New Customers for Nexenta

UK Nexenta Systems announced that a number of customers are selecting Nexenta-powered storage solutions to achieve high availability (HA) driven by the features of ZFS and the NexentaStor HA Cluster Plug-in.

Five exemplary customers, CADENAS, Impulse Advanced Communications, Intermountain Electronic, Inc., Minerva Networks and the Workers Compensation Board of Manitoba (WCB) are supporting mission critical and highly available applications using Nexenta’s OpenStorage solutions, an alternative to legacy storage vendors. With Nexenta, enterprise organisations can implement cost-effective, high performance storage by utilising NexentaStor features including in-line deduplication, unlimited snapshots, thin provisioning and high-availability clustering.

CADENAS GmbH
As a developer of standard software that specialises in strategic parts management and process chain optimisation for companies, CADENAS GmbH has thousands of engineers that rely on the availability of its web service ‘PARTserver Community’ for consistent access to data. CADENAS utilises NexentaStor HA Cluster Plug-in to provide data access for their growing customer base. The NexentaStor HA Cluster Plug-in enables NexentaStor instances to be configured as an active/active pair. When installed and configured, each instance of NexentaStor is able to perform all regular functions while providing high availability for shared storage accessible from both appliances. The purpose of HA Cluster is to eliminate as a single point of failure the NexentaStor instances themselves. As a result, NexentaStor HA Plug-in delivers available data to CADENAS’s customers.

Impulse Advanced Communications
Impulse Advanced Communications is service provider, which designs voice and data networks that support companies’ growth. As an IT service provider, high-availability data storage was imperative to make data accessible to Impulse customers around the clock. When Impulse calculated that they would max out their existing storage, the company decided to evaluate other storage solutions that would mitigate costs and provide better, more robust data management software than the technology offered by NetApp and EMC.
 
"To meet our storage growth, we were faced with replacing our existing EMC appliance. We compared the purchase price of a new Nexenta, NetApp, or EMC SAN, and the Nexenta solution met our requirements and actually provided better functionality with an upfront cost savings of over 33 percent," said Jessie Bryan, director of Systems Engineering at Impulse Advanced Communications. "Also, we expect to realise a 50 percent savings on annual maintenance fees and projected storage expansion."
 
Intermountain Electronics, Inc.
Intermountain Electronics, Inc. (IE), designs, engineers, manufactures, and services custom electrical distribution and control equipment for mining, power generation, refineries, utility providers and all levels of government. This intensive industrial design and manufacturing requires a robust data storage solution to support it. As one of the fastest growing companies in Utah, IE needed a storage solution with highly available data that enabled multiple users to access it at the same time from different devices. After evaluating Dell, EqualLogic and LeftHand Networks, IE selected Nexenta for its feature set, high availability, performance and price point.
 
Minerva Networks
Minerva Networks, in IP television management, developed a forward-looking storage strategy that required a high-end, high-speed, high-availability system. At the time, they were using NetApp’s FAS2020 pre-configured storage system – an entry-level solution primarily designed for small-to-mid-size organizations that they were quickly outgrowing. Minerva knew they needed to upgrade their internal IT infrastructure to keep up with double-digit sales growth and they liked the flexibility of NAS for backup purposes. More importantly, Minerva wanted to achieve very fast IOPS (up to 100,000 in production). Minerva considered upgrading its NetApp system to one that could handle such fast IOPS, however, the price was cost prohibitive. Minerva instead chose NexentaStor to effectively manage their data growth at a price they could afford.

Workers Compensation Board of Manitoba
The WCB administers both compulsory and optional no-fault insurance for workplace injuries to workers and employers in the Canadian province. WCB is mandated to keep track of critical data regarding compensation. In order to protect this data in the event of an emergency, the WCB backs up their data on a secondary storage tier. When considering different options for storage, the WCB knew they needed a cost-effective solution that provided reliable, customisable and easy-to-use backup features to close the disparity between virtual data infrastructure and their primary operating system, which Nexenta provided. Now, if disaster strikes, the WCB can switch to its backup NexentaOS servers and be up and running with only a short break in data accessibility.
 
"Within the last 12 months, enterprises in a variety of markets have replaced their legacy storage infrastructures with far more advanced ones based on Nexenta’s OpenStorage solutions," said Evan Powell, CEO, Nexenta. "This significant shift from high-priced proprietary technologies to cost-effective, open systems is one of the most significant events in the enterprise IT market in the last five years, and we will continue to drive the industry forward with storage solutions that put the power of choice in the hands of the customer."