The New Revolution in Enterprise IT and Cloud Computing: Software Defined Storage Nexenta Systems, Inc.

In today’s tech world, managed operation costs, better performance, availability, reliability, security, and faster service delivery are treasured assets that boost an enterprise’s data center efficiency and drive innovation through focus on high-value IT outcomes. But these assets are difficult for enterprises to achieve using traditional, hardware-centric methods. Offering the promises of flexibility, pay as you need agility that enables enterprises to readily adapt to their changing requirements, the software-defined data center is on its way to becoming mainstream, thanks to the ongoing technological advancements of companies devoted to software-defined technologies.

Meet the global leader in Open Source-driven Software-Defined Storage (OpenSDS) with 6,000+ customers, 400+ partners, 46,000+ community members, 42 patents, and more than 1,500 petabytes of storage under management- Nexenta Systems Inc. Founded in 2005, the global company has made the benefits of Software-Defined Everything, accessible by all, be it the data center, end users, infrastructure or apps. Privately held, Nexenta is headquartered in Santa Clara, CA.

The idea of success
In 2005, friends Alex Aizman and Dmitry Yusupov saw the potential for an entrepreneurial venture by pioneering components of Linux with the OpenSolaris and Open Storage codebases, and Nexenta was born. Their products soon became some of the first Open Source storage products to be brought to market in mid-2008. Over the years until 2013, the company grew at a careful pace and carved a niche for itself in the industry. However, in August 2013, the company began its unprecedented growth, soon after its current Chairman and CEO Tarkan Maner was appointed.

As the saying goes, “Behind every entrepreneurial venture, there is a vision and mission.” Tarkan Maner, along with his team of exceptionally talented executives, is the current driving force behind Nexenta’s success. But not all ventures attain success so easily; after all it takes much more than a vision and mission to reach for the skies. Tarkan’s experience as a global executive operator, investor and advisor in the IT industry, and the support he receives from his team of executives and employees are Nexenta’s stepping stones towards excellent services.

As a team, Nexenta’s passionate and caring professionals work round-the-clock to deliver disruptive and revolutionary solutions that enable, as Tarkan’s vision inspires, “a Better Living for a Better World.” And with operational and investment areas of focus that include social media, mobility, Internet of Things, Big Data and cloud computing, Nexenta is making it possible for Software-Defined Storage to redefine the possibilities for enterprises, today.

Providing one of a kind Solutions to all
Founded around an Open Source platform and industry-disrupting vision, the company provides organizations with the benefits of Software-Defined Storage.
Nexenta has an expanded portfolio of products, delivering award- and patent-winning software-only unified storage management solutions with a global partner network of the industry’s best and brightest, including Cisco, Citrix, Dell, HP, Quanta, SanDisk, Seagate, Supermicro, VMware, Western Digital, Wipro, and many others.

Nexenta uniquely integrates software-only collaboration with commodity hardware-centric Software-Defined Storage innovation. The company’s path-breaking innovation–OpenSDS solutions that are 100% software-based; and 100% hardware-, protocol-, and app-agnostic–provides organizations with Total Freedom to protecting themselves against punitive vendor lock-in. This innovation also enables everyday apps from rich media-driven social living to mobility; from the Internet of Things to Big Data; from OpenStack and CloudStack to Do-It-Yourself Cloud deployments – for all types of Clouds – Private, Public, and Hybrid.

Nexenta Software-Defined Storage serves a wide variety of workloads and business-critical situations, including cloud service providers, education, media & entertainment, healthcare, government, and telecommunications, among others. Uniquely positioned to meet the challenging needs of key workloads running in the client’s data center including data protection, cloud, Big Data and virtualization, the company plans to continue expanding its market and improvise on its offerings, in the years to come.

In conversation with team Nexenta

Q. What is the current status of the software-defined data center (SDDC) market? And how does Nexenta make the most out of the challenging opportunities posed by the industry?

“The industry is moving rapidly to a software-defined data center (SDDC) approach, based on commodity hardware solutions. Within the overall SDDC market, which has a projected growth of 36% CAGR, the fastest growing subset is software-defined storage (SDS), with a projected growth of 75% CAGR, according to IDC. The market is seeing the sales of legacy hardware falling due to innovative software-defined and hyper-converged (software running on an appliance) solutions. We are perhaps the only company offering software-only storage solutions that can work with any user, app, protocol, stack, hardware or cloud today. At Nexenta, we offer unified block and file storage services (NexentaStor), high-performance block and object storage (NexentaEdge), and seamless integration with third-party ecosystems to address storage challenges (NexentaConnect).”

Q. Are Nexenta’s Solutions designed to address any major pain points of the industry?

“There are a number of pain points for the industry. For one, the Internet of Things and its growing number of connected devices are increasing data volumes at record rates, demanding storage solutions that scale rapidly. Another is a pent-up demand for the flexibility promised by data containers, which need strong storage support to be truly ‘enterprise ready.’ We have shaped our OpenSDS solutions in such a way that today they are 100 percent software-based and 100 percent hardware-, protocol-, and app-agnostic providing organizations with total freedom of choice. Moreover, we have entered into partnerships with many other leading providers to package unique solutions and drive down total cost of ownership (TCO). Overall, we offer customized solutions to our clients and at the same time ensure that we address their grievances, if any.”

Nexenta’s Success Stories 

• Wipro: Cloud/Service Provider
  “We needed a scalable and cost-effective file storage solution for our VDI implementation. With Nexenta we could achieve great performance while scaling the storage capacity without excess expense.”
  – Seshu Kumar G V, Delivery Head for VirtuaDesk.

• Northern Backup: Cloud/Service Provider
  “With NexentaStor, we not only control our own ecosystem, but we’re seeing impressive performance improvements… Overall, we’re seeing a 50% average write latency coupled with a four times performance improvement.”
  – Brent Thumlert, Chief Architect

• ServerCentral: Cloud/ Service Provider
  “Too many SDS solutions out there are prohibitively expensive for most companies. But we don’t have to worry about that with NexentaStor.” – George Nelson, Manager of Managed Services.

• ScaleMatrix: Cloud/Service Provider
  “Our partnership with Nexenta allows us to provide our clients with the critical performance characteristics and truly competitive cost structures they need to compete in today’s cloud market.” – Chris Orlando, Co-founder

• The University of Toronto: Education/Research
  “Our decision to go with Nexenta will save the university around $9 million over a five-year period. ‘Tier 1’ storage vendors would have charged 3 to 3.5 times more than the amount negotiated with Nexenta and yet the functionality was basically the same.” – Patrick J.A. Hopewell, Director, Enterprise Infrastructure Solutions.

• George Washington University: Education/Research
  With Nexenta, we can maximize the effectiveness of our expanding research programs by minimizing the amount of funds that have to go to procuring and managing storage. – Garrett Fields, Technical Support Analyst

• Picturemaxx AG: Media/Entertainment
  “Today we process more than 600,000 files each day. This huge amount requires advanced technology on all fronts and storage is a critical success factor for our business. Our market is a tough one and we constantly need to improve our system to make it more efficient and cost effective.” – Christian Marnitz, CIO.

• CityClinics: Healthcare
  “The solution from Nexenta puts us at the forefront of technology innovation. Not only does it ensure we have the best performance and scalability, at a more affordable price, it takes away vendor lock in issues and allows for a more flexible infrastructure, now and in the future.” – Ivo Andreev, Corporate Communications Manager.

• Nordic MedTest: Healthcare
  “The performance is incredible and management is intuitive and straightforward. We also like being
  able to use NFS, as opposed to iSCSI, without suffering any reductions in speed.” – Torbjörn Wiger, CTO.

• LexisNexis: Legal
  “We need to rely on the platform since we are building our business on it. The new solution had to offer enterprise features and stability at an affordable price. Built on ZFS, NexentaStor helps solve our performance needs and costs substantially less than the legacy providers. It has the additional benefit of features that can scale as we grow. It’s a winning situation.” – Ronald Smits, IT Manager.

• viaForensics (NowSecure): Government/Utilities
  “To keep our IT-system flexible enough to react on the quickly changing energy market, we were looking for a new storage system that offered high performance, flexibility and high availability. With Nexenta’s software defined approach we found the right solution.”- Meik Müller, IT Manager

• Architecten en de mass: Manufacturing
  “With this new Nexenta environment, Architecten en de Maas now has an advanced, Ňexible and scalable solution which can grow to match the company’s anticipated storage needs in the next five years.” – Peter Hilkens, System Manager.

• Cox Communications: Telecommunications
  “Network engineers throughout Cox Communications were limited in the testing they could do because we lacked the flexible storage options to support it. Now, though, they can do what they think is best, running as many tests as they need. This helps ensure we provide our customers with the most reliable and best-performing network service available.”
  – Phil Bedard, Technical Director.