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Epidemics at the Speed of Software

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By Michael Letschin, Director, Product Management, Solutions, Nexenta

In today’s global economy and 24/7 news culture, word of health risks spread faster than ever before. If a child is diagnosed with a rare disease in Asia at 10 AM, it could be sent to the US Center for Disease Control and reported on US news outlets in time for the 11 o’clock news (a 2 hour time lapse). But, that’s even slow compared to how quickly it could spread through social media. This is not to say that health concerns are sensationalized or should not be treated with the utmost urgency and concern.

The scare over Ebola has shed new light on how quickly news and information flows around the globe. It also showcases how quickly NGOs (non-governmental organizations) can be spun up around an issue. A quick search on the USAid web site lists 60 NGOs responding to the Ebola crisis. These organizations range from religious groups to relief groups to groups dedicated to specific continents. Some of which are smaller organizations, scarcely known of, like BRAC (creating ecosystems in 11 countries in which the poor have the chance to seize control of their own lives), while others are some of the largest organizations in the world, like the Red Cross. One thing that ties all of these groups together is their need to keep up-to-date on news and information, which is highly dependent on technology. It’s these same technology networks that spread panic and concern via the news and social media, that also transport critical, life-saving information to these organizations in need.

The worldwide growth of this need-to-know data is exponential. Some Gartner reports have shown that enterprise data is growing at rates of 40-60% year over year. If enterprises are growing this fast, you can only imagine the growth rate of data collection during a health crisis. This explosion of data is also what drives innovation, enabling organizations to move away from legacy systems that slow down data accessibility.

A key innovation in the effort to easily track the spread of disease is the Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC). The SDDC changes the game by providing software based solutions where any hardware can be repurposed for various purposes. In the time of a crisis, these Software-Defined solutions will ensure your data includes the most up-to-date trends for the next airborne illness.

While server virtualization has made a huge impact by enabling compute power to live in the data center, storage has previously lagged behind. Now, Software-Defined Storage, a robust scalable storage solution, is being deployed on any existing hardware allowing organizations to rapidly analyze complex issues. For instance:

Imagine being a researcher or doctor in a remote location. You have critical information that could show trends of treatment practices, but you have no place to store all the millions of data points that have been collected on paper. You also have no way to get or install traditional legacy limited hardware solutions, nor a place to power and store such solutions. The easy answer is to use the existing industry standard hardware and deploy a software solution. I am in no way saying that the Software-Defined movement is going to save the world in a health crisis, but I only hope that the NGOs and world leaders see that Software-Defined technology can lead to a more cost-effective and faster time to market. And hopefully time to cure.

To hear more about the benefits of Software-Defined Data Centers and Storage easing health crises, please join Forrester, VM Racks and Nexenta on 12/16 at 8am PT. Click here to register for this webinar.

Big Data Meets Software-Defined Storage at EngineRoom.io

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Allison Darin, Director of Communications & Public Relations, Nexenta Systems, Inc.

Big Data and Software-Defined Storage go hand in hand as part of the NexentaStor implementation for EngineRoom.io. EngineRoom.io – the world’s leading Secure Private Cloud Service for the entire Big Data Pipeline – are market leaders in the innovative area of “high performance data analysis ” (HPDA) for industries from media and entertainment, life sciences, financial services, oil & gas, engineering and more.

They recently added Software-Defined Storage to their IT toolkit through their deployment of NexentaStor and other leading Software-Defined Data Center solution providers including Brocade, SanDisk (FusionIO) and VMware. Take a look at our new case study here for lots more information.

Sofware-Defined Storage – Vertical Sectors Sharing the Love

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Allison Darin, Director of Communications & Public Relations, Nexenta Systems, Inc.

First, the good news. We are in a year that promises to shake up the storage world with open source Software-Defined Storage (SDS) solutions revolutionizing the market and helping today’s organizations build toward the Software Defined Enterprise (SDE) of the future.

