Boost Your Storage Systems with OSNEXUS Software Defined Storage Platform to Lower IT Costs and Save Time

The Silicon Review

“Headquartered in Bellevue, Washington, OSNEXUS operates around the globe with partners and customers across North America, Latin America, Asia, Europe and the Middle East.”

Software Defined Storage(SDS) allows companies to better utilize their existing storage assets while adding new data storage
capacity at the same time. The benefits of SDS include lower costs, time saving simplification of the management of storage networks and devices and a reduced number of IT workers needed to maintain storage systems, which in turn, reduces overall storage operating costs. Founded in Bellevue, Washington in 2010, OSNEXUS helps companies realize SDS benefits by managing their storage ranging from small sites to hyper-scale deployments across global datacenters with its QuantaStor Software Defined Storage (SDS) platform. The Company has always championed open source file systems starting with ZFS, a combined file system and logical storage volume manager originally developed by Sun Microsystems and open sourced in 2005. Today, OSNEXUS is an active contributor to and sponsor of the OpenZFS project. Their SDS software is built on the Ubuntu Linux operating system and also incorporates the open source Ceph and Gluster scale-out storage platforms into QuantaStor SDS.

Making their presence felt in the current market scenario
OSNEXUS develops Software Defined Storage (SDS), a powerful tool for IT administrators as it enables them to use their commodity server hardware interchangeably for compute and storage as opposed to traditional storage solutions that lock enterprises into proprietary hardware and file systems with limited protocol support. SDS has dramatically changed the economics of the storage industry, resulting in major cost savings and IT agility for enterprise storage buyers. OSNEXUS is the only SDS vendor to deliver a unified scale-out file, block and object platform on open source file systems to form easy to manage storage grids up to 64 physical or virtual storage appliances locally or dispersed across geographies.

OSNEXUS QuantaStor SDS
OSNEXUS’s QuantaStor SDS is designed to scale up and out to make storage management easy while reducing overall enterprise storage costs. The Company’s hyper-scale grid storage architecture allows IT organizations to expand on demand and essentially without limit. As a consequence, new storage appliances can be added to a cluster or multi-site cluster to grow an environment from small scale to 10s or soon 100s of petabytes of storage. In addition, the layered architecture of OSNEXUS’ SDS solution provides solution engineers with unprecedented flexibility and application design options that maximizes workload performance and fault-tolerance for a wide range of storage workloads.

Addressing a broad set of storage use cases
QuantaStor SDS addresses storage use cases like Server Virtualization, Backup and Archive, Big Data, Cloud Computing and High-performance Applications. One example of a compelling QuantaStor SDS use case is automating backup, restore and archiving of business-critical data. QuantaStor SDS makes sophisticated backup and archiving capabilities available to companies of all sizes, including data that was previously stored on tape that can be shifted to low-cost near line disk storage, while maintaining high recovery time objectives (RTOs). Providing elastic storage capabilities, cloud-based archiving, fault-tolerance and load balancing, QuantaStor SDS physical or virtualized storage nodes offer significant improvements in IT
agility and increased ROI.

Formidable features to compete with
The OSNEXUS security model, which includes end-to-end security coverage enabling multi-layer data protection “on the wire” and “at rest” for the enterprise and cloud storage deployments is paramount and an important factor that sets the company apart from its competitors. Customers can deploy security and encryption measures at the user level by masking user permissions and allowing administrators to grant permission for users at the storage object level, to all objects in the user’s associated cloud(s) or to the entire storage system. For data-at-rest, QuantaStor features “one-click” full drive software encryption with Intel AES-NI technology and FIPS 140-2 self-encrypting drive support with certified hardware. QuantaStor also provides data on-the-wire encryption via SMB3, IPSec, and HTTPS. For iSCSI storage, QuantaStor uses Challenge-Handshake Authentication Protocol (CHAP) supporting CHAP for storage volumes, user levels and storage clouds providing easier management and SAN security. Finally, all data replication and storage grid management communications are encrypted using SSL/TLS 1.2 with strong ciphers enabling OSNEXUS to stay ahead of the pack.

Kenworth is a much
happier Sales Company for seeking OSNEXUS’s aid Kenworth Sales Company sells premium products and service to the truck industry in the Intermountain west and has been in business for 68 years with 20 locations in 7 western US states. Kenworth wanted to replace high maintenance storage system with a solution an IT generalist could manage and reduce support and administration costs of overall storage assets. And so it singled out OSNEXUS to handle these specific tasks. OSNEXUS deployed QuantaStor for email, file servers and ERP system while it used RAID 10 backup and archive configuration for redundancy and performance which eventually reduced administration costs dramatically.

Clientele
OSNEXUS has over 600 active paid deployments globally, many with Fortune 500 companies across vertical industries including banking, insurance, energy, media and entertainment, healthcare, retail, telecoms and transportation. The Company’s major partners include Cisco Systems, HP, IBM, Intel and VMware.

What will the future look like?
Enterprise IT buyers choosing to deploy fractional storage arrays as a virtual storage appliance in the future, is anticipated by OSNEXUS. The Company also looks forward to elastic search being the next storage opportunity just as S3/SWIFT object storage protocols entered into the storage landscape with NAS and SAN protocols. OSNEXUS believes that it will enable a broad set of additional use cases for scale-out storage and will let customers analyze their data assets and extract business intelligence and more value out of their data assets.

Key Executive

Steven Umbehocker, CEO and Founder – Steve has worked in the enterprise software and storage industry for 20 years holding engineering leadership roles at companies including Citrix Systems, Symantec and Veritas. He has over twenty filed and issued patents in storage systems technology and cloud computing.