cloud within a matter of months and at an unprecedented low cost,” said Evan Powell, CEO, Nexenta. “We are grateful for awards such as this that highlight the significant shift that is occurring in the storage landscape, in which Nexenta is a leading player.”

Hardware-agnostic NexentaStor™ provides open, unified storage management at a fraction of the cost of legacy systems, allowing for high-efficiency scalability while eliminating costly vendor lock-in. Built upon ZFS technology, NexentaStor is the leader in three crucial categories: scalability, interoperability and cost-effectiveness. Nexenta’s solutions are used in some of the world’s largest public clouds, including KT’s uCloud, the largest public cloud in Asia.

NexentaStor-powered storage provides cloud companies with the ability to provision, on demand, petabytes of high-performance, enterprise-class storage by fitting into the automated provisioning and management systems used by cloud service providers. With Nexenta, cloud providers can amplify performance and IT efficiency while dramatically decreasing administrative costs.

“Nexenta has been recognized for its achievement in bringing innovation and excellence in the market while leveraging the latest technology trends to create an enriched user experience,” said Erik Linask, group editorial director, TMC.

“Recognizing leaders in the advancement of cloud computing, TMC is proud to announce Nexenta as a recipient of the second annual Cloud Computing Excellence Award,” said Rich Tehrani, CEO, TMC. “NexentaStor has demonstrated innovation as well as the ability to improve the cloud.”

The Cloud Computing Excellence Awards recognize the companies that have most effectively leveraged cloud computing in their efforts to bring new, differentiated offerings to market. Winners of the Cloud Computing Excellence Award are published in the October 2012 issue of Cloud Computing Magazine.

About Nexenta Systems

Nexenta® Systems is the world’s leading provider of Software-defined Storage for the enterprise. Its flagship software-only platform, NexentaStor, delivers high-performance, ultra-scalable, cloud- and virtualization-optimized storage solutions. Built upon ZFS technology, and running on industry-standard hardware, NexentaStor eliminates vendor lock-in and provides open, unified storage management at a fraction of the cost of legacy systems.

More information about Nexenta Systems, and free trials of the ZFS-based NexentaStor, can be found at www .nexenta .com or by calling (855) 639 3682. Partners selling NexentaStor-based hardware/software appliances can be found at: www .nexenta .com /partners.

About TMC

TMC is celebrating its 40^th anniversary as a global, integrated media company that helps clients build communities in print, in person, and online.TMC publishes the TMC’s CUSTOMER Magazine (formerly Customer Interaction Solutions), INTERNET TELEPHONY, Next Gen Mobility, and Cloud Computing magazines. TMCnet.com, which is read by 1.5 million unique visitors each month, is the leading source of news and articles for the communications and technology industries. TMC is the producer of ITEXPO, the world’s leading B2B communications event. In addition, TMC runs multiple industry events: Cloud Communications Expo; Cloud4SMB Expo; CVx (ChannelVision Expo); DevCon5; HTML5 Summit; LatinComm Conference & Expo; M2M Evolution Conference & Expo; Mobility Tech Conference & Expo; MSPAlliance MSPWorld; StartupCamp; Video World Conference & Expo and more.

For more information about TMC, visit www.tmcnet.com.

Company Contact:

Schwartz MSL for Nexenta
Lauren Whitehouse, 415-512-0770
nexenta@schwartzmsl.com

TMC Contact

Jan Pierret
Marketing Manager
203-852-6800 ext. 228
jpierret@tmcnet.com

Software-defined Storage and NexentaVSA for View: Dan Boggs

Dan Boggs — Tue, 16 Oct 2012 16:00:00 GMT

One of the many things I enjoy about the technology industry is that it is forever changing with a purpose. In the enterprise IT market, many if not most of the big changes ultimately enable companies to either deliver greater value to their customers, reduce their costs, do both, and more.

Over the last several years, Cloud has dominated much of the discussion. And like many of you, I often get the “What is the cloud?” question from friends and family when we get together. This is one of the reasons I find the terms “Software-defined Datacenter” and “Software-defined Storage” (SdS) so wonderfully descriptive. But what is even better is the fact that there are tangible proof points for both today. Let’s take a closer look at SdS.

Evan and Alex have done an excellent job identifying the characteristics of SdS and have highlighted how NexentaVSA for View is a great proof point. For those of you that are not familiar with it, NexentaVSA for View automates the complicated and sometimes daunting challenge of deploying a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure. It has a rich feature set and enables customers to confidently deploy VDI knowing they will achieve the level of performance their customers demand. Best of all, you do not need custom storage hardware to deploy VDI with this solution.

Hardware abstraction is one of the key pillars of SdS. But it goes a little beyond that as well. A true SdS offering will be able to create the desired storage characteristics without relying on proprietary hardware. This is an example of the SLA characteristic Evan highlighted. For example, NexentaVSA for View easily takes physical, direct attached storage and creates virtualized shared storage for VDI with all of the wonderful benefits of ZFS. And the performance is excellent!

Nexenta is continuing to innovate in this area too and has some exciting capabilities coming. For example, we are adding the ability for a system administrator to restore a single desktop from a snapshot without having to switch between multiple user interfaces. In addition, we are enabling system administrators to schedule their VDI deployment so they do not need to be around at 2a.m. when the necessary resources are idle. This also is true for things like snapshots and what we call ‘calibration’. Calibration enables a system administrator to easily optimize their VDI deployment to achieve a predefined SLA for desktop latency with their existing server hardware. Remember the SdS notion of using SLAs to define storage configuration? This is a fantastic example.

Let’s take a look at another use case. Specifically, that of NexentaStor, which is our unified storage appliance offering. While it has been possible to deploy NexentaStor in a hypervisor literally for years (Virtualized Storage Appliance, VSA), it also can be deployed as a physical appliance to provide broader support for a public, private, or hybrid clouds. To that end, we are continuing to invest in things such as VAAI and VASA, which further improve performance and manageability. And these benefits will not be limited to the physical appliance use case. Environments such as NexentaVSA for View, and NexentaStor, deployed as a VSA, also will benefit.

Ultimately, SdS must enable enterprise IT users to either deliver greater value to their customers or reduce their costs. The best solutions will do both and much more.

We briefly have explored the portfolio of SdS products available from Nexenta. And as with any great idea, there are SdS offerings from others in the industry, which is great. What do you see as the most important attributes of SdS? Join the debate on SdS!