Even better, the SDS revolution, spearheaded by Nexenta, is spreading to more and more vertical markets and countries. And while the institutions and organizations adopting an SDS approach have made their choice for a number of reasons, they all have one thing in common: they’re very happy with what it delivers. But don’t take our word for it – read on for the stories of several customers and their journey towards becoming Software Defined.

In Germany, regional energy supplier Stadtwerke Tuttlingen (SWT) provides electricity, gas, and water utilities to over 34,200 residents across 980 square miles in the South West area of the country.

SWT’s existing storage solution was proving inadequate to run multiple high performance databases (Oracle, MSSQL) and incapable of supporting a planned VDI deployment. Searching for a storage system that offered high performance, flexibility and high availability, SWT found NexentaStor.

One of the key selling points for SWT was the simplicity of Nexenta’s products. There was no need for complex licensing and NexentaStor provided features such as unlimited snapshots, thin provisioning and hybrid storage pooling that helped SWT to implement cost-effective storage with high performance.

In the UK, the University of Sussex turned to Nexenta when its original solution started to approach end of life. The IT department at the University provides support to the entire university – 13,000 students and over 2,100 staff – with a single home directory service that enables users to access files from whatever device and operating system they are using, wherever they are on the campus.

NexentaStor was selected because of its flexibility, scalability and attractive economics. It delivered the performance the University sought, and paved the way for sustainable expansion. The stability, scalability and performance of Nexenta has proven so effective that it has prompted the IT department to look at other campus storage systems and further opportunities to consolidate, increase speed and grow efficiently.

In the media industry, London-based boutique VFX organization BlueBolt was searching for an adaptive storage solution to manage the growing workload of its creative and technical staff and to keep up with the evolving demands of the industry.

BlueBolt has provided the visual effects for many award-winning productions including the BBC’s Great Expectations, Game of Thrones (Season 1) and Mandela – Long Walk to Freedom. Needing to implement a secure, reliable, scalable storage solution, the company chose Nexenta’s SDS solution to centralize and manage its storage infrastructure and replace the various storage platforms in situ.

Best of all, Nexenta provided all of the features BlueBolt expected from an enterprise storage platform while remaining one of the most cost-effective solutions on the market.

There are many advantages for organizations like SWT, University of Sussex and BlueBolt that opt for Nexenta’s SDS approach. They escape from vendor lock-in, total cost of ownership (TCO) is radically improved, performance gets significantly better and the result is true scalability. In other words, it’s future-proof.

Nexenta helps customers to bypass the MESS (Massively Expensive Storage Systems) produced by traditional vendors and concentrate on growing and building their business – boosting productivity and customer service. It’s a win win for everybody.

No wonder customers in industries as diverse as media (BlueBolt), energy supply (SWT) and education (the University of Sussex) are turning to Nexenta, the global leader in SDS, to deliver easy to use, secure and ultra low cost storage software solutions.

By now, some of you are probably starting to ask: That’s great, but what happened to the bad news? Good news everybody, there isn’t any.

Accelerate your Horizon 6 deployment with NexentaConnect 3.0!

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Nexenta is proud to announce the general availability of NexentaConnect 3.0 for VMware Horizon (with View).  The VDI acceleration and automation tool provides increased desktop density and higher IO performance for existing storage deployments as well as greenfield new VDI solutions.  NexentaConnect 3.0 introduces many new features and enhancements for a VDI solution to include

  • Full support for VMware Horizon 6NexentaConnect for Horizon 3
  • Pass Through Support for VMware GPU
  • Import Horizon View desktop pools
  • Fast desktop pool restoration from backup

Combining all these great new features allows you to now accelerate and grow your existing Horizon deployment, which may have been limited by traditional storage solutions.

To learn more about NexentaConnect for VMware Horizon go to http://www.nexenta.com/products/nexentaconnect/nexentaconnect-horizon and download the 45 day free trial.

