NexentaStor 2.0 Used by Kenworth Sales

Nexenta Systems, Inc. announced the experience of another NexentaStor user, Kenworth Sales Corporation, provider of sales and services for shipping firms based in the Midwestern United States. Kenworth Sales recently expanded their NexentaStor deployment so that NexentaStor is their primary storage for all email and XenVm servers.

Kenworth Sales first used NexentaStor in the Spring of 2008 as one of the first commercial customers of NexentaStor. Over time their usage has expanded with additional capabilities and additional storage managed by NexentaStor. NexentaStor is an hardware independent OpenStorage solution, providing complete NAS and SAN capabilities from a software solution that is available directly from Nexenta or from a variety of partners globally who sell NexentaStor on particular hardware platforms.

Ben Bliss, Infrastructure/Network Engineer at Kenworth Sales, said: "We’ve been able to grow our NexentaStor deployment seamlessly and on our own terms thanks to the freedom from vendor lock-in that using a hardware independent OpenStorage solution like NexentaStor delivers. We really like the ease of management, especially when it comes to managing storage for our virtualized environments. We have been unable to find comparable solutions, where you get NFS, FC, iSCSI and NAS all in one license plus simple management of storage for virtualized environments. And we believe we have achieved over 75% savings versus legacy proprietary hardware-based NAS and SAN alternatives."

Kenworth Sales recently upgraded to NexentaStor 2.0 at no additional cost as an existing Nexenta customer. NexentaStor 2.0 marked the second release of VM Data Center, an optional module for NexentaStor that assists in the management of storage for virtualized environments, as well as a number of other additional capabilities.

The optional module VM Data Center is playing an especially important role for Kenworth Sales. Again, Ben Bliss from Kenworth Sales reports: "With the NexentaStor VM Data Center module we can very simply establish and manage storage policies for our virtualized environments. For example, we want certain virtual machines to be protected via 3 way mirror schemes and via on and off site replication. We establish all of that via VM Data Center and if we move the virtual machines the storage policies follow the VMs around." Today’s storage administrators are faced with the challenge of tying storage policies to particular virtual machines – without a solution like VM Data Center such granularity of control is not possible.

Evan Powell, CEO of Nexenta Systems, said: "OpenStorage and Nexenta will continue to succeed to the extent that our customers and free users continue to say good things about their experience with NexentaStor. We’re extremely happy that Kenworth Sales continues to expand their usage of NexentaStor, particularly because they are an example of an early customer that has expanded their use of NexentaStor over time."