The Nexenta Blog

Evan's predictions for 2013

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?

RCO — Real Cost of Ownership for Storage, Savings by Nexenta

Storage Costs Overview

Many IT organizations engage in financial fiction with management when analyzing their costs for IT. They call it TCO — Total Cost of Ownership. But most of the time, what they deal with is My Cost of Ownership or even My Cost of Acquisition. Rarely do they attempt to include all of the costs as they are spread over many departments.

For many IT departments, storage has become one of the largest, if not largest, budget item. It’s not hard to see why. Unstructured data keeps growing, media files keep getting larger and cheaper to produce, and there is sense that ‘big data’ will, somehow, be of great value. And nobody wants to throw any of that data away.

Organizing data into tiers and archiving old data to tape sounds like a great idea, yet few people do it; it’s often easier to just buy more storage. That’s getting harder as the total amount of storage under manage increases and IT is asked to do more with less.

Nexenta is a storage software company. We believe that we can help IT address their storage challenges and reduce the Real Cost of Ownership (RCO) by using software to exploit all of the attributes of modern storage hardware.

Real Costs

Business owners and senior management should be concerned about the RCO of storage when they do financial planning.  But what should be included in RCO? Here are the areas to consider:

• Cost of buying new gear
• Operation of the gear for its useful life (five to seven years)
  • Hardware / software support contract(s) for life of the gear
  •  Cost of power to run and cool the gear will be greater than the acquisition cost
  • Data center costs (e.g., rack space, power usage effectiveness (PUE))
  • Management / administration costs (people)
• Disposal fees, license replacement, migrations fees:
  • When you dispose of the old gear, do you also dispose of the software license? If yes, then you will need a new license.
  • Cost of moving to the new gear
    • Cost of moving off the old gear

Cost of Buying New Gear

OpenStorage is an approach to building storage system from Open Source software and commodity hardware:

• System software
  • Storage access methods (file and block)
  • Device management
  • Data integrity
  • Replication services
  • Data management
• Controller(s)
  • Commodity x86 servers with large amounts memory for caching
  • Optionally, cluster of two for high availability
  • Commodity HBAs for SAS, FC, 10GbE, etc.
• JBOD Enclosures
  • With high-capacity, commodity disks at commodity prices
  • With SSDs for IOPs

This is in contrast with proprietary systems that are built with similar components:

• Propriety software
  • All enhancements must come from one vendor: limited rate of adding new functionality
  • All costs of development paid by that one vendor: keeping costs high
  • Limited features, innovation: limited ability to exploit new technology
• Propriety controllers
  • Expensive (but profitable for vendor)
  • Lag behind industry innovations
• Proprietary disk enclosures
  • Limited choice of disks, high prices
  • Stops customers from just adding their own commodity disks

Nexenta’s software is based on the enterprise operating system Solaris (which became OpenSolaris, which, in turn, is the basis of the illumos operating system).

A key feature of the software is ZFS technology, which provides many capabilities, including data integrity, scalability, and the ability to mix ARC (memory), SSDs, and disks into a Hybrid Storage pool (HSP).

Operation of the Gear

A large percentage of the RCO for storage systems is power consumption for running the system and cooling it down.

Customers want these things from the storage system:

• Capacity
• Performance (IOPs and / or    throughout MB/s)
• Security
• Reasonable costs
  • Easier management

The choices that are made to obtain these attributes, and the vendor chosen, will have significant impact on power consumption.

Capacity:

Using fewer high-capacity disks (e.g., 3TB or 4TB) at lower speeds (e.g., 7200 RPM) will consume less power and take less space for a given capacity than using faster, lower capacity disks (10k RPM, 2.5” 900GB disks or 15k RPM, 3.5”  300GB or 600GB disks).

Performance:

With the ZFS Hybrid Storage Pool, the combination of SSDs, main memory caching, and high-capacity disks can deliver better performance than fast disks alone—while consuming far less power because there are fewer disks and the disk that are used are power efficient.

All SSD storage systems are exciting, but today, they have limited capacity and high costs. A storage system that can evolve from all mechanical disks, to SSD/mechanical, to all SSD is very attractive. That’s exactly what you can do with Nexenta powered storage.

Security:

Disks fail:  RAID can be used to deal with disks that fail. And ZFS has enhancements that allow RAID protection with no special hardware. A group of two or more disks can be linked into a RAID device with one or more “parity” disks.  A replacement disk is tasked with taking the place of a failed disk:

• Automatically — hot standby, no operator intervention required  
• Manually — warm standby, disk is in system and online; operator instructs system to do the replacement
• Resilvering — the process of writing the missing data to the replacement disk.  

