Nexenta Systems
Nexenta Systems is a company I have heard about for a while, since a couple of acquaintances Mike L. and Matt V. went to work for them.
All I knew was that Nexenta had developed a software-defined storage platform that folks liked a lot.
As a result, I was was quite stoked when Nexenta was revealed as a sponsor, and one of the stops, for Storage Field Day 6.
So, who or what, is Nexenta Systems?
Founded in 2005 – they’re an aged company by Silly Valley standards – Nexenta was probably at the vanguard of the software-defined revolution, coming up with a software product that aimed to democratize storage by using their software on commodity hardware.
Going forward, I’ll chug a snifter of Grand Marnier whenever I write the phrase, “commodity hardware”.
I have noticed that Nexenta is well-received in the storage enthusiast community, FWIW.
Starting off our visit is Jill Orhun, VP of Marketing & Strategy led the introductions and welcome to Nexenta.
She gave a brief bio on the company and their products.
For her, there was this shoutout from the Interwebs:
Great to see a woman presenting at #SFD6 @nexenta @JillOrhun
— Sheryl Koenigsberg (@storageDiva) November 6, 2014
It was indeed very good to see.
What are their products?
Nexenta’s products can be described as a journey, where your first step is NexentaStor, followed by NexentaConnect. Your third step is NexentaEdge, and your journey concludes with NexentaFusion.
NexentaStor
NexentaStor is software defined storage technology based on ZFS, and utilizing Nexenta OS, a variant of Linux. It is block and file storage.
Personally, I have to say that all the talk about hardware agnosticism and commodity hardware has me shuddering at the thought of the size of the hardware compatibility lists Nexenta must maintain in order not to have hardware failures incorrectly attributed to them.
Nexenta can install on bare metal or as a VSA (virtual storage appliance) on VMware vSphere or Xen today. Microsoft Hyper-V support is expected soon.
This, is annoying. It means that Logikworx cannot avail ourselves of this product until Hyper-V is supported. Most importantly, I cannot play with it until then.
Jill then gives us a few market statistics: Nexenta has approximately 5500 customers, about evenly split between enterprise and community (free, enthusiast) editions. It has close to an exabyte of licensed customer capacity. Their largest user has over 100 petabytes of storage. No, they didn’t reveal who that customer is.
Nexenta offers unlimited storage per license, but you must pay for Nexenta Connect on a per socket basis.
NexentaConnect
This is Nexenta’s orchestration and deployment layer for their storage management products.
It is tightly integrated with VMware Horizon and Virtual SAN. In VMware Horizon, NexentaConnect leverages a GUI in order to provide automation of storage management functions.
NexentaEdge
Next up is Robert Novak – no, not that Robert Novak, another one! – to talk to us about Nexenta’s new new thing, NexentaEdge.
Robert promises us that NexentaEdge 'will be superior to other things you've seen'
NexentaEdge uses UDP. Yes folks, UDP! Pretty interesting implementation of object storage from Nexenta: "Multicast UDP reliably”. Run Windows Storage Server for file services on vSAN.
While we had marveled earlier on about whiteboarding, Robert went old old school, and brought out a paper board, an easel, and colored crayons!
(In reality, colored markers, but this is my story, right? Thank you!)
NexentaEdge is like BitTorrent storage.
It is Nexenta’s entry into the object storage space.
It is replicast much like BitTorrent: chunking & tracking with hashing over multicast groups and IPv6. for retrieval.
Using ZFS, NexentaEdge will allow for global dedupe, scale up to several hundred petabytes, allow snapshotting, cloning, and dynamic performance optimization.
It is being engineered to use the next gen server CPU platforms including low-power chips such as ARM and Intel Atom.
Targeted uses are for Swift, S3 and Openstack.
UPDATE: Corrected to reflect that it’s NexentaEdge that uses UDP, not NexentaConnect. Thanks, Enrico Signoretti
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