 

 

Nexenta Launches Revolutionary Software-Defined Scale Out Object Storage Solution for OpenStack and Big Data Infrastructures

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NexentaEdge – Taking Nexenta’s ZFS DNA to Cloud Scale

Thomas Cornely, Chief Product Officer, Nexenta

VMworld 2014 in San Francisco promises to be an incredible event for Nexenta. In addition to our OpenSDx Summit on 8/28, as a VMworld 2014 Platinum Sponsor we’re gearing up for a slew of new product announcements and demos. We’re particularly excited about the opportunity to showcase NexentaEdge, the latest addition to our Software-Defined Storage portfolio, specifically targeting the petabyte scale, shared nothing, scale-out architectures required for next generation cloud deployments. NexentaEdge is a software only solution deployed on industry standard servers running Ubuntu, CentOS or RHEL Linux. Version 1.0 will support iSCSI Block services with OpenStack Cinder integration, Swift and S3 Object APIs as well as a Horizon management plugin. File services are part of our design and will be delivered in follow-on versions.

If you’re familiar with Nexenta, you know all about NexentaStor, our unified block and file Software-Defined Storage solution built on the ZFS file system. What made ZFS great were some key design choices that took advantage of emerging trends in the hardware landscape. Things like Copy On Write, delivering guaranteed file system consistency at very large scale, as well as high performance unlimited snapshots and clones. Things like block level checksums, trading increasingly cheap CPU cycles for way more valuable end-to-end data integrity. This strong technology heritage, paired with Nexenta’s continued investment on performance, scale and manageability has led service providers across the globe and a growing number of enterprise customers to rely on NexentaStor as the storage backend for their legacy cloud and enterprise applications.

If you’re in technology, you know that the only constant is change. Our service provider customers are busy scaling their infrastructure, moving to next generation open source cloud infrastructure like OpenStack and CloudStack and looking for even more scalable and cost efficient storage backends. For that, we’ve built NexentaEdge. And rather than quickly combine existing open source pieces and hack on top of them, we deliberately took some time to design a solution from the ground-up, and we made sure our design reflected the lessons we learned from our years of working with ZFS. We also made sure our design looked forward and was ready for what we see as new emerging trends in the storage landscape. The net result is a truly next generation scale out solution that incorporates what we like to call our ZFS DNA.

For example, one core design aspect of NexentaEdge is something we call Cloud Copy On Write. While the system is fully distributed truly, without any single point of failure, data in the cluster is never updated in place. Very much like ZFS, but applied in a distributed context, this gives us a great foundation for advanced data management and the ability to gracefully handle a variety of failure scenarios that affect large scale out clusters. Another example is end-to-end data integrity. All chunks of objects in NexentaEdge are stored with cryptographic hash checksums that deliver ultimate data integrity. The system is also built with automatic self-healing in case corruption is detected in a chunk.

Another critical aspect of the design is the recognition that building large scale out clusters is as much a storage challenge as a networking one. So we paid particular attention to how we consume precious network bandwidth and how we automatically route data around hot spots and busy nodes. These functions are implemented as part of what we call FlexHash (for dynamic flexible hashing that automatically selects the best targets for data storage, or data access based on actual load states) and Replicast (our own network protocol that minimizes data transfers and enables lower latency data access).

Last but not least, a great design proves itself by how advanced features naturally flow out of it. One such feature is cluster wide inline deduplication. NexentaEdge clusters get inline deduplication of all data at the object chunk or block level. These are variable sizes and can be as small as 4KB as we will demonstrate at the Nexenta booth at VMworld 2014 we will create 100’s of virtual machines on iSCSI LUNs while consuming slightly more than one copy worth in the cluster.

NexentaEdge is here. And we think it will be big. Over the coming weeks, we’ll dig a bit deeper into the technology and share details on Cloud Copy On Write, Flexhash and Replicast. See you at the Nexenta booth at VMworld 2014!