NexentaStor 4.0 With 50% Reduction in HA Failover Times

Nexenta Systems, Inc announced the latest release of NexentaStor, a Software Defined Storage (SDS) solution, and a building block of the software defined data centre.

The announcement was made at Cloud Expo Europe 2014 in London.  This release will be available in Q2, 2014.

The software has impacted the storage industry to lower TCO, and with the release of NexentaStor 4.0 the business and technology benefits will exceed basic economics. It is an SDS implementation, and SDS is key components of the mounting shift towards a software defined data centre.

“The volume and type of data being collected by enterprises today is moving storage to the forefront of CIO and IT agendas,” according to Donna Taylor, research director, IDC.  “This data deluge is creating very real and very pressing issues to organisations struggling to keep up. In such environments, storage is becoming a strategic company-wide issue and companies are eager to find solutions that balance security, price, performance and reliability.“

The company shares the innovation of its open storage solution. 

Enhancements include:

• 50% reduction in HA failover times

• Embedded intelligence in the Fault Management Architecture which detects and resolves issues around failing hardware to reduce performance impacts

• Improved problem isolation that provides better reliability and visibility

• Reduced latencies to end users with the addition of Server Message Block 2.1 support

• Simplified administration with the new wizard-driven storage pool with configuration and deployment tools

• Improvement in performance with support for 512GB memory

• Replication improvements with a improved AutoSync service

• Additional SNMP MIBs and Traps for increased observability and monitoring

• Code base migration to Illumos open-source OS, for improvements in security, management and monitoring

• Improves stability and supportability

• Seamless upgrade from all existing NexentaStor versions 

“Software Defined Data Centre is the future in IT; and Nexenta is at the forefront of this movement,” said Tarkan Maner, chairman, CEO, Nexenta. “Our SDS solutions have already changed the traditional storage management approach with our fast-growing customer and partner ecosystem. With today’s announcement of NexentaStor 4.0, we are extending our substantial TCO advantages by adding disruptive technology capabilities along with additional business benefits for organisations who are sick and tired of the IT status quo.“

With NexentaStor 4.0, enterprises can continue to liberate themselves from the hardware-centric storage approach and have a unified solution that scales to meet growing storage requirements on any platform. It offers enterprise capabilities for data integrity and workload performance, providing customers the flexibility to select their storage OS independently from the hardware on which it runs, while commodity storage hardware tends to lack defense against silent data corruption, is difficult to manage, and suffers in performance as storage needs grow.

“Nexenta’s progressive thinking and innovative products have them riding high on the SDS wave that is set to disrupt how data centres operate today; the combination of flexibility – on hardware vendors and architecture – with attractive economics makes their solutions the right choice for us,” said Steve MacPherson, CTO, FrameStore. “It’s a pleasure to work with their knowledgeable and highly technical team – their support helps enable our success.“

“With SDS being at the heart of nearly every product we sell, Nexenta helps our team at ScaleMatrix deliver the best performance at a competitive cost,” according to Chris Orlando, co-founder, ScaleMatrix, a Nexenta customer focused on private cloud services. “The end result is more value for our end users!“

“As a leading specialist in virtual desktops, our storage needs are demanding to enable us to deliver a premium desktop solution to our customers. Working with Nexenta, we have been able to help our clients reduce their storage complexity and to help them achieve the real benefits which VDI delivers. We are really looking forward to the new features that Nexentastor 4.0 offers, including the dramatically improved performance and 50% reduction in HA failover times. Nexenta is disrupting the storage market, Nexentastor 4.0 will take it to the next level.” says Mike McGuigan, CEO, Molten Technologies, a cloud service provider.

