Contributed by Evan Powell, Chief Strategy Officer, Nexenta Systems, Inc.
Congratulations to EMC and their software teams for announcing ViPR. Since we have been selling software defined storage for a number of years – and now have many more times customers than Vmware did when EMC bought them (and more than 10x than 3PAR when they went public for example) – I take exception to the lead in the press release proclaiming ViPR as "the world's first Software Defined Storage platform…"
Nonetheless, ViPR appears to be a real step forward towards software defined storage. And EMC deserves a lot of credit for again showing a willingness to risk aspects of their core business in order to keep up with customer requirements.
If you are one of the folks to read this blog regularly, you know we have shared a simple definition of SDS. You can read more about it here. Our definition is based on countless discussions with our cloud and enterprise customers who have shared with us why they started down the journey to software defined storage in the first place.
Basically it is 1) Abstract away the underlying hardware. 2) Achieve flexibility through the ability to handle multiple data access methods and data types. 3) Be truly software defined – through an architecture and set of APIs that allows, for example, orchestration software to manage the storage and to determine to what extent it is meeting application requirements.
If you look at what we know about ViPR – I think it is software that is policy driven that delivers object storage and that also manages and possibly virtualizes block and file storage. I gathered this especially from the more detailed write up over on EFYTimes.
It’s difficult to glean much from a press storm and I know that things will be much clearer once we see more detail from EMC and customers but let's look at early indications of how ViPR might shape up based on those criteria.
- Abstraction
- ViPR: ViPR does not, it appears, add a consistent set of storage management capabilities over any hardware - it exposes and manages those that are already available on the hardware. If you are on an array with snapshots – congratulations, you've got (some sort of) snap shots. On the other hand if you are on a JBOD, no luck. Additionally, of course, ViPR does not open up the on disk format as it is generally not in the data path. This means vendor lock–in remains and arguably increases as ViPR hooks into your Vmware environment.
- NexentaStor: Conversely NexentaStor runs on any hardware, including high performance SSDs to deliver caching, and of course JBODs and does deliver that consistent set of capabilities irrespective of the underlying hardware. But – NexentaStor really prefers JBODs to legacy storage arrays and it is extremely likely that ViPR will be better able to manage heterogenous storage arrays, especially those from EMC, than NexentaStor does; NexentaStor can virtualize them but is not aware of their underlying capabilities in a way that ViPR will be.
- Achieve flexibility. The basic difference is that NexentaStor is broader and more flexible that we think ViPR will be when it ships thanks, again, to controlling everything from the on disk format to the access methods. On the other hand, while Nexenta has sponsored open source object approaches we are not shipping today a object storage solution whereas ViPR will include object. Whether we will ship object by the time ViPR ships is yet to be seen.
- A lot depends on to what extent ViPR can actually virtualize the underlying resources by combining them into pools that include SSDs; NexentaStor has this ability today which is why we have partners shipping JBODs with cache achieving 1 million IOPS and more. On the other hand, the promised capability of ViPR to turn object into file and vise–versa could be important.
- I am hopeful that in this area ViPR will be a massive step forward vs. legacy arrays which are essentially black-holes for your data, each requiring a different set of expertise to manage and built to address a different silo of data.
- What needs to be seen is how ViPR will handle putting the right data on the right underlying array. Whereas with NexentaStor the configurations themselves, such as the block sizes used to write the data disk, are themselves variable in the case of ViPR the software has make sure that, for example, video files needed for streaming are stored on underlying Isilon arrays whereas structured data like Oracle remains on VNX and presumably high random I/O workloads from larger cloud and Vmware deployments are served from XtremeIO.
- Being software defined this is arguably the most vague section of our fairly vague definition of software defined storage.
Today, however, IF ViPR is routing data sets based on application requirements to the right underlying array – per the point above – than it may well have the architecture necessary to close the application management loop. By comparison, NexentaStor can absolutely eliminate the need for deep storage engineering with solutions like VSA for VDI. In this solution the customer must simply enter the number and type of desktops and NexentaStor – with integration code for VDI – does the rest AND, crucially, tests and manages the system to insure that the requirements are being met.
- Nexenta, however, built the VSA for VDI business logic in part in hopes of seeing others in the industry run with the task. Arguably orchestration solutions like aspects of OpenStack and CloudStack and even VMTurbo should pick up the baton if they are truly going to be the brain inside the software defined data center. It may be that EMC with ViPR and of course Vmware will lead the industry in creating an open approach to characterizing application requirements and using them to simplify management.
