Nexenta Has Freed Another Customer From the Shackles of Proprietary Enterprise Storage

Nexenta Systems has freed another customer from the shackles of proprietary enterprise storage. Earlham College announced hat they are tripling their capacity of storage managed by NexentaStor and expanding their usage of NexentaStor to encompass primary storage, desktop backup, and site to site replication.

Earlham College is a leading Midwestern Liberal Arts College based in Richmond, Indiana.

Randy Schultz, the Lead Systems Administrator at Earlham, said: "We initially used NexentaStor on Sun x4500 Thumper servers for primary storage for home directories. In the course of a year we have seen the system perform extremely well while additional capabilities and features were added at no additional cost from Nexenta. We recently added more NexentaStor based systems and are now using NexentaStor for replication and disaster recovery and have repurposed our initial systems to use Nexenta’s excellent desktop backup capabilities. We’re extremely happy with the price/performance and with the ease of use."

Specific ways that Earlham is using NexentaStor include:

• Site to site replication: Earlham utilizes asynchronous, snapshot based replication from Nexenta. This replication is based upon ZFS snapshots and adds a number of capabilities onto this foundation including the ability to connect seamlessly to legacy storage and to back-off or self throttle and retry as needed in the case of network congestion.
• Shared Windows and Linux file access: As an enterprise class NAS, NexentaStor enables the sharing of files between Windows and Linux users and facilitates the administration of user access through LDAP integration.
• Desktop backup: NexentaStor offers an optional module called Deloreon. This module performs per windows client backup across the network to centrally located NexentaStor unified storage.

Another benefit Earlham College has experienced is seamless and cost free software upgrades. Nexenta has delivered a number of incremental updates over the year that Earlham College has been a customer. These upgrades are available via a seamless process.

Randy Schultz said: "Every single upgrade has been completely trouble-free, which is the first time I can say that about any system I have managed."