sarahnexenta

Introducing “The Essential”- A Quick-Start NexentaStor Virtual Storage Appliance

June 25, 2019 By sarahnexenta

In any datacenter there is a built-in need for enterprise file and block storage services. However, in smaller branch offices or in cloud deployments, deploying a bare-metal appliance might not be feasible or economical. Never the less, file storage is almost always needed for applications and document storage.

These are the use cases where the NexentaStor Virtual Storage Appliance (VSA) shines. It’s easy to deploy and can leverage existing virtualization solutions to provide enterprise storage capabilities out of your existing infrastructure.

While I will focus this blog on a smaller configuration, keep in mind that the NexentaStor VSA solution can scale as long as you provide additional compute and storage resources. Some of our customers run NexentaStor VSAs with hundreds of terabytes of usable capacity.

Below I will walk you through how you can download and deploy “The Essential”, a NexentaStor VSA that is preconfigured with 8TiB of usable storage for File or Block services. It deploys with ease, directly into your VMware environment.

NexentaCloud Complements On-Prem NexentaStor for Hybrid Deployments

April 11, 2018 By sarahnexenta

By Michael Richtberg, a Nexenta Advisory Board member and former VP of Strategy and Corporate Development at SoftNAS.

Thousands of Nexenta customers have come to trust our open-source driven software-defined storage software that enables a truly hardware independent storage solution. We offer full enterprise class data services for industry standard NAS and SAN protocols, which have become table stakes, used by virtually all organizations to run their business applications. All of these on-premises qualities found in our flagship NexentaStor solution are now available to our customers via the public cloud with NexentaCloud, running on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Employee Perspective: Why Legal Professionals Should Embrace SDS

April 6, 2018 By sarahnexenta

Photo by Sanwal Deen on Unsplash.

The legal profession traditionally moves very slowly when it comes to new technologies. Some might even say that attorneys have a difficult time changing. They prefer technologies tested repeatedly before adopting them. However reluctantly, the legal profession has finally agreed that the internet is here to stay and that perhaps this cloud-computing thing might be of great help in a various number of tasks.

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.