Start-Up OS Nexus With Storage Appliance Software

OS NEXUS, Inc., provider of storage appliance software for cloud computing and virtualised environments, unveiled its QuantaStor appliance software, bringing public or private storage clouds to small business and managed service providers.



It differs from legacy storage operating systems by enabling users to create virtual dedicated SANs- or NAS-based storage clouds by securely sharing the underlying hardware. This new storage cloud operating system is built from inception incorporating virtualisation concepts and functions similar to a hypervisor sharing physical resources with virtual machines.
 
The complexity and costs associated with managing and maintaining traditional SANs made them inaccessible to SMBs. The same is true for cloud hosting companies looking to offer SAN-based services to their smaller customers; they just don't make financial sense using traditional SANs. With QuantaStor, budget-conscious organisations can ride commodity cost curves by purchasing lower-cost servers and deploying these as high-performance storage systems at a fraction of the cost of traditional SANs. A key differentiator in the design of QuantaStor is the way storage is managed by reducing complexity and allowing administrators to delegate general management tasks to their users via storage clouds.

Within a QuantaStor appliance, users can only see those resources within their designated cloud and are enabled to accomplish self-service administration according to policies or permissions set by the service provider. As such, users and virtualisation administrators are given access to advanced storage features typically only offered by enterprise SAN/NAS such as QuantaStor snapshots, cloud backup, and instant provisioning to make the execution of their projects safer and faster while increasing operating margins.
 
The creation of a public or private storage cloud can be done with a few clicks, and this can then be managed via the web-based management interface, QuantaStor Manager. This interface resembles the layout of a typical web application, making it intuitive and easy to use and QuantaStor Manager is AJAX/web 2.0 based so there are no page refreshes and no client side drivers.
 
QuantaStor is the a storage operating system to bring multi-tenancy to block storage thereby enabling administrators with the tools they need to delegate tasks to end-users who, in turn, can execute their projects faster. Thanks to QuantaStor's data management functionality, users can now create snapshots or clones of shared 'golden-images,' provision and manage their storage, without having to get assistance from a storage administrator, enabling end-user control.
 
Managed Service Providers (MSPs) with petabytes of legacy storage can also benefit from deploying QuantaStor. The software allows them to offer cloud-based public or private SANs by re-purposing commodity hardware already present in their datacentres, without additional capital expenditure.
 
"The industry is slowly addressing the management complexity problem, especially in some newer solutions but we made ease of use a core tenant in the design of QuantaStor so that it's easily managed by storage administrators and non-storage experts alike. By building a twenty-first century solution that incorporates multi-tenancy, enterprise-level data management features and extensible open user interfaces we're also bringing new tools to the table to boost productivity and efficiency. This is how QuantaStor differs from this latest wave of next-generation competing solutions," says Steve Umbehocker, founder and CEO of OS NEXUS. "We also spent quite a significant amount of time working on the out-of-box experience so that administrators and end users can get their new storage systems provisioned,  running and generating revenue in minutes."
 
QuantaStor is available online as a fully featured 30-day Trial Edition and in a limited Free/Community Edition.