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Archives for September 2016

The difference between NexentaStor and NexentaEdge

September 27, 2016 By Nexenta

By: Thomas Cornely, Chief Product Officer

Deciding between NexentaStor and NexentaEdge is relatively easy if you understand the products and your applications. NexentaStor delivers unified file and block storage services, where NexentaEdge is our scalable object storage platform. So the question is simple: what are you looking for, file protocols or object storage APIs?

Key Differentiators Between NexentaStor and Nexenta Edge

It is true that both systems provide block services, although NexentaEdge’s block support is limited to iSCSI. But one easy way to choose between the two is if you want shared file services (e.g. NFS, SMB) then only NexentaStor offers that functionality. But if you want to start storing data the modern way using an object storage API such as S3 or Swift, then only NexentaEdge has that capability.

Other differences include that NexentaEdge is built on a Linux kernel versus NexentaStor that is built using OpenSolaris and ZFS. NexentaEdge was also built from the ground up to be our most scalable product, so if scalability is important to you, NexentaEdge will offer you the best choice.

Which one is right for you?

So the next question is, what applications and systems are you running, and what kind of storage are they looking for? If you are considering an OpenStack deployment, NexentaEdge was specifically designed with it in mind, along with full support for both the Swift and S3 APIs. NexentaEdge would, therefore, be the obvious choice for OpenStack.

What about containers – especially those with persistent storage? Cinder is one of the more promising ideas in that space, something NexentaEdge has full support for. In fact, NexentaEdge is so convinced of the concept of containers that we build it on containers. Using containers in our core product gives us a lot of experience with the challenges of running persistent storage with containers, and this experience is found in NexentaEdge.

If you are running a legacy application that requires NFS or SMB access, then NexentaStor is your product of choice. In addition, if you need Fiber Channel block access, only NexentaStor offers this.

The question is a little bit harder when discussing iSCSI, since both platforms offer iSCSI block access. Perhaps the deciding factor will be scalability or performance. While both products offer some level of scalability, we made scalability one of the core things we wanted to accomplish with NexentaEdge. NexentaStor can scale to petabytes, but NexentaEdge can scale to hundreds of them. On the other hand, if performance and low latency are your primary concern then NexentaStor is for you.

Most data centers will need both systems. First, a high performance, feature rich NAS that supports a variety of protocols. Legacy applications and data will be with us for decades consolidating them to a single storage platform that can reduce complexity and increase performance just makes sense. We deliver this with NexentaStor.

NexentaEdge is your choice for storing the petabytes of data that the internet of things (IoT) will generate, as well as delivering that data to modern applications like Splunk, Spark, Cassandra and CouchBase.

Nexenta Releases Storage for Persistent Docker Containers by Storage Swiss

September 20, 2016 By Nexenta

What if you do not consider one of the greatest advantages of containers to be an advantage to you? Many tout the stateless nature of containers as their single greatest feature. They start up, they accomplish their task, and they go away – no stateful storage necessary. Many within the container community consider a stateful container to be a violation of best practices.

And yet there is a growing desire by some to run stateful containers. One of the arguments for doing this is it allows development and production to use the exact same infrastructure. This makes it easier to move an app from development to test to production – something essential to a devops workflow. Unfortunately, however, limitations of Docker and its associated partners create difficulties for those wanting to do this….

To read more, please visit https://storageswiss.com/2016/09/20/nexenta-releases-storage-for-persistent-docker-containers/

Efficient Replication using Multicast Protocols

September 13, 2016 By Nexenta

By Oscar Wahlberg, Director of Product Management

Replication as Data Protection

The use of replication as a data protection method is not new. Historically, it was relegated to disaster recovery for tier-1 applications and did not have a role in day-to-day backups.

Recently, however, many customers are using replication as their primary mechanism for backup and recovery for all tiers of systems – primarily due to the advent of object storage systems with built in replication and versioning. Unfortunately, the side effect is that this significantly increases the amount of data that needs to be replicated.

[Read more…] about Efficient Replication using Multicast Protocols

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