Bits in blocks of data become bad, firmware makes mistakes. This is a real problem for most storage systems. ZFS not only detects such bad bits, but it can correct them much like ECC memory can detect and correct memory errors.

 

Easier Management:

Nexenta’s Unified Storage solution allows one pool of storage to provide multiple storage services simultaneously. For example, file-based Network Attached Storage (NAS) services can be provided to one set of clients via the CIFs/NFS and, at the same time, Storage Attached Network (SAN) services can be provided to another set of clients via FC/iSCSI.

 

Disposal Fees, License Replacement, Migrations Fees

When a Nexenta powered storage solution reaches the end of its life, you can migrate the license to a new box and repurpose the old system.

This is much less likely to result in disposal fees.

As Nexenta support’s industry standard protocols, migrating to and from a Nexenta systems is fairly easy.

Summary

Nexenta’s OpenStorage approach allows IT organizations to do more with less while reducing the Real Cost of Ownership for IT’s biggest line item, which is storage:

• Systems built with Open Source-based software and commodity hardware components cost less to acquire and maintain.
• High capacity, scalable, unified storage means fewer boxes that are easier to manage.
• Grow capacity by adding a JBOD or live-swapping older, smaller disks for newer, larger disks. This allow for “just-in-time” capacity that is rack-space efficient.
• ZFS Hybrid Storage Pools lower power costs by using energy efficient SSDs for IOPS, along with a smaller number of efficient, high-capacity disks for capacity.
• Industry standard, open protocols make migration easy.
• Industry standard hardware is easier to repurpose and dispose of.
• Nexenta’s capacity licenses are permanent and can be transferred to new systems.

Software-defined Storage and NexentaVSA for View: Dan Boggs

One of the many things I enjoy about the technology industry is that it is forever changing with a purpose. In the enterprise IT market, many if not most of the big changes ultimately enable companies to either deliver greater value to their customers, reduce their costs, do both, and more.

Over the last several years, Cloud has dominated much of the discussion. And like many of you, I often get the “What is the cloud?” question from friends and family when we get together. This is one of the reasons I find the terms “Software-defined Datacenter” and “Software-defined Storage” (SdS) so wonderfully descriptive. But what is even better is the fact that there are tangible proof points for both today. Let’s take a closer look at SdS.

Evan and Alex have done an excellent job identifying the characteristics of SdS and have highlighted how NexentaVSA for View is a great proof point. For those of you that are not familiar with it, NexentaVSA for View automates the complicated and sometimes daunting challenge of deploying a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure. It has a rich feature set and enables customers to confidently deploy VDI knowing they will achieve the level of performance their customers demand. Best of all, you do not need custom storage hardware to deploy VDI with this solution.

Hardware abstraction is one of the key pillars of SdS. But it goes a little beyond that as well. A true SdS offering will be able to create the desired storage characteristics without relying on proprietary hardware. This is an example of the SLA characteristic Evan highlighted. For example, NexentaVSA for View easily takes physical, direct attached storage and creates virtualized shared storage for VDI with all of the wonderful benefits of ZFS. And the performance is excellent!

Nexenta is continuing to innovate in this area too and has some exciting capabilities coming. For example, we are adding the ability for a system administrator to restore a single desktop from a snapshot without having to switch between multiple user interfaces. In addition, we are enabling system administrators to schedule their VDI deployment so they do not need to be around at 2a.m. when the necessary resources are idle. This also is true for things like snapshots and what we call ‘calibration’. Calibration enables a system administrator to easily optimize their VDI deployment to achieve a predefined SLA for desktop latency with their existing server hardware. Remember the SdS notion of using SLAs to define storage configuration? This is a fantastic example.

Let’s take a look at another use case. Specifically, that of NexentaStor, which is our unified storage appliance offering. While it has been possible to deploy NexentaStor in a hypervisor literally for years (Virtualized Storage Appliance, VSA), it also can be deployed as a physical appliance to provide broader support for a public, private, or hybrid clouds. To that end, we are continuing to invest in things such as VAAI and VASA, which further improve performance and manageability. And these benefits will not be limited to the physical appliance use case. Environments such as NexentaVSA for View, and NexentaStor, deployed as a VSA, also will benefit.  

Ultimately, SdS must enable enterprise IT users to either deliver greater value to their customers or reduce their costs. The best solutions will do both and much more.

