Monday, July 27, 2009

The bottom line is that NexentaStor is a compelling alternative to the traditional storage systems providers in the market today; its combination of low cost and advanced features plus excellent virtualization support is something that deserves serious consideration.

OpenStorage is gaining traction in the industry with over 1 million users. Because of its hardware independence the speed of the solution will continue to increase by riding the wave of Intel processor advancement. To put this into perspective, servers are now 800x-900x more powerful than when NetApp designed ONTAP and WAFL. ZFS and OpenStorage exploit these exponentials.

NexentaStor has all the prerequisite capabilities you would expect in a unified SAN/NAS solution; active/active high availability, snapshots, thin provisioning, RAID, asynchronous mirroring, clones, phone/email home etc... It also includes features that are unique; Integrated Data Movement to move storage automatically between storage tiers, compression to save on storage space, continuous data protection providing synchronous mirroring across the network, Integrated Search to find the data you need when you need it and RAID Z and RAIDZ2 that can protect information by identifying AND correcting data corruption before it becomes a problem.

Most importantly NexentaStor provides specific support for the management of virtual machine storage. VMware for example supports mount server images via NFS, Fibre or iSCSI. NexentaStor provides this support for these protocols from a single cost effective platform. In addition, there is an optional module called VM Data Center that allows for specific storage policies per virtual machine on VMware and Xen with Microsoft’s Hyper-V is soon to follow.  For example, a particular VM can be ‘tagged’ with a replication and RAID policy and this policy can follow the VM as it is moved within the virtualized environment.  Also cloning of identical VMs can be performed within the VM dData cCenter much more quickly and more space efficiently than within the virtualized environments themselves. Finally, Nexenta reports that support for an integration into Citrix StorageLink for the management Xen and Hyper-V environments is ‘around the corner’ which could be especially attractive to many of Nexenta’s hosting company customers.

The other unique aspect to this storage is it is built on an OpenStorage foundation. At the core NexentaStor leverages the ZFS file system. The ZFS file system has been heavily tested and widely deployed, via open source software, and provides universal access (SAN and NAS), excellent performance and software based raid that not only provides protection but can identify and correct corruption.

Onto this foundation Nexenta has built the NexentaOS which is an open source project that adds the Linux / Ubuntu administration capabilities to the OpenSolaris kernel with ZFS; the growth and activity of the open source Nexenta project gives Nexenta a lot of advantages including a base of hundreds of thousands of early adopter users.

NexentaStor in turn is written on top of the NexentaOS and completes the solution by offering hardware independence full SAN and NAS support and an event based API via fully supported closed source software. The entire stack including the NexentaOS and NexentaStor is wrapped together into an easy to use package that can be installed on bare metal or on common virtualization environments or purchased as part of total solutions from a growing variety of global systems integrators and storage companies. Because NexentaStor is written on top of ZFS, it does not lock customers into Nexenta products since customers can access their data via any solution that can manage ZFS file systems.