KT Using Nexenta

Nexenta Systems, Inc. announced that KT, the largest fixed-line operator and second largest mobile carrier in Korea, is using NexentaStor to power the largest public cloud in Asia.

KT officially launched its commercial public cloud service earlier this month. KT’s selection of NexentaStor as the storage standard for its public cloud is a signal to the market that OpenStorage solutions provide the price/performance ratio, scalability and interoperability that is impossible to achieve with legacy storage solutions.

The promise of cloud computing is that it can deliver the economies of scale and flexibility required to support a wide range of enterprise applications on demand. To achieve this goal, the building blocks in a cloud – servers, storage, networking gear – must be available in commodity markets in which there is real vendor choice and must be able to be deployed, configured and managed in an automated manner. Such open, flexible solutions have not been available for data storage, which has meant that the leading cloud companies have had to write their own software-based OpenStorage solutions since the hardware-based solutions from legacy vendors are too inflexible, expensive and difficult to manage, until now.

Nexenta’s widely available OpenStorage software running on top of commodity hardware drastically reduces storage costs, helping KT to be profitable while beating the market prices set by Amazon and other cloud service providers. In addition, NexentaStor-powered storage provides KT with the ability to provision, on demand, petabytes of high performance enterprise class storage by fitting into the automated provisioning and management systems used by KT and other cloud service providers.

"In a world in which data growth rates are exploding, innovative storage technologies have become the secret ingredient to rolling out public cloud services," said Jung-sik Suh, senior vice president, Cloud Services Business Unit, KT. "Translink Capital, a venture capital firm in the Bay Area, helped us conduct the due diligence of all existing storage solutions and selected Nexenta as the best partner for KT because NexentaStor was the leader in three crucial categories: scalability, interoperability and cost-effectiveness. With NexentaStor, KT was able to develop a public cloud within six months and at unprecedented low cost. Now, Nexenta is KT’s OpenStorage solution for both our private and public cloud offerings."

NexentaStor, which leverages the open source ZFS file system, is a supported commercial software package that runs on industry standard x86 servers and provides NAS and SAN capabilities including support for CIFS, NFS, iSCSI and Fiber Channel storage access. NexentaStor customers typically experience 75 percent or greater cost savings versus proprietary solutions as well as increased efficiency through compression, thin provisioning, deduplication and industry leading usage of hybrid storage pools that leverage SSDs plus disks to provide unmatched price/performance especially of the random work loads of virtualized and cloud environments. NexentaStor also offers other must-have capabilities for cloud deployments including Rest-APIs, boot from SAN, self-cloning from master configurations, high availability, synchronous and asynchronous replication and, most importantly, airtight end-to-end data integrity with the ability to find and detect silent data corruption.

"KT’s deployment of NexentaStor in their private and public clouds is an enormous validation of our technology and company and of the broader OpenStorage movement," said Evan Powell, CEO of Nexenta. "It signals that there is now a real alternative to ‘business as usual’ in storage and that breakthrough innovation is still possible despite the recent acquisition frenzy of legacy storage companies. KT’s public cloud performance and economics demonstrate that no other approach to storage can match the scale and flexibility of the commercially supported OpenStorage based NexentaStor. NexentaStor helps make it possible for public clouds to be financially viable for companies like KT that have massive scale and yet do not want to undertake the risk and cost of writing their own storage solution. We look forward to a long strategic relationship with our partners at KT."