Nexenta SDS Solutions: Product Overview and Insight

See the full list of top SDS vendors

Bottom Line

Nexenta’s software-defined storage (SDS) products are based on open source technology, and are software-only. This is in contrast to some SDS vendors, which combine hardware (or software written for specific hardware) into their SDS solutions. As such, the Nexenta solution is flexible and will interoperate with any hardware system not designed for a given vendor’s platform. 

Furthermore, Nextenta’s solution give users a lot of flexibility in regards to scale-up or scale-out architecture and block, file or object storage. This flexibility compliments the open nature mentioned above – not only can Nexenta fit into many environments, it can handle a variety of storage tasks with its SDS platform.

The company itself touts its SDS products as a way to reduce costs. Typically this is true of open source software, but this claim may not come to fruition in all scenarios.

As a related side point, the company continues to be privately held. Given that it’s one of the leaders in the market and has a lot of high-profile users, it’s possible that it could be acquired by a larger company.

There are two version of the Nextenta SDS product: NexentaStor is available in an appliance through hardware partners, in which case it will typically be optimized for your data center, given that you can choose the hardware. NexentaEdge is a software only version; to its credit, it support high performance all-flash arrays  (see chart below for additional details).

Product Description

Nexenta offers four SDS products, two of which are featured below. NexentaStor is its flagship enterprise SDS solution for block and file storage. NexentaEdge offers high-performance, scale-out block and object storage. Nexenta Fusion is an SDS management tool, and NexentaCloud offers scalable on-demand hybrid cloud storage through AWS.

Type of product:

Software-only (also available in an appliance through partnerships with hardware manufacturers.)

Editions available:

NexentaStor comes in a Community or an Enterprise Edition; NexentaEdge comes in a DevOps (free) or an Enterprise Edition.

License:

Open source or proprietary

Key features:

NexentaStor

• block and file storage
• enterprise-grade data integrity
• performance scaling into the petabytes
• unlimited file system sizes
• inline data reduction
• unlimited space-optimized snapshots and clones
• periodic or continuous asynchronous long-distance replication
• VMware integration
• support for Docker and OpenStack

Nexenta Edge

• object storage
• inline deduplication
• compression
• Quick Erasure Coding (Quick EC)
• Docker Datacenter integration
• web-based GUI
• superior data protection
• support for high-performance, all-flash arrays

Target Industries

Cloud/technology, education and research, healthcare, government, utilities, telecommunications, entertainment and media, manufacturing and logistics

Customers

Peak 10, NOAA, Hyundai, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Wipro, University of Cambridge, Tgen, Tenet Health, PictureMaxx, KT, GMO Internet, Datapipe, Zayo

Pricing and How to Buy

Available on request from authorized resellers.

NexentaStor Features Chart

NexentaEdge Features Chart