Nexenta Provides Soft Appliance With NAS/iSCSI Storage Management

The flagship offering from Nexenta Systems, NexentaStor, is deployed as a soft-appliance (or VMware-compatible machine) and, when installed, provides for the Enterprise a NAS/iSCSI storage appliance with features including support for unlimited incremental snapshots, block-level mirroring between storage appliances, archive search, and file-system-based virtualization features including thin provisioning and storage pooling (including the ability to pool I/O operations as well as the physical storage itself). The platform is targeted primarily to Tier-2 storage deployments.

At its core, the platform leverages the open source NexentaOS operating system (which in turn is based on the OpenSolaris kernel) and the ZFS file system, which itself supplies several of the virtualization features of the product. NexentaStor ships as a soft-appliance (downloadable or CD) that should be installed on a dedicated machine with hardware requirements similar to that of Solaris 10/OpenSolaris; or as a VMware image (playable on VMware Player, VMware Workstation and VMware Server).

Following installation, each NexentaStor appliance includes the following primary components (all reside on the appliance itself):

The Nexenta Management Server (NMS), which is the core engine that manages the storage itself. The NMS exposes a common and open API that is accessed and utilized by both the NMC and Web-based NMV (see below).
The Nexenta Management Console (NMC), a login-based command-line tool for advanced management tasks available from an attached keyboard/monitor or via SSH connections. The NMV can be used to manage a single appliance, multiple, or groups of appliances, and includes features such as command recording and replay (for the creation of task scripts that can be applied to one or more management servers), syntax and parameter validation, and more.
Nexenta Management View (NMV), a Web-based (GUI) higher-level management tool that provides storage and network views, user management, graphical stats, and the ability to perform common tasks. NMV is accessed via an encrypted (HTTPS) connection.

Additionally, the product includes a pair of Web-accessible GUI configuration wizards. SNMP-based management is also supported, as is E-mail-based alerting.

As mentioned earlier, NexentaStor is based in ZFS, which itself leverages a 128-bit addressing scheme and therefore enjoys support for unlimited snapshots (2 to the 48th power; automated or on-demand with support for retention policies) as well as unlimited file system sizes. Storage wise, data can be accessed via CIFS, NFS, rsync, FTP and iSCSI (iSCSI storage can be discovered and deployed), and stored on local drives (SCSI, SAS, SATA, etc.) or externally attached arrays (iSCSI, FC, Infiniband, etc.). Snapshot features include indexing and boolean search functions.

Other features include:

Single/double parity software RAID-0, 1, 5, 6 and combinations
Support for SAMBA and WebDAV
LDAP and Active Directory integration
Multiple data replication options, including snapshot-based file system copies; synchronization of a volume, file system, or emulated block device; and full, block-level CDP (remote mirroring).

NexentaStor is available in Developer, Basic and Enterprise versions.

The Developer edition is a free, fully functional download that supports only 1 TB of used storage (but unlimited amounts of attached storage); once the 1 TB limit is reached the data itself remains accessible but the management and functional aspects of the software (CLI, GUI, scheduled snapshots, automated reporting, etc.) will cease to function. Of course, no support is provided with the Developer Edition; but it can be upgraded to a Basic or Enterprise Edition as needed.

The Basic Edition is priced annually per TB, starting at 2 TB for $290. The Enterprise Edition is priced perpetually per storage controller.

Nexenta Systems