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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.

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

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….