We briefly have explored the portfolio of SdS products available from Nexenta. And as with any great idea, there are SdS offerings from others in the industry, which is great. What do you see as the most important attributes of SdS? Join the debate on SdS!  

Software-defined Storage: Part Two

Whether we are in the 20th century (mindset) or the 21st, there is always a CLIENT and a SERVICE provided to the CLIENT. These two abstracted macro-tiers have always been there in some shape and form, and will remain in the foreseeable future. They are changing though, and fast, in front of our eyes.

Just a few years ago, enterprise IT CLIENT would be by and large stationary and static, in terms of storage access and storage utilization. The CLIENT did not require SLA for itself, for the application it was running and the user behind. Instead, the CLIENT would use what's (best-effort) available - which of course immediately implies one of the following two choices for IT managers:

1. over-provisioning for the worst possible case, or

2. purchasing and maintaining a product, out of existing and often confusing panoply of many similar storage products that advertize themselves for the corresponding CLIENT's usage profile and SLA (read: application), including: latency, throughput, price, MTTF and MTBF, etc.

Storage SERVICE, on the other hand, for a good couple decades to date was, and largely remains: conventional statically-provisioned shared NAS and/or SAN accessed via a handful well-established protocols over Ether or (for SAN) FC, and less frequently, IB.

The picture below illustrates these two omnipresent macro-tiers, CLIENT and SERVICE, with conventional state of the art on the left and the future - on the right. This future is happening fast though, in part because:

• IT inevitably moving to Cloud, compute and storage-wise

• The amount of stored raw data exponentially growing with no deceleration in sight, further exposing, amplifying and exacerbating the "network bottleneck", the need for intelligent and on-demand tiering

• Mobility becomes a MUST for more enterprise applications

• Flash prices and quality continue to improve

• and finally, hypervisors are getting better at managing hardware resources while running increasing numbers of virtual machines and their vApps

All of the above are the telltale signs that the original model (on the left) will continue to break in a variety of interesting ways, to be replaced by the model on the right, with Unified Storage providing quality services out of heterogeneous pools of highly virtualized resources in the tiers of Clouds, from more local/primary/fast to remote/archiving.

Software-defined Storage (SDS) would be another way to state the same (but shorter). Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_Defined_Storage) defines SDS as follows:

• key concept #1: policy-driven storage provisioning - SLA's replace technology details

• key concept #2: virtual volumes - separating the physical hardware from its presentation

SDS challenge and the corresponding CLIENT<=>STORAGE model (picture on the right) require higher degree of virtualization of the storage service itself. The previous blog on SDS calls the corresponding technology a 3rd generation of storage virtualization, whereby the storage Server (or Target) is:

• virtualized

• mobile, along with the vApps and their "container" VMs

• highly available

• providing QoS on a per vClient/vApp

Closed-source SDS?

As a side, there is one other SDS "key point" that I believe is missed by Wikipedia at the time of this writing (Sept 2012): openness of storage software.

Closed software stacks for the most part come preinstalled and packaged on top of proprietary hardware, which immediatley undermines the idea of virtualization of the storage service itself, based on end-user selected hardware resources, including platforms and disks, other peripherals.

And one more reason, often cited in different contexts. Every existing closed software stack has a certain life-term limit that, depending of course on vendor and multiple other factors, may count months, years or even decades, and still will always remain - a limit, with a certain attached probability to terminate. It is therefore difficult for end-users, from Fortune 100 down to small businesses and home offices, to fully embrace a paradigm shift while being aware of the "term limit" and the fact that there effectively will be no continuity of support. Which in the worst and still plausible case would mean: losing access to your data...

Remote is a new Local

Supporting SDS and the new model (picture above, on the right), with its 21st century requirements - is a tall order. Storage must become more consolidated and simultaneously more localized, so that the clients do not lose benefits of local secure access, while the "move" to Cloud remains transparent as far as existing applications.

Remote professionally managed (backed up, serviced) consolidated storage, along with local access - doesn't that sound like a contradiction?

Well, it may, and it definitely will - as far as the legacy closed-hardware based approach.

NexentaStor VSA: the leverage

Let's recap. I strongly believe that Virtual Storage Appliance (VSA) is a key and a strategy to approach, approximate, incrementally improve, and ultimately achieve the goal and the promise of SDS. The one very concrete step in this direction is NexentaVSA for View - the product that effectively defines the storage for VDI.

