Archives for March 2018

Employee Perspective: How to Build a Thriving Storage Ecosystem

March 26, 2018 By sarahnexenta

Infrastructure leaders face the daunting task of keeping up with the business at the same time dealing with a technology landscape that is changing at a relentless pace.

Gone are the days when the only thing we had to manage was the data center. Today’s businesses are demanding that infrastructure leaders orchestrate internal and external systems and services in an efficient and effective manner.

The one thing we can count on in our line of work is that everything in our environment will land into one of three system states:

Legacy systems – Those that you just can’t seem to get rid of. They are getting more expensive by the day and are distracting from other work.
Steady State – The core production systems that are running your business and need most of your attention.
Inbound Projects – The laundry list of requests for resources to support initiatives ranging from the well thought-out and resourced, to the unfunded science project that failed to account for any of the supporting infrastructure.

Employee Perspective: A Multi-Protocol Solution

March 20, 2018 By sarahnexenta

After three and a half years at Nexenta, I joined another storage software company, an early stage start up. It was all very exciting and seemed like an amazing opportunity for me to share my software-defined storage skills and knowledge to help customers be successful and grow the company. Unfortunately, after four months I parted ways due to several factors.

At first, I was really impressed with the work the engineering team had done to build a software-defined storage (SDS) product with such intentionality. However, there were several factors that I began to question:

It’s still hard to convince customers to change from old habits to SDS.

Software Defined Storage isn’t the new buzz word it once was. Companies can find it a difficult paradigm to accept when it’s compared to appliance-based storage. Humans don’t like change, even if it’s a good kind of change. So it takes a lot of effort by a sales team to help bridge that gap of doubt. Customers want to see demo’s, proof of concepts (POCs), technical deep dives, customer references, the list goes on and on. And it’s all reasonable. When faced with something different and new, many customers want to be thorough to ensure that you’re making the right choice. Nexenta is the leader is SDS, with a 6000+ customers deployments that run their products. Any new customer can have the confidence that they aren’t the only person on the planet running SDS- and that they were in fact choosing the right solution as many enterprises are making the switch.

Employee Perspective: Software Defined Infrastructure and Hybrid Cloud Systems

March 14, 2018 By sarahnexenta

Companies consider cloud usage for enterprise IT infrastructure, yet the majority of data stays in its own organization. They have to decide what data and system should go public and private. Two big trends, Big Data and Cyber Security, do not allow them enough time to construct both systems in public and private separately. Data and security threats are increasing enormously in such short period, and will continue to do so. IT organization also needs to face the fact that they cannot have both an unlimited budget and time for the infrastructure to solve those issues. In this case, I believe Software Defined Infrastructure and Hybrid Cloud systems are the solution. It gives you the tremendous flexibility to adopt the system to public and private cloud based on the commodity hardware platform.

Employee Perspective: SDS – Bringing parity to the rest of the infrastructure stack

March 8, 2018 By sarahnexenta

When you purchase any OS today, it doesn’t come locked to specific hardware (sorry Apple). I can purchase Microsoft Office and it doesn’t care if I’m running it on a Dell PC, an Acer/Supermicro/HP. If you use applications like Salesforce you aren’t worried about the hardware. They are totally independent of the underlying hardware, and each is sized according to the job at hand. You buy hardware to fit your budget, on aesthetics, or its gaming performance (if you are my son). You buy software similarly and largely because it provides a function you need. So then why are so many people still buying storage hardware and software that are tied together?

Why Nexenta? Employee Perspectives

March 6, 2018 By sarahnexenta

Nexenta knows the Software-Defined Storage world. We consider ourselves experts within the industry, even across our various teams and job functions. Our tight-knit teams are constantly collaborating with different departments, partners, and customers around the world to leverage each others knowledge and point of views.

We also have passion for our products, company and industry. Whether it’s an Engineer working on the latest product update, or a Sales Rep talking to a new potential customer, our work is driven by passion and excitement for the technology and possibility in making a world impact on SDS.

Here at Nexenta, our employees not only believe in our Software-Defined Storage solution, but can wholeheartedly speak to it. We asked a few of our employees to talk about why they believe in Nexenta. Over the next few weeks we will be releasing entries from our employee’s point of view in a series we’re calling “Why Nexenta- Employee Perspective”. Here are the dates and people you can expect to hear from:

March 8th – Bill Fuller, VP, Engineering

March 14th- Jun Matsuura, Country Manager, Japan

March 20th- Eric Cho, Sales Engineer

March 26th- Rick Hayes, VP, Customer Service