Start-Up’s Profile: OS Nexus

Company
OS NEXUS, Inc.

Headquarters
Mercer Island, WA

Founded in
January 2010

Financial funding
Self-funded

Main executive

Steven Umbehocker, CEO and founder: former engineering director at Citrix, Symantec, and Veritas

Number of employees
5

Technology
OS NEXUS’s storage system OS, QuantaStor, was designed to address the
needs of public and private clouds. It supports multi-tenancy by
enabling administrators to create ‘storage clouds’ within the storage
system where each user, or group of users can be assigned to one or more
storage clouds and those users only see and can manage the storage
within storage cloud for which they are members. In this way each
storage cloud acts as a virtual storage array which can be assigned to
specific projects and resource limited via quotas.

QuantaStor also supports auditing and chargeback accounting through APIs
which provide cloud service providers a way of collecting the amount of
storage and I/O bandwidth utilized by each user and/or storage cloud.
 
Products description
QuantaStor is a SAN/NAS (iSCSI+NFS) storage system software which runs
on any 64-bit server hardware and can also be deployed as a virtual
machine under Hyper-V, XenServer, and VMWare. The underlying OS is
Linux-based, (Ubuntu Server 10) which makes it easy to update, maintain,
and customize. It features unlimited snapshots, compression,
thin-provisioning and remote replication.

How to install QuantaStor on You Tube

Platinum Edition includes remote replication and a higher storage cloud
limit and is designed for larger companies looking to do site-to-site
replication, cloud to local premises replication or vice versa.
Enterprise and Platinum Editions both support NFS whereas the Standard
Edition is iSCSI only.

Released date
September 2010. V1.4 available since December 3 with Upgrade Manager and
Recovery Manager. The company has run into some problems with its
current version of btrfs shipping with v1.3 and v1.4 AND is working on a
patch to address the issues.

Price range
Free for 2TB, $1,295 for 8TB and $149 per additional TB. Price of
support varies between $495 (Bronze) and $3,295 (Platinum) per year.

Roadmap
FC support (2Q11)
Amazon S3 backup (3Q11)
HA support 4Q11

Partners
Canonical, Fusion-io

Market
SME, media and entertainment, cloud service providers

Competitors
EMC, NetApp, HP, Nexenta