Further, quoting the previous blog SDS and SDN:

• First, a dedicated VSA can do block and file and object storage much better than the hypervisor itself simply because it packs 20+ years of storage stacks development and, in many cases including Nexenta, many years of commercial deployment.

• Second, VSA can hide the fact of local/remote storage from the VMs, thus providing an additional (and higher!) degree of virtualization. The hypervisors do virtualize local storage hardware. VSAs on the other hand do virtualize the entire storage, local and remote.

• Thirdly, VSA being a VM is mobile itself, and it therefore can follow (or rather, be followed by) migrating VMs using it for storage - to their (the VMs) new destination. This in turn creates a design and implementation opportunity to make VM migration a truly self-contained transaction, independent of the location of physical storage hardware.

There is an extra point though. On top and in addition to its existing 2nd-gen hybrid storage pools and thin provisioned virtual volumes (see Wikipedia SDS), the upcoming Version 5 of the NexentaStor VSAs will be capable to:

• Approximate per application SLA - via SLA ⇒ CoS mapping that is shown on the picture above and remains TBD, with the subsequent handling of the latter out of heterogeneous unified storage pools - the corresponding set of works is currently underway and is largely titled ZFS++ and, separately, CCOW.

H-squared

One of our current efforts,  is code-named 'ZFS meta'. Quoting 'ZFS meta' PRD:

Heterogeneous data volume combines ZFS vdevs of different types (classes) and provides the capability to classify, route and manage user data and/or associated metadata on a per type of this data (metadata) basis.

Presence of different classes of disks within the same heterogeneous ZFS pool is further combined with a new ZFS capability, to route and manage the data based on associated Class of Storage, which is:

1. A descriptor that combines user and system defined properties to control ZFS IO pipeline stages and, effectively, propagate user data and/or associated metadata to/from stable storage differently – on a per CoS basis
2. A mechanism to match user data with a specific class (or classes) of disks within the heterogeneous storage volume when placing the data

Consolidated heterogeneous backend "multiplied" by storage intelligence to process CoS descriptors - this H-squared combination will allow applications to define how the data is stored, accessed, retained, migrated, backed up, and overall managed - on a per application/user basis.

The remaining SDS ingredient - SLA to CoS mapper - will first be addressed by custom management systems, later - by industry standard APIs. That is an easy prediction to make.

Storage consolidation in and of itself is a great value, in terms of ease of management, ability to apply a set of consistent policies, to conserve power, to backup, snapshot, and otherwise control from a single IT perspective. This has played tremendous role as far as shared NAS/SAN propagation and success in the market in 1990s and 2000s, and will not be lost with the move to Software Defined Storage, to H-squared.

To be continued.

Software-defined Storage and Software-defined Networking: A History

Software-defined Storage from Nexenta: Evan Powell, Nexenta CEO

Recently, people have started to apply the term “software-defined storage” (SDS) to our NexentaStor and to OpenStorage approaches more generally.

That prompted us to look at what we really mean when we use that term.

Already I’m seeing a rush towards the “Software-defined” label. Consider “Software-defined networking.” It appears that $1.26bn gets people’s attention. Thank you VMware (and Nicira, and EMC)!

The promise of a software-defined data center is simple: fix IT once and for all. If you compare the data center to highly controlled and automated processes in manufacturing, IT still lags behind. You’ve got highly paid experts deploying box X and another highly paid expert connecting it to box Y, where another highly paid expert runs application Z and then turns around and complains about the other so-called experts not being expert enough. Those companies that have nailed IT have achieved competitive advantage because the average data center is a mess filled with proprietary, dated technologies that don’t work well together.

The software-defined data center promises flexibility, end to end flow through provisioning and management, and application awareness so that applications can be deployed, on demand, and can access appropriate resources from the data center, also on demand. Again, at the highest level, the goal is to fix IT so that the benefits of the incredible ongoing exponential improvements in hardware flow through to end users thanks to a software and services stack that just works to improve competitive advantage.

But first, before we talk in detail about what SDS is, here are a few approaches that do not pass the sanity check as being SDS:

1. Storage hardware that is driven by APIs. Don’t get me wrong. It’d be great if storage hardware companies supported up-to-date Rest-APIs. But that is surely not enough to warrant a rebranding as SDS.

2. Storage software that works with one and only one vendor’s hardware.
   Again, it is great to be able to drive storage hardware via software. Actually I’m not sure how else you’d do it. But claiming that your management UI or even your multi-system management capabilities somehow make you SDS is a stretch at best.

