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Nexenta flies over the Edge into the object storage bearpit

ZFS alternative hits the streets

Nexenta's hypercale block and object storage software has hit the streets, pitting Nexenta competitively against all the other object storage suppliers.

NexentaEdge was introduced last August and now it's generally available, two quarters later than its then-schedule. We're having it described as "the first software-only scale out storage solution to deliver cluster-wide inline deduplication and compression."

Customers are organisations implementing active archives, big data infrastructures and OpenStack clouds and Nexenta says traditional storage technologies, such as monolithic and dual-controller modular arrays with block and file access are unsuited to the hyperscale needs of active (meaning disk-based) archives, big data stores and general OpenStack clouds.

In keeping with Nexenta's software-only, no hardware lock-in story, it says that there is no lock-in to any hardware or cloud platform provider with the Edge product. Any commodity x86 Xeon servers running Linux can be used as the storage nodes in the shared-nothing cluster design.

The software features:

  • iSCSI Block and Swift and S3 Object Services
  • Deployed on 10GbitE-connected clusters of X86 Linux servers running Ubuntu, CentOS or RedHat Enterprise Linux
  • Claimed best in class performance for small random I/O generated by virtual machine boot images in OpenStack Clouds
  • Enterprise-grade data integrity and unlimited space optimized snapshot and clone capabilities with Cloud Copy On Write
  • Cluster-wide in-line deduplication, with variable size chunking, and compression of all data ingested at any scale
  • Scale storage capacity and performance (I/O per second or throughput) independently of each other, supporting all-disk, all-SSD and hybrid node configurations
  • Automated real-time capacity and performance balancing

The cluster-wide deduplication for block storage will be useful for workloads with repetitive block patterns, such as VDI, but object storage should be inherently deduplicated.

The company says the Edge design makes he software ready for coming drive technology like key:value drives, Ethernet drives and Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR). Also file services are part of its design and will arrive in a follow-on version. That will make Edge competitive with similar file, block and object technologies like Ceph, Infinidat, Springpath, and EMCs DSSD and ScaleIO.

Supporting quotes for Nexenta's news come from (take a deep breath) Arista Networks, Ascentech K.K., Big Switch Networks, Bluechip, Canonical, Citrix, Core Micro Systems, Cumulus Networks, DataON Storage, Dell, GMO Internet, HGST, Intel, Mavenspire, Micron, Mirantis, NAS, SanDisk, ScaleMatrix, Solinea, SSG-NOW, Stanford University, SuperCloud, Supermicro, VMware, and Wipro; it's a veritable love-in.

Nexenta has announced a partnership with Canonical so Ubuntu OpenStack customers can use Nexenta's storage software products.

Pick up a brief NexentaEdge datasheet here and check out a blog here.

NexentaEdge’s perpetual license lists from $0.15/GB to less than $0.10/GB at capacity plus maintenance and support. ®

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