Start-Up’s Profile: Nexenta Systems

Company
Nexenta Systems, Inc.

Location
Headquarters in Mountain View, CA; office in NYC, NY and The Woodlands, TX; competency centers in Dresden, Germany, and Krasnodar, Russia

Date founded
2005

Financial funding
Half million dollar in seed funding and then $6 million raised from investors in the U.S. and Europe (Javelin Venture Partners, FINAVES, Translink Capital)

Revenues
Y/Y revenue increased 385% from 2009 to 2010; channel partners sold between $70-100 million of hardware using NexentaStor software component of the storage solution; total value of solutions sold based upon NexentