How Software Defined Storage innovations from OSNEXUS are changing the enterprise storage landscape

“We focus on continuous innovation in enterprise storage to help large IT organizations improve agility while reducing costs.”

Software-defined Storage (SDS) provides companies with the opportunity to move their storage infrastructure away from a rigid proprietary hardware platforms and into a software–based architecture. This enables organizations to use commodity servers from vendors like HPE, Dell, and Cisco to deploy SAN/NAS and Object storage at a significant cost savings versus solutions built with proprietary storage systems.

The concept of Software Defined Storage is an innovative new solution to the problem of exponential data growth. As the name suggests, the management of the entire storage infrastructure is based on a single software based storage platform. Unlike traditional SAN, NAS or RAID storage systems, SDS systems are not based on proprietary hardware that are designed only for products of a particular manufacturer. This makes it possible to combine the software and hardware from different manufacturers to operate together resulting in enormous cost savings and performance improvements.

Founded in 2010, OSNEXUS helps companies manage their storage ranging from small sites to hyperscale deployments across data-centers globally with its QuantaStor™ industry-leading Software Defined Storage (SDS) platform. The QuantaStor Software Defined Storage platform provides scale-out file, block, and object storage as a single, easy-to-manage solution via its unique storage grid architecture.

Candid Q&A with CEO Steven Umbehocker

How did OSNEXUS emerge?

While working on storage system integration for XenServer at Citrix in 2008-2009, I found that storage systems were still largely not API driven and they didn’t connect together. If you set up 12 Netapp or EMC boxes you had a huge headache in managing it all. To me it seemed that storage systems should link together no differently than how hypervisor infrastructure technologies such as VMware and XenServer linked servers together. A technology that could do that for storage would revolutionize it.

How did the initial product cater to your future developments?

In the early stages you’re looking to build the “MVP” or minimum viable product. QuantaStor v1 provided just iSCSI block storage after about a year of development, but that first version laid much of the groundwork for what was to be developed in the years ahead. Our initial launch was not very successful. The platform had numerous feature gaps and it taught us a lot about the storage market and market fit.

Subsequently, we expanded the protocol coverage to go from just block storage to a unified file, block and object architecture in QuantaStor v4. Also, QuantaStor v1 didn’t have the storage grid technology or many of the advanced high availability and disaster recovery features that we have today. Our goal is to rapidly displace EMC and Netapp systems with our QuantaStor SDS platform and that cannot be done with a “minimum viable product.” It’s taken us seven years of consistently innovating and driving the product forward to put us in this position today where we can now displace traditional enterprise SAN/NAS systems. 

What is QuantaStor Software Defined Storage? 

QuantaStor is a unified Software Defined Storage (SDS) platform designed to scale-up and scale-out to make storage management easy while reducing overall enterprise storage costs. QuantaStor addresses a broad set of storage use cases including server virtualization, big data, cloud computing, and high performance applications through scale-out physical and virtual storage appliances. With support for all major SAN/NAS and Object protocols (iSCSI/FC, NFS/CIFS/SMB, and S3/SWIFT) QuantaStor SDS delivers a complete array of enterprise features and capabilities for file, block and object storage. What makes QuantaStor unique is its storage grid technology which links all the appliance together across data-centers and on-premises locations so that all the storage can be easily monitored and managed. The other bit is that QuantaStor integrates with open storage filesystems like OpenZFS and Ceph. QuantaStor hides all the complexity of using these technologies but by leveraging them OSNEXUS is able to innovate faster and deliver solutions which stand the test of time. 

What are the key features of QuantaStor SDS? 

Scale-up, Scale-out Grid Technology

QuantaStor’s grid technology enables the scaling of storage up and out to 64 physical or virtual storage appliances locally or dispersed across geographies. Easily provision storage from any appliance in the grid from a single web-based management interface with no special client side software to install. 

Flexible, Modular Architecture

The layered architecture of QuantaStor SDS provides solution engineers with unprecedented flexibility and application design options that maximizes workload performance and fault-tolerance for a wide range of storage workloads.

Simplified Management

The intuitive QuantaStor SDS management interface eliminates many complicated steps commonly associated with legacy storage applications while providing IT generalists that deliver powerful storage solution configuration options. QuantaStor’s web-based interface requires no special client-side software to install.

What is the firm’s present scenario?

We’re right at 20 people and most of it is engineering. Jay Iyer (ex-EMC Isilon) is our VP of Engineering, Scott Arenson (ex-Microsoft) is our VP of Marketing, and William Rocca is our VP of Business Development. Our go-to-market strategy is 100% channel driven so we leverage the great sales and sales engineering teams of our channel partners and our low sales overhead gives them more margin and keeps our pricing disruptive.

Persistent transformation with a focus on product quality – OSNEXUS

OSNEXUS focuses on continuous innovation with a strong focus on product quality and industry leading support to ensure customer and partner success with every deployment. The company has a dedicated support team that is on call 24/7 to answer any questions and help with QuantaStor SDS deployments around the world. QuantaStor is sold worldwide through managed hosting providers, OEMs, VARs, and System Integrators that provide turn-key storage solutions.

OSNEXUS, a solace to its customers

The company regularly contributes to multiple open source projects but especially the OpenZFS filesystem. By making it easier for organizations to scale and at less cost we are helping companies put more of their IT spend towards solving hard problems like the cancer research work being done at USC.

Greet the ingenuity personality: Steven Umbehocker, CEO/Founder 

Steve has worked in the enterprise software and storage industry for over 20 years in engineering leadership roles at major software companies including Citrix Systems, Symantec and Veritas Software. Steve holds over twenty patents in the areas of storage virtualization, software defined storage, and cloud computing technologies.

“Our specialties are storage file system, cloud infrastructure, iSCSI, virtualization, Fibre Channel, NFS, scale-out NAS, virtual storage appliance, replication, Linux, and High Availability.”