“I am extremely interested in the new features offered by NexentaStor 4.0, especially the ability to off-load metadata and the asynchronous deletes capability,” said John R. Schleigh IV, IT manager, ESRG LLC, a data analysis and remote monitoring technology firm that uses a unified storage appliance supplied by Silicon Mechanics. “I expect that being able to get that out of RAM will help us a lot.  I am also looking forward to taking advantage of the improved compression ratio and the updated Common Internet File System (CIFS).“

“We have been extremely happy with NexentaStor and excited by the promise of the 4.0 release with the added functionality around HA, Fault Management, as well as the scale and performance benefits,” said Doug Soltesz, VP and CIO, Budd Van Lines, a transportation network company.  “We look forward to continuing our success with Nexenta and NexentaStor.“

“The combination of Dell Storage, Dell PowerEdge servers, and SDS software from vendors such as Nexenta provides excellent value and performance for customers,” said Alan Atkinson, VP and GM, Dell, Inc. “The advances in NexentaStor point to continued adoption of Software Defined Storage as a model for storage management, and Dell is committed to offering the industry’s best technology platform for SDS delivery.“

Howard Hall, senior director, technical alliances, VMware, Inc., stated: “We are pleased to have a quality partner like Nexenta delivering certified solutions on vSphere 5.5 that bring additional features and benefits to our joint customers. Nexenta brings storage solutions to software-defined data centres that are unique and innovative.“

“Nexenta continues to advance the software-defined storage category with its NexentaStor platform, and we’re pleased to support their innovative approach,” said Mark Long, president, Western Digital Capital. “Solutions such as NexentaStor provide the building blocks for a virtualised storage tier and delivers numerous benefits to enterprise and cloud datacentre customers. Western Digital continues to work with partners to support and grow the innovation of the broader storage ecosystem.“

Aimee Catalano, VP Alliance Marketing, Citrix Systems, Inc., said: “Nexenta’s open storage solution, NexentaStor, offers Citrix customers the freedom of hardware choice and provides a forward-thinking path to Software Defined Storage.“

“Nexenta was one of the first storage vendors to integrate with OpenStack and has since been a committed member and an active contributor to the community,” said Boris Renski, Mirantis, Inc.‘s co-founder and OpenStack foundation board member. “We’ve seen strong interest in Nexenta solutions among organisations adopting OpenStack and our partnership enables us to provide choice and best possible experience to the customers and partners.“

“Inventec’s commitment to core philosophies such as innovation and quality also extends to the companies and partners with whom we work,” according to George Wang, chief advisor, Inventec Corporation. “For this reason and more, we are pleased to see Nexenta continue to innovate and extend the capabilities of NexentaStor.  As software defined storage continues to be adopted throughout the enterprise, we are confident Nexenta’s offerings will be held in high regard.“

“Customers want complete, validated, and cost-effective Software Defined Storage solutions,” said Mike Yang, GM, Quanta QCT.  “Our partnership with Nexenta makes it simple for cloud-scale datacentre customers to add storage based on NexentaStor 4.0, pre-certified on Quanta gear.“

“We are seeing that forward-thinking enterprises are looking at storage strategically, and not as a check-box item,” according to Guy Watts, MD, Getech Ltd., a UK IT distributor and VAR. “In the same way that virtualisation impacted the server industry a decade ago, we are seeing SDS impacting legacy storage vendors.“

“Nexenta’s innovative broad SDS solutions, in addition to the continued improvements of their portfolio with new disruptive releases like NexentaStor 4.0, are just some of the key reasons that we team so successfully with Nexenta,” said Nao Sato, founder and CEO, Ascentech, an IT solution provider and VAD in Japan.

“Silicon Mechanics’ strong partnership with Nexenta has been instrumental in helping customers realise the benefits of Software Defined Storage with an innovative product that improves our product performance and reliability,” said Eva Cherry, CEO and president, Silicon Mechanics, Inc., an IT solution provider. “As a premier reseller for Nexenta, we are excited about how the enhancements in NexentaStor 4.0 will continue to help customers address the challenges inherent in big storage.“

Patrick van Helden, chief architect, Proact Netherlands BV, a Nexenta VAR, says: “This latest version of NexentaStor shows us that Nexenta has a strong focus on adding features and functionality to the newest release based on customer needs requirements and not on industry buzzwords.“