NexGen Storage Emerges From Stealth

NexGen Storage, Inc. emerged from stealth with the availability of a solid state storage system with Quality of Service designed for business critical virtualization.

The NexGen n5 Storage System integrates technologies, including PCIe solid state and patent-pending performance QoS, Dynamic Data Placement and Phased Data Reduction, to deliver new levels of shared storage control and efficiency. Organizations can now extend virtualization benefits throughout their entire environment – including their demanding business critical applications and virtual desktops (VDI).
    
"When we designed the NexGen Storage system, our goals were to deliver deterministic shared storage performance, to accommodate any type of storage media, and to simultaneously reduce the cost per gigabyte, cost per IOP and footprint," said Kelly Long, chief technology officer and founder, NexGen Storage. "To the delight of our growing customer base, that is exactly what we have delivered."
    
"Enterprise customers are challenged to deliver the quality of service and performance required in many business critical applications," said Jeff Janukowicz, research director for Solid State Storage at IDC. "By giving customers the ability to provision, maintain, and control performance, solid state solutions, like the NexGen n5 Storage System, can be implemented in a cost effective manner for these demanding enterprise environments."
    
According to a survey by Enterprise Strategy Group almost 60 percent of organizations have not virtualized any mission critical workloads. Without the ability to provision and maintain performance, these applications will remain siloed and unvirtualized.

The NexGen n5 Storage System gives customers control
over shared storage performance
using three capabilities:    

• Performance QoS to provision performance just like capacity: Allows IT administrators to track how much performance has been provisioned and how much is left, enabling them to manage and allocate system performance resources (IOPS) with ease.
• Dynamic Data Placement to maintain QoS over time: It migrates data in real-time to deliver guaranteed performance levels. Dynamic Data Placement ensures that each volume maintains its provisioned performance level.
• Performance Service Levels for control: Service levels ensure each volume maintains its priority and performance levels during events such as rebuilds, software upgrades, or outages.

"NexGen’s performance Quality of Service will enable us to ensure that boot storms and virus scans in our virtual desktop environment don’t impact the other applications on the SAN," said Eric DenBraber, assistant director, Housing IT, University of Colorado.
    
"Implementing solid state behind SAS connections and controllers limits performance," said John Spiers, chief executive officer and founder, NexGen Storage. "We’ve integrated solid state next to the CPU on the PCIe bus. That way, solid state can run at the speeds for which it was designed."
    
Using PCIe solid state and Phased Data Reduction, the n5 Storage System delivers up to 76 times higher VM storage density than a typical disk drive deployment resulting in up to 90 percent storage operating expense savings.  

The system also delivers:

• 58 percent lower $/GB than the leading tiered system: To drive down $/GB NexGen has taken a fresh approach to data deduplication with Phased Data Reduction. It includes multiple phases leveraging advanced QoS capabilities so application performance is never impacted. Phased Data Reduction applies to all tiers, not just solid state, to deliver 58 percent lower $/GB without any performance penalty.
• 43 percent lower $/IOP than SSDs:  Most vendors implement solid state by plugging it into disk drive slots. Designed for spinning media, these drive slots, SAS connections, and controllers create bottlenecks that limit performance. NexGen implements solid state on the PCIe bus, which was designed for memory speed, to unleash the performance potential of solid state storage and to achieve 43 percent lower $/IOP.

"With NexGen, we’ve seen the time to transfer data reduced by 67 percent. The NexGen System decreases the time it takes to process our data from days to hours," said Dan Jackson, director of IT, Tendril Networks, Inc.
    
The n5 Storage System is available through authorized NexGen resellers. Each system delivers PCIe solid state performance that starts with 32 TB and scales to 480 TB of effective capacity with a 5:1 data reduction ratio.

Read also:
New Start-Up to Follow: NexGen Storage
Launched by co-founders of LeftHand