- Please note – plaintive request - what the storage layer really needs is something like the recently announced Project Daylight from IBM, Cisco, Juniper and of course the Linux Foundation. I think even Nicra / Vmware / EMC is joining that effort to open up the control layer. Read more about Project Daylight here
- In the meantime, Nexenta's upcoming Metis utility – which ties application logic to details like pool configurations – is growing in value and importance with integration into our and our partner's Salesforce for example and ServiceNow and other management solutions in the future. However, again, Nexenta cannot be the business logic of a software defined data center on our own. The industry needs to come together here and maybe ViPR will be a catalyst to make that happen.
Three Somewhat Surprising Trends
Contributed by Evan Powell, Chief Strategy Officer, Nexenta Systems
Last Thursday I was thrilled to discuss Software Defined Storage at Dell's banking day in their offices in One Penn in NYC. I was one of two guest speakers, the other was Gartner's Joe Unsworth who did a great job outlining the transition to flash-based storage. After our fairly brief presentations and some Q&A there was an open round table discussion. The attendees were a who's who of global financial IT leaders including CIOs and VPs of technology and storage of most "too big to fail" banks; we had a couple of already highly referencable customers in the audience as well which was great. A friend at Dell estimated that the collective IT capital purchases of the attendees were approximately $20-$30bn per year. I cannot thank Dell enough for the opportunity and for the partnership.
As an aside - I think all of us in IT owe Dell a debt for their willingness to shift towards enterprise and towards a vision of enterprise IT that, for me, is more compelling, more open, and much more dynamic than many legacy system vendors from which Dell is rapidly taking market share. Maybe I should blog sometime soon about why we are Dell fans – I'd welcome the input of folks that read this blog. For now, suffice it to say that I think Dell is doing a good job leveraging their strengths including supply chain management and global support to both enable and benefit from the ongoing re-platforming of IT. Yes – I am biased since Dell recently started paying their sales teams on NexentaStor – so take those comments with a grain of salt. On the other hand – we targeted Dell as a preferred tier one vendor because they are so well positioned so our money and focus is where our mouth is.
The nature of the Banking Day conversations is that they are closed door and vendor neutral. I did not try to sell Nexenta's products or even the Dell hardware and services we leverage to deliver software defined storage. Instead I tried to kick off a real conversation.
Here are a few observations. First – some comments and themes I expected and then 2-3 really surprising comments.
As expected, these buyers are more interested in agility than they are in cost savings. And, with one or two exceptions, they assented freely to the notion that legacy storage is done, finished, a thing of the past; it feels like the transition to a software defined data center is just the straw breaking the legacy camel's back.
Perhaps most surprising to me were a few items:
- Increased recognition of the inevitability of cloud-based approaches. I'll call this acquiescence #1. Many financials have been fighting the easy on-ramp of AWS for years as they struggled to get their thousands of developers to keep their IP on premise and protected. There seems to be a sense that only by building a better, safer, more performant and massively easier to deploy and manage IT platform could they attract developers to stay within the enterprise. I sensed a lot less willingness to fight their own users than in the past and much more confidence in their ability to deliver a better solution that will retain users.
- Acquiescence #2 – BYOD is here to stay. Again, maybe I'm just out of touch however RIM and blackberry rose to prominence in part because of the mandates of buyers (and their colleagues in the government). And now the iPad and Android devices and similar are a fact of life that Software Defined Storage and the rest of the IT has got to accommodate.
- Nobody believes today's all flash landscape will be with us in 18 months. Here I may be stealing Joe and Gartner's thunder slightly. Suffice it to say that he presented a fairly provocative view of likely changes and everyone agreed that today's apparent leaders are unlikely to win longer term. Hybrid players like Nexenta-based solutions and Nimble did receive more support.
I'd be remiss if I didn't point out one final acquiescence which may be why the event was so well attended – I think there is more uncertainty over the fundamental structure of IT than I've seen since I first startedpartnering with and selling to these buyers 10-15 years ago. The storage teams feel like they are under threat – and they are. In a way it is similar to what I experienced when building Clarus Systems (now Riverbed) and the voice teams were realizing that voice and video convergence with the IP networks could mean "career convergence" as well. As the software defined data center progresses, you'll see much more need for a true DevOps mindset and skill set. Service engineering is now the hot commodity and folks that know a particular silo really well are increasingly being flanked by those that build IT platforms that deliver on the agility promised by software defined data centers.