3. Anything sold by a legacy storage hardware vendor. OK, perhaps my bias is showing here. However, a hardware company suddenly claiming they are a software company is a zebra changing its stripes. You cannot suddenly become a software company because you have software developers. You have a value chain entirely predicated on selling expensive hardware with on-disk formats that lock customers into your products. And now you want to back away from that model and pivot to being a software-centric business that offers choice? That’d be a great pivot to make; IBM did something similar and it is astounding that they pulled it off.  Customers get this so they tend to want to buy software from software companies.

4. Something that ONLY works as a virtual storage appliance. It must be possible to provide a consistent storage solution across virtual and physical infrastructures alike. Needless to say, this applies to folks that can run on one, and only one, VSA as well, since that even further reduces the flexibility and ubiquity needed to achieve SDS.

5. Something that sacrifices fundamental data storage capabilities. If your solution is Windows-based or otherwise not truly enterprise class, you are not yet ready for enterprises. I suppose that is tautological. Still, worth reiterating. Just because the future is software-defined storage does not mean that the features enterprises have demanded in the past on their arrays are no longer needed—most still must remain. 

Enough with describing what SDS is not. What is it as we see it?

In short: software-defined storage is an approach to data storage and management that virtualizes the underlying hardware and enables the flexibility and dynamism promised by virtualization to both be fully achieved and to be extended into the management of storage. Software-defined storage is a fundamental component of software-defined data centers. Key attributes include:

• Openness: Systems that are inherently closed and proprietary lack the flexibility of open systems. This openness should extend from on-disk formats through APIs and business models.

• Ubiquity: Solutions should be widely available, and work with all major protocols. This implies two things. First, it implies some kind of open source or freemium distribution model, so the solution can achieve widespread distribution. Second, it implies you’ve got to be able to serve block, file, and object protocols.

• Abstraction: This is all about separation of the data from the data control layers. Amongst other things, this means that JBODs rule. Everything—from RAID through HA and replication and NFS, CIFS, and other protocols―should be delivered as software that can define the attributes on the storage in the server or on the JBOD on the fly, as needed.

• Service Level Agreements / Application Awareness: If a product or service is to be considered software-defined storage, it must be possible to inherit SLA requirements from the compute level or from the overall data center business logic. We agree with VMware’s approach here as far as we understand it; and we fully anticipate CloudStack and OpenStack will head in a similar direction, being able to pass along requirements from the application provisioning and management layer through the entire stack, including storage. Self-provisioning storage, based on application requirements, is an example, similar to our own NexentaVSA for View.

• Collapsing Compute, Storage, and Networking: For software-defined storage to become reality, the storage protection, replication, cloning, and other capabilities must be able, for certain use cases, to be run co-resident on the compute boxes. In practice, this ironically can mean moving aspects of that logic off the storage capabilities on-box so that storage itself delivers services that then are instantiated, as needed, on the physical device or rack. Our own cloud-wide deduplication capabilities, which we are including in our contributions to the OpenStack Swift community, are good examples of this kind of cloud or data center-wide capability enabled by collapsing just the right part of the storage onto the box (in this case a Swift box) while retaining other aspects logically off the box in a distributed fashion.

At Nexenta, we take the above vision seriously enough that we are looking at every line of code (with more than several million lines to look at) in NexentaStor and NexentaVSA for View, including changing aspects of the underlying ZFS technology, to insure that they are in alignment with our vision of software-defined storage. We are listening to some of our largest current users who need to manage thousands of NexentaStor instances across their cloud in a centralized manner through policies controlled by their cloud management frameworks.

We view NexentaVSA for View, our improvements to Swift, and forthcoming code-named NexentaSwift and NexentaHadoop solutions, as proof that SDS is coming. We have a pure software-only business model. And a relentless focus on data integrity, data protection, flexibility, high performance, and freedom from vendor lock-in in everything we do. We believe that Nexenta and OpenStorage approaches more broadly give the IT industry the best hope for transforming the 42% of IT spending that storage now absorbs into a better solution that reflects the requirements of emerging dynamic, software-defined data centers.

Stay tuned. And please contribute to the debate over what SDS is and what it is NOT. If the storage industry does this right, we can bring openness and a fundamentally more flexible approach to storage to market in the months and years to come, thereby freeing IT from the lock-in and legacy approaches of dominant storage vendors.  This is about more than Nexenta or even about storage—this is about fixing IT once and for all.  I look forward to hearing your thoughts.