Nexenta Namespace Cluster for Scale-Out Environments

Nexenta Systems, Inc. announced Namespace Cluster, an offering that virtually eliminates technical limits on scalability and allows users to connect thousands of nodes to work together as one file system.

For service and network providers, Namespace Cluster dynamically scales out storage capacity and performance while consolidating and reducing the complexities of managing petabyte-scale storage deployments.

Nexenta also introduced NexentaStor 3.1, an upgrade to the company’s enterprise storage platform that addresses common storage requirements.

"As one of the largest public clouds in the Asia-Pacific region, KT relies on NexentaStor every day," said Jung-sik Suh, SVP of Cloud Services Business Unit, KT. "Nexenta has become one of our most trusted partners and has shown a deep understanding of the requirements of operating multi-petabyte, reliable mission critical environments. We’re excited about Nexenta’s Namespace Cluster because it further simplifies management and our overall cloud architecture."

Namespace Cluster
The promise of scale-out from NexentaStor-based OpenStorage is that organisations with huge storage requirements, such as service providers and emerging cloud services companies, can deploy on-demand, low cost, enterprise-class storage to meet their project storage needs. Combined with the ability to manage NexentaStor entirely via rest-APIs and NexentaStor’s ability to address performance requirements of cloud computing that bring legacy storage to its knees, NexentaStor has become the storage of choice for petabyte-scale cloud and virtualisation deployments. With the addition of Namespace Cluster, NexentaStor now can scale horizontally; it already blows through the technical and business model limitations to scaling legacy systems vertically.

Key features in Namespace Cluster include:

Adds horizontal scalability to NexentaStor’s existing ability of scaling vertically better than legacy storage;
Migrates data and associated workloads between nodes without end user disruption;
Simplifies management of numerous files across up to 256 storage machines without the file system limitations of legacy storage;
Manages an entire federation of nodes from any single node;
Provides the penultimate level of protection to the multi-level data protection capabilities of NexentaStor, including: 128-bit-based transactional check-sums; find and correct data corruption; active/active clusters; industry-leading split clusters and replication and now the ability to have hundreds of petabytes in one name space.

"OpenStorage is no longer just about disrupting the ageing legacy storage industry. Today’s announcement shows that Nexenta is also out-innovating them," said Evan Powell, CEO of Nexenta. "Now cloud and other large deployments are shifting towards OpenStorage because legacy storage has proven to be slow, inflexible, and expensive to buy and operate. Namespace Cluster adds even more benefits that cannot be matched by legacy storage for these use cases. I am particularly proud of Namespace Cluster because it is the first of what will be a drumbeat of announcements this year of Nexenta-developed technologies that we believe will cement our industry leadership in the cloud and VDI market segments."

NexentaStor 3.1
An upgrade to its OpenStorage software, NexentaStor 3.1 includes new features, including metro or stretch cluster capabilities and enhancements to its asynchronous replication capabilities that allows up to 10 replication streams to be aggregated into high asynchronous replication throughput.

NexentaStor 3.1, was developed in response to customer requirements and demand in two primary areas; total product ease of use and enhanced performance.

Total Product Ease of Use:

Enables users to quickly administer a standard configuration and then return to that image if manual or human errors occur while reconfiguring the system. This run-book automation also simplifies the process of deploying NexentaStor.
Includes a proactive and automated alert mechanism that notifies IT administrators when the system configuration deviates from standard configuration, providing early warning of deviations from desired run-book configurations.

Performance and Optimisation:

Enables customers to more quickly replicate between different data centres asynchronously through the use of a new Layer 5 multi-connection, multi-destination, multi-pathing protocol which ties together many replication streams to achieve fast throughput.
Supports metro cluster or stretch cluster deployments and the capability to provide real time failover between active/active clusters in different geographies up to 15-30 miles apart.
Reserves space for future growth of physical and thin provisioned volumes, ensuring that users can operate with a storage buffer when storage capacity demands peak unexpectedly.
Augments NexentaStor’s existing support for the CIFS standard, which is used by Nexenta’s customers to connect Windows machines to NexentaStor by incorporating support for cross forest trust and through more than 100 minor enhancements and fixes.
Reduces storage requirements in VDI deployments by freeing up space at the back end through SCSI UNMAP, allowing for the shrinking of thin provisioned volumes. Combined with cloning and inline deduplication and compression, some users have seen more than a 100-to-one reduction in space for VDI when using NexentaStor.

NexentaStor is a storage software solution built upon the ZFS file system. NexentaStor runs on x86 servers sold by a network of more than 250 certified resellers. It provides NAS and SAN capabilities, including support for CIFS, NFS, iSCSI, and Fibre Channel storage access. Customers experience the benefits of enterprise storage, including performance and air tight data integrity with multiple replication methods, without the vendor lock-in and aged technologies of legacy storage vendors.

"NexentaStor 3.1 builds on an already successful enterprise storage platform and we are excited to integrate this release into our managed SAN/NAS solutions," said Erik Logan, president of Pogo Linux. "With the Namespace Cluster feature, Nexenta continues to lead the storage industry in innovation with a simplified solution that makes cluster management more simple and flexible for storage administrators in the hosted services, health care and financial services segments."

Availability
NexentaStor 3.1 is available for download. Namespace Cluster will be available by August 2011 for the VMWorld conference in Las Vegas.