Hopefully these few nuggets are of interest. All in all, it is tremendously exciting to see some of the most credible and financially powerful IT buyers and partners (again – thank you Dell!) assent to the notion that software defined storage has got to happen for IT to remain relevant and to deliver on the promise of a more agile platform. I learned a lot from the conversations.
Configuration Demonstrates Power of Nexenta’s Software-defined Storage in Delivering High-end IOPS and High-Availability at an Unmatched Price
Santa Clara, Calif., March 19, 2013 — Nexenta® Systems, the world leader in Software-defined Storage, together with its Premium Partner Area Data Systems, today announced they achieved 1.6 million IOPS (Input/Output Operations per Second) and high-availability with no single point of failure. Comparable solutions from proprietary vendors cost significantly more than the Nexenta and Area Data Systems solution and cannot guarantee high-availability. With the combination of Nexenta’s Software-defined Storage, NexentaStor™, and high-performance, all-flash hardware, there is now a clear enterprise-class alternative to meet the scalability demands of big data.
“Our customers can now reach well over one million IOPS and capitalize on big data opportunities without breaking the bank on proprietary storage technologies that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars,” said Bridget Warwick, Chief Marketing Officer, Nexenta Systems. “This is further proof that Nexenta’s Software-defined Storage is changing the economics of the enterprise storage market.”
Nexenta is demonstrating the 1.6 million IOPS storage configuration at Intel® Solutions Summit 2013 from March 19-21, 2013 in Los Angeles, Calif. Nexenta is a Silver Sponsor and will be at its booth in the storage zone to discuss the enormous opportunity for Intel channel partners to drive ideal storage solutions, powered by Nexenta, to their customers.Architecture recipes using Nexenta and Intel products are listed on Intel’s website at: http://www.esaa-members.com/recipes/advSearchList/182.
“As an ongoing Nexenta partner, we are impressed with the results that have been achieved with NexentaStor and the Intel® Xeon® E5 Server Platform,” said David Brown, director of marketing for Intel’s Enterprise Products and Systems Division. “By choosing the Intel Xeon E5 processor, Nexenta is taking advantage of key technologies like Intel® Integrated I/O to deliver outstanding storage performance and scalability to end-users.”
Area Data Systems leveraged its expertise with NexentaStor’s ZFS file system to achieve the 1.6 million IOPS milestone with a configuration of NexentaStor, dual Intel Xeon E5-2643 3.3GHz processors, and DataON Storage’s external storage stack, DLS-1640S (“Delivering Lightning Speed”). An elite Nexenta Partner, DataON Storage’s solution is based on Nexenta-certified, best-of-breed components: DataON 24 bay 2u JBODs, LSI Serial-attached SCSI (SAS) host bus adapters (HBAs) and switches, and STEC enterprise-class, SAS solid-state drives (SSDs).The overall cost of Area Data Systems active/active high availability 9.6TB flash-based solid state solution is an estimated $75,000.
“Our customers trust us to architect unified storage solutions that can adapt to their business today and provide the performance needed for the future. Nexenta’s Software-defined Storage changes the game by enabling Area Data Systems to offer high availability, clustered high-IOPS solutions that are more resilient and more affordable than those offered by the pure flash storage purveyors,” said Trenton Baker, vice president of business development, Area Data Systems.
About Nexenta Systems:
Nexenta Systems is the world leader in Software-defined Storage. Its flagship software platform, NexentaStor, delivers high-performance, ultra-scalable, cloud- and virtualization-optimized storage solutions. Built upon ZFS technology and running on a broad choice of industry-standard hardware, NexentaStor eliminates vendor lock-in and provides open, unified storage management at significantly less cost than legacy systems.
More information about Nexenta Systems, and free trials of the ZFS-based NexentaStor, can be found at www.nexenta.com or by calling (855) 639 3682. Partners selling NexentaStor-based hardware/software appliances can be found at http://www.nexenta.com/corp/store/resellers-search.
Contacts:
Merrill Freund or Lauren Whitehouse
Schwartz MSL
(415) 512-0770
Y/Y Revenue Growth Doubled; 1PB+ Installations Increased Ten Fold; Evan Powell assumes Chief Strategy Officer Role — Mark Lockareff Joins as CEO and Bridget Warwick as CMO
Santa Clara, Calif. — February 27, 2013 — Nexenta® Systems, the world leader in Software-defined Storage, today announced that it closed out 2012 with business growth that exceeded the company plan in terms of revenue, partner growth, partner sales, and customer adoption. Faced with this growth and opportunity, the company has secured $24 million in Series D financing. Nexenta also announced the appointment of Mark Lockareff as chief executive officer, with former CEO Evan Powell assuming the new role of chief strategy officer. With 25 years’ experience growing, leading, and investing in disruptive technology companies, Mark Lockareff will drive Nexenta’s next stage of growth as Software-defined Storage rapidly changes the dynamics of the IT technology market.
Nexenta’s over-subscribed Series D financing is being led by new investor Four Rivers Group, with participation by existing Nexenta investors Menlo Ventures, TransLink Capital, Javelin Ventures, Sierra Ventures, Razor’s Edge Ventures, and West Summit Capital. In addition to Four Rivers, new strategic investors Presidio Ventures and UMC Capital participated.
This round of investment is testament to the momentum and growth that the company has experienced in the last 12 months and to the company’s leadership of the transformation of the storage industry. Key highlights include:
- The number of Nexenta-powered storage deployments of one petabyte or greater grew by a factor of 10.
- Revenue growth doubled year-over-year; the company has experienced triple digit growth for three consecutive years.
- Adoption of NexentaStor exceeded the 5,000 customer deployment milestone, while follow-on sales to existing customers expanded by 475 percent.
- Total storage under management now exceeds 660PB and Nexenta has enabled an estimated $400 million in hardware storage sales for its reseller partners.
- The company’s global reach continues to expand with active partners growing by 75 percent since January 2012. Nexenta has established official subsidiaries and teams in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, China, South Korea, and Japan.
- Nexenta expanded its product portfolio with the launch of NexentaVSA for View for managing and deploying virtualized environments.
New CEO Lockareff has led or invested in a number of enterprise infrastructure, software and internet companies during their key growth stages including: ParAccel, Agiliance, Softricity, Model N, Riverbed, Acopia, ProofPoint, and Facebook.
In addition to Lockareff’s appointment, Bridget Warwick is joining Nexenta as chief marketing officer. Warwick previously held senior marketing positions at BlueArc Corporation (acquired by Hitachi Data Systems) and NetApp. These strategic additions to the executive team follow the October 2012 appointment of Rick Martig as CFO, and reflect Nexenta’s transition from a disruptive and explosive start-up to the trusted and innovative storage partner for thousands of companies all over the world.
“Nexenta provides the ideal storage to support Hosting.com’s cloud hosting services and our customers’ mission-critical applications. No other technology can match Nexenta’s price-to-performance, which has helped us offer competitive and differentiated services to companies all over the world. We look forward to a long and mutually beneficial relationship between our two companies,” said Hosting.com CTO Matt Ferrari.
“Our task at Nexenta is simple: we must build a company that is up to meeting the enormous opportunity of leading the transformation of the storage industry. The transition to Software-defined Storage is accelerating because customers must have greater flexibility, performance, and savings in their storage if they are to compete. I’m confident that Mark and Bridget will help us do an even better job for our customers, resellers, and strategic partners,” said Powell.
About Nexenta Systems
Nexenta Systems is the world leader in Software-defined Storage. Its flagship software platform, NexentaStor, delivers high-performance, ultra-scalable, cloud- and virtualization-optimized storage solutions. Built upon ZFS technology and running on a broad choice of industry-standard hardware, NexentaStor eliminates vendor lock-in and provides open, unified storage management at significantly less cost than legacy systems.
More information about Nexenta Systems, and free trials of the ZFS-based NexentaStor, can be found at www.nexenta.com or by calling (855) 639 3682. Partners selling NexentaStor-based hardware/software appliances can be found at: http://www.nexenta.com/corp/store/resellers-search.
Media Contacts:
Merrill Freund or Lauren Whitehouse
Schwartz MSL
(415) 512-0770
nexenta@schwartzmsl.com
Now that 2012 is over, I guess it’s time to start looking at what’s coming down the track in 2013. Here are my top five predictions for the year ahead:
1. ZFS will be recognized as the most broadly deployed storage file system in the world.
Okay, so I cheated on that one. It already is. We alone have half as much storage, we figure, under management as NetApp claims. Add Oracle and you’re already bigger than any one-storage file system. Add all Solaris and illumos deployments on top of that and you are 3-5x larger than NetApp’s OnTap. In fact, the number of ZFS users is larger than those using NetApp’s OnTap file system and EMC’s Isilon file system combined.
2. “Other” will again be the only storage vendor growing product sales year on year
Take a look at EMC’s recent earnings results. They show that while EMC is gaining market share, it is dropping year on year product sales. Results from NetApp are similar; again, it is likely gaining share versus the much, much larger system vendors while dropping sales quarter on quarter.
Given that storage spend is actually increasing, the only explanation that makes sense is that “Other” is taking more and more share within storage and is taking ALL of the revenue growth in the space.
What this means is you are out of touch if you are not at least evaluating “Other”. Companies like Nexenta are pioneering software defined storage that offers superior enterprise class performance and data protection without the vendor lock in and ridiculous pricing of legacy storage vendors.
3. Software defined storage will be more disruptive and more difficult than the rest of the software defined data centre
There are about $1.2 billion reasons software defined networking was hot in 2012, such as VMware acquiring Nicera for $1.2 billion. And with good reason. Fixing, making more flexible, networking is an important part of fixing the data centre.
But storage is the real bottleneck. At current rates of growth, storage is on pace to consume more dollars than networking, security, and compute put together by 2014. That’s simply not sustainable.
Perhaps even more importantly, storage is hard and data is heavy. You can move network port definitions around with a VM and have a software infrastructure in place plus the hardware to forward those packets accordingly and achieve software defined networking. You cannot move the data around.
Repeat after me, you cannot move the data around. You cannot move zetabytes of data here around because the speed of light has not changed and it takes time to get that data over the network. So it’s increasingly important to work out what SLAs are acceptable from compute and networking to deliver per application performance on the storage. Perhaps this will be done increasingly by performing compute ON the storage, such as in our VSA for View product.
4. SaaS and web companies will continue to vote against IaaS offerings from major vendors
Take a poll of the CEOs of the top SaaS companies and they’ll all tell you, “No legacy IaaS company has a clue how to run infrastructure for the enterprise”. They cannot match the price point of those based on commodity hardware. Relatively few data center providers pass muster.
5. NVMe and anti-competitive behavior by flash factories will shift the flash storage world towards openness
With recent moves by the four or five companies that make pretty much all the world’s NAND for SSDs and consumer devices to limit global supply in the hope of restraining price drops, vendors and users reliant on flash are concerned about locking themselves into a single vendor.
NVMe offers some hope. Unlike FusionIO, which is getting users to adopt a proprietary set of APIs to get to their data, NVMe is a standard approach to accessing data on flash-enabled systems. Nexenta and most other storage vendors will support NVMe, which should level the playing field somewhat.
In either case, openness is important. And software defined storage that abstracts the underlying hardware dependencies away is important if storage and compute buyers want to avoid more vendor lock in as the world shifts towards flash.
That’s my top five for 2013 but I also have a bonus prediction for you: All flash isn’t a company, it’s a feature
Every storage system vendor will have all flash capabilities in their product offering in 2013. We launched ours earlier in 2012 with partners announcing systems based on NexentaStor achieving over 1 million IOPS, more than 3x faster than proprietary all flash systems on the market.
Our users don’t want to sacrifice enterprise class requirements like data protection, NAS access and 24x7 around the clock support in order to have all flash appliances. So they won’t. They’ll buy all flash from legacy vendors or from other suppliers like Nexenta and our partners, including Dell, SGI, Wipro, Racktop, Cisco and others that have a track record of making many thousands of customers successful.
To paraphrase John Chambers of Cisco and many other leaders of the IT industry, when industries shift, they shift. All we can do as companies is try to anticipate and then keep up with the shift.
With increasing coverage in mainstream IT and in analyst reports – and mounting interest on the part of Wall Street, including countless public investors and bankers with whom I’ve been spending time – the storage industry is shifting right before our eyes. In 2012 all major vendors saw declining core product sales despite a fast growing overall storage sector. We also saw confirmation that an originally general-purpose file system, ZFS, passed the legacy storage vendors in terms of capacity under management. And with software defined storage gaining visibility I’m confident that by the end of 2013 we will look back on the early 2000s storage industry and wonder, “what were we thinking”.
The world has changed. And openness and flexibility has come to storage. The result will be a better IT industry and a smarter world. But that’s a subject for another blog.
What do you think about my projections? What did I miss? What is the most likely to occur? What is least likely?
Key Points
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Nexenta’s Solution delivers the Best Performance Density on a B230 M2 UCS Blade
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Nexenta’s Solution delivers the Most Number of VDI Users per B230 M2 UCS Blade
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Nexenta’s Solution costs under $500/seat, 40% less expensive than recent certifications
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Nexenta’s Solution was achieved with NO hardware or software acceleration
We are pleased to announce that we have joined the Cisco Developer Network as a Registered Developer within the Unified Computing technology category. NexentaVSA for View 2.0, has successfully completed interoperability testing* with the Cisco B230 M2 and the C240. The reference architecture is now a Cisco Compatible Solution.
The Cisco Developer Network (CDN) unites Cisco with third-party developers of hardware and software to deliver tested interoperable solutions to joint customers. As a Registered Developer, Nexenta offers a complementary product offering and has started to collaborate with Cisco to meet the needs of joint customers. With offerings such as NexentaVSA for View 2.0, customers can more quickly deploy a broad range of Cisco Compatible business applications, devices, or services that can enhance the capabilities, performance, and management of their Cisco network. For more information on NexentaVSA for View’s interoperability with the Cisco B230 M2 and C240, go to: https://marketplace.cisco.com/catalog/companies/nexenta-systems
Our new Cisco Home Page is here: http://nexenta.com/cisco.
We are also pleased to announce that we have surpassed existing Cisco benchmarks for the B230 M2 by achieving 196 users(@139 IOPS) for the Cisco blade computer. Nexenta’s performance benchmark for the B230 also indicated a sustained rate of 155 users (@215 IOPS) per desktop for the B230 M2 with storage latency, via the C240, of less than 3ms on average. This is more than 2X better than similar enterprise storage arrays, for the UCS platform.
For more information on this benchmaek
To learn more about Cisco-approved UCS VDI solution, go to https://marketplace.cisco.com/catalog/companies/nexenta-systems.
To download NexentaVSA for View for a complimentary 45-day trial, visit
http://www.nexenta.com/corp/downloads/nexentavsa-for-view.
Greg Schulz wrote a great piece on "Valueware", and I wanted to syndicate it here. He frames it in terms of "TrueValue Hardware", a place where I spend a decent amount of money. He rightly urges vendors to consider the Value of what they are providing. So, Here it is:
I am surprised nobody has figured out how to use the term valueware to describe their hardware, software or services solutions, particular around cloud, big data, little data, converged solutionstacks or bundles, virtualization and related themes.
Cloud and virtualization building blocks transformed into Valueware
Note that I’m referring to IT hardware and not what you would usually find at a TrueValue hardware store (disclosure, I like to shop there for things to innovate with and address the non IT to do project list).
For the rest of the blog, see:
http://bit.ly/SY35Os
In 1881, John Pierpont Morgan’s home on Madison Avenue in New York City became the first private home in the world to be lit entirely by electricity. Morgan invited the crème de la crème of New York society to witness this amazing technological display where he boldly declared, “Electricity as the future.” Despite electricity’s successful debut, Morgan’s father, Junius Spencer Morgan, dismissed the technology as the “stuff of carnivals and fairs” and admonished the younger Morgan for investing in this emerging and unproven technology. The elder Morgan had a point. He was after all the legendary financier who built the “House of Morgan.” How can this upstart technology possibly challenge Standard Oil and its stranglehold on kerosene?
Just as electricity changed the world, OpenStorage and Software-define Storage are revolutionizing the storage industry as we know it. Nexenta Systems, the leader in Software-defined Storage solutions for the enterprise, is on the forefront of this revolution. A recent IDC study showed that the quarterly factory revenues for EMC, NetApp and other storage industry incumbents are on the decline. Conversely, the revenues of upstart storage companies (“Others”) are on the rise. In fact, factory revenues for EMC, NetApp, IBM and Hewlett Packard all declined from Q2 to Q3 this year. EMC fell 2.2%, NetApp dropped 2.9%, IBM slipped 9.4% and Hewlett Packard tumbled 10.4%. In contrast, factory revenues for “Others” increased by 49% from Q2 to Q3 this year. If the current trends continue, “Others” will surpass the quarterly factory revenues of EMC in the fourth quarter of 2012.
New Nexenta EcoSystem Alliance Partner Program Extends Opportunities for Technology Partners
San Jose, Calif. — November 14, 2012 — Nexenta® Systems, the leader in Software-defined Storage solutions for the enterprise, today launched its Nexenta EcoSystem Alliance (NESA™) program to facilitate and grow the market for OpenStorage solutions that provide enterprise-class features.
More information about the Nexenta EcoSystem Alliance can be found at: http://www.nexenta.com/corp/nexenta-ecosystem-alliance-program-nesa.
Working with an ecosystem of technology partners is fundamental to the objective of providing “enterprise class storage to everyone,” a main tenet of Nexenta’s business philosophy.
This program was created to address the growing breadth of Nexenta’s technical partners. Its mission is to provide technical and marketing assistance to those partners that help to deliver a complete Software-defined Storage solution to the market. It also provides customers of Software-defined Storage guidance on the products and vendors that make up the Nexenta EcoSystems.
By joining NESA, partners can extend the sales and market reach of their organizations and promote their products to Nexenta’s resellers and customers. NESA is designed to co-market joint solutions through collaborative marketing, selling, and lead-generation activities. Partners also can take advantage of the Nexenta lab for certification, customer demos, and proof of concept (POCs).
Nexenta’s long standing technology partners immediately become charter members of the program and can start taking advantage of its benefits.
“Our technology partners play a huge role in Nexenta’s overall success,” Evan Powell, CEO of Nexenta. “Investing in programs like NESA allows us to reward our existing partners with a variety of benefits and attract additional partners to deliver complete storage solutions.”
“We are excited to see Nexenta, a key partner in Software-defined Storage, take this next step in its growth by launching the NESA program,” said Brent Blanchard, senior director of worldwide channel sales and marketing, LSI Corporation. “We have been working closely with Nexenta since its earliest days and believe that the NESA program will help drive adoption of certified OpenStorage solutions using our HBAs, SAS Switch and Nytro™ portfolio of PCIe flash adapters.”
“The exceptional level of storage performance with NexentaStor and STEC’s SSDs is a reflection of the close, symbiotic relationship between STEC and Nexenta,” said Farzin Baz, director of channel sales at STEC. “The NESA program gives STEC the opportunity to certify more products quickly and take advantage of multiple options for joint marketing, leveraging both of our storage expertise.”
“We at SuperMicro have seen Nexenta as a natural ally in the mission of delivering Software-defined Storage with industry standard, Intel-based hardware. We always have seen the benefit of testing and certifying solutions together so as to give our customers and channels the confidence they seek in their enterprise storage solutions,” said Wally Liaw, vice president of sales and co-founder of SuperMicro. “We see the NESA program streamlining this process. It gives us a perfect way to grow our market share in storage while promoting our joint value through Nexenta.”
Along with formalizing partner relationships with key existing partners, NESA will address the growing list of new partners wishing to join in the OpenStorage revolution. Nexenta’s goal is to not only accommodate system, HDD, and SDD vendors but also vendors in areas that complete the data center storage ecosystem.
The NESA program offers a tiered model with three membership levels: Affiliate, Certified, and Elite. Each level provides an increasing number of benefits and commitments from Nexenta, and serves as the foundation for a technical relationship with the company.
This program assures Nexenta customers that there is a solution in the ecosystem to address all their needs. Some of the recent additions to NESA include CommVault and LakeSide Software.
The program also includes product certification to ensure interoperability and time-to-market delivery of the latest innovations in Software-defined Storage solutions. As the result of a stronger relationship with technology partners, customers can focus on growing their OpenStorage infrastructure, confident in their technologies’ interoperability.
About Nexenta Systems
Nexenta Systems is the leader in Software-defined Storage solutions. Its flagship software-only platform, NexentaStor, delivers high-performance, ultra-scalable, cloud- and virtualisation-optimised storage solutions. Built upon ZFS technology, and running on industry-standard hardware, NexentaStor eliminates vendor lock-in and provides open, unified storage management at a fraction of the cost of legacy systems.
More information about Nexenta Systems, and free trials of the ZFS-based NexentaStor, can be found at www.nexenta.com. Partners selling NexentaStor-based hardware/software appliances can be found at: www.nexenta.com/partners.
Media Contacts:
North America:
Lauren Connelly
Schwartz MSL
(415) 512-0770
nexenta@schwartzmsl.com
Europe:
Emily Gallagher / Eric Dragt
Touchdown PR
+44(0)1252 717040
nexenta@touchdownpr.com
Public Records Demonstrate Urgent Need to Reduce Costs of Expensive Legacy Storage Platforms by Embracing Next-Generation Software-defined Storage Solutions
Santa Clara, Calif., November 5, 2012 – Nexenta® Systems, the world leader in Software-defined Storage, today announced the results of its research into public sector spending on legacy storage giants EMC and NetApp. Since 2001, the U.S. Federal Government has awarded at least $1,234,842,449 in non-classified contracts to these legacy storage vendors, who lock in customers with proprietary systems that are subject to costly and inconvenient price hikes. Because Nexenta’s Software-defined Storage solutions can save 60-70 percent over time versus legacy systems, the non-classified portions of the U.S. Federal Government could have saved at least $493,936,979.60 by switching to Software-defined Storage solutions such as Nexenta’s. Total potential savings, from classified and non-classified programs, are estimated to exceed $1 billion annually.
“With the looming fiscal cliff and assorted federal budget challenges ahead, U.S. agencies are paying much closer attention to cost-effective IT solutions across the board,” said Jonathan Spalter, former CIO of the United States Information Agency. “This includes the trend towards software-defined next-generation storage solutions, which are significantly reducing costs on a critical top line item in most CIO budgets.”
Nexenta’s findings indicate that the federal information technology procurement practices are not in accordance with public commitments to reduce costs and increase competition -- especially given the proliferation of new storage vendors and technologies that have entered the market in recent years. At $0.40 per gigabyte, the cost of storing data with proprietary EMC or NetApp technologies is up to three times more than for higher performance, open alternatives.
“Federal IT managers preparing for Big Data while facing potential across-the-board budget cuts urgently need more cost-effective and innovative alternatives to the storage strait-jacket of last-generation, inflexible and expensive legacy solutions such as EMC’s and NetApp’s,” said Evan Powell, CEO, Nexenta Systems. “Nexenta’s Software-defined Storage vision is a demonstrably more cost-effective, scalable and adaptable solution for keeping our nation’s information safe and available.”
An increasing number of private- and public-sector organizations are saving substantial sums by embracing Software-defined Storage, including the U.S. Army, KT (Korea Telecom), the U.S. Department of State, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation , NOAA, several U.S. National Labs, LeaseWeb and Budd Van Lines. More successful Nexenta customers can be found at: http://nexenta.com/corp/case-studies.
Nexenta’s original research found the following:
EMC Corporation
Since 2001, EMC Corporation has been awarded $850,311,037 in 3,626 awards by the U.S. Federal Government.
EMC’s five largest federal buyers, by dollars awarded, include:
- Department of Defense ($409 million)
- General Services Administration ($145 million)
- Social Security Administration ($126 million)
- Department of Justice ($24 million)
- Department of Commerce ($19 million)
NetApp
Since 2001, NetApp has been awarded $384,531,412 in 1,928 awards by the U.S. Federal Government.
NetApp’s five largest federal buyers, by dollars awarded, include:
- Department of Defense ($717 million)
- Department of State ($57 million)
- Department of Homeland Security ($20 million)
- Department of Health and Human Services ($19 million)
- Securities and Exchange Commission ($18 million)
Methodology
Nexenta Systems conducted research on USASpending.gov and submitted Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to the U.S. Departments of Homeland Security, Treasury and State, as well as the U.S. Army, Marines, and Air Force.
Tweet This: @Nexenta releases #federal #storage research: departments overspent by $500 million since 2001: http://bit.ly/YeCRIf
About Nexenta Systems:
Nexenta Systems is the world leader in Software-defined Storage. Its flagship software-only platform, NexentaStor, delivers high-performance, ultra-scalable, cloud- and virtualization-optimized storage solutions. Built upon ZFS technology, and running on industry-standard hardware, NexentaStor eliminates vendor lock-in and provides open, unified storage management at less than half the cost of legacy systems.
More information about Nexenta Systems, and free trials of the ZFS-based NexentaStor, can be found at www.nexenta.com or by calling (855) 639 3682. Partners selling NexentaStor-based hardware/software appliances can be found at: www.nexenta.com/partners.
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