Systems Integrator NetNordic Selected Nexenta

Nexenta Systems, Inc., in Open Source-driven Software-Defined Storage (OpenSDS), announced that NetNordic Holding AS (NetNordic), a systems integrator, specialising in networking solutions and cloud-based services, has chosen NexentaStor to create a centralised storage repository for the company and its customer base.

Founded in 2001, NetNordic is comprised of two main departments – Network Solutions and Enterprise Communications. Between these business entities, the company boasts more than 80 operators and 300 enterprise and government customers throughout Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland.

NetNordic’s business was growing and with an increasing number of customers, it found that its storage solution was struggling and suffering from high latency and low availability. In fact, the latency would on occasion spike so high that it made the ESX freeze – a huge performance flaw that was impacting the level of service provided to customers. NetNordic made the decision to review the market and opted for software-defined storage as it offered greater value for money and would provide the scalability needed for the coming years.

NetNordic turned to NexentaStor, which is the organisation’s centralised storage repository for its own business, as well as its customers. It uses the snapshot function for backups, and is looking to buy another Nexenta system to replicate the snapshots to another site. It has also been impressed by Nexenta’s compression. While its previous solution had very little available space, NexentaStor offered an extra 1TB of data with compression turned on.

“This was very significant to us,” said Sander Petersson, operations engineer, NetNordic. “About 97% of the VMs that we store on Nexenta is Linux VMs which doesn’t contain anything other than just basic text files. So this means that the built in compression in ZFS saved us about one TB of used data. Thinking of the compression, it’s excellent and when we’re looking through the figures and graphs we will not be needing to buy more storage in quite some time.“

The company has also been impressed with NexentaStor’s HA integration. NetNordic’s NOC monitors a lot of businesses’ infrastructure and it is imperative that it does not go down. The monitoring system is performance heavy, but the combination of NexentaStor and HA can cope with the workload, while providing good value for money.

NetNordic has more choice. The team is benefitting from a scalable solution that avoids hardware vendor lock-in. It has also been able to offer more services to its customers since installing NexentaStor and is beginning to offer more cloud services and tools where clustering is required. Prior to implementing Nexenta, NetNordic didn’t have the centralised storage it needed.

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