Nexenta Revealing NexentaEdge

Nexenta Systems, Inc. announced NexentaEdge 1.0, a software-only scale out block and object storage solution designed to deliver high performance global inline deduplication on petabyte scale clusters.

It is suited for next-generation open source cloud infrastructures and big data repositories requiring performance, scale and low TCO.

The solution will be demonstrated for the first time at VMworld US 2014, August 24-28 in San Francisco, CA.

Object storage is increasingly taking center stage as a required storage option to support emerging cloud-based and big data applications. Breaking with the constraints of legacy enterprise storage, modern object stores are designed to run on low cost shared nothing clusters and present all capacity as one single pool. Key characteristics include scaling to virtually unlimited sizes while remaining easy to manage and highly resilient to device and node failures.

IDC forecasts that worldwide revenue for file-based and object-based storage will reach $38 billion by 2017, a 65% increase from the estimated $23 billion revenue in 2013. Even more, it forecasts total capacity shipments for file and object storage to reach 173EBs by 2017, more than 4 times the capacity shipped in 2013.

“The challenge for IT decision makers is that the growth in unstructured data is placing huge pressure on already tight IT budgets,” said Ashish Nadkarni, storage systems research director, IDC. “File-based and object-based solutions are much more versatile and will quickly outpace more rigid, hardware-based options. Software-based storage solutions based on commodity hardware platforms will lead the charge in the file- and object-based storage market.”

NexentaEdge is a scalable solution that helps enterprises store and manage the growing amount of unstructured data including film, medical images, graphic designs and cloud backup/archive. The solution allows users to store any amount of data in a single, highly available repository with TCO thanks to inline data deduplication functionality.

Complementing existing NexentaStor solution, NexentaEdge 1.0 features include:

• Industry-standard x86 server utilization running Ubuntu or Red Hat Linux
• iSCSI Block, Cinder, Swift and S3 Object APIs
• Scale out, shared nothing architecture of any scale
• Always on, high performance global inline deduplication and compression
• Continuous real-time optimization of performance and capacity utilization
• Network optimization to reduce bandwidth requirements and avoid congestion
• Self-healing capabilities using strong cryptographic hashing to guarantee data integrity
• Designed to take advantage of drives optimized for next generation scale-out object storage (e.g. Seagate Kinetic)

“The explosion of unstructured data driven by today’s trends of social, mobile, the Internet of Things, and big data is hard to ignore. The legacy hardware- and new appliance-based systems are not designed to handle these sorts of workloads, data types and volumes. However, it has become the norm for the legacy vendors to keep chucking more hardware at the problem,” said Tarkan Maner, CEO, Nexenta. “Nexenta delivers the most comprehensive Software-Defined Storage portfolio on any hardware platform, across any type of protocol or workload. With today’s announcement of NexentaEdge we are extending our disruptive technology capabilities. Now, we are providing enterprises and cloud service providers with a state-of-the-art Software-Defined Solution portfolio delivering ultra-scale, performance and TCO from block and file to object storage on any platform and for any workload or app.“

NexentaEdge will be available worldwide in Q4 2014.

“Citrix CloudPlatform is a turn-key cloud orchestration solution based on an open and flexible architecture that can run every application workload at scale and with simplicity,” said Krishna Subramanian, VP marketing, cloud platform group, Citrix Systems, Inc. “NexentaEdge complements that philosophy with an object storage software solution that is both storage and network optimized for great performance. We are looking forward to making the power of NexentaEdge available to our global install base of CloudPlatform customers.“

“As a company at the forefront of the OpenStack movement, we are focusing on building the next generation of enterprise infrastructure that will support future cloud applications,” said Randy Bias, founder and CEO, Cloudscaling, Inc. “Object Storage will play a fundamental role in enabling that vision and is important for enterprises who need cost-effective petabyte scale storage for storage hungry applications. Delivering on innovation in the object storage space, NexentaEdge helps enterprises avoid vendor lock-in with proprietary hardware, reduce the cost of storage with deduplication, and manage 100s of petabytes with ease.“

“As the pure-play OpenStack vendor we work with companies globally to provide them with the right infrastructure,” according to Boris Renski, co-founder and CMO, Mirantis, Inc. “Customers are realizing that one of OpenStack’s greatest benefits is its openness and interoperability. By adding an open Software-Defined Storage solution to the stack, NexentaEdge creates a great solution to support scale-out storage that will underpin petabytes of data.“

“Software-Defined Storage is a core component of the hosting services that we provide to our clients across North America,” according to Chris Orlando, co-founder and CSMO, ScaleMatrix, Inc. “As our customers grapple with managing and storing unstructured data, object storage is becoming an important technology for us to have in our repertoire. NexentaEdge will be a perfect complement to our cloud, hosting and IaaS solutions for customers.”

“Seagate is delivering breakthrough innovation and economics in scale-out object storage, with our Seagate Kinetic Open Storage Platform,” according to Kaustubh Das, VP, advance storage solutions, Seagate Technology LLC. “This technology represents an opportunity to substantially address the inefficiencies of traditional data centers whose legacy architectures are poorly adapted to a world of exploding unstructured data and applications. NexentaEdge is a perfect complement to the Seagate Kinetic vision and we look forward to a continued partnership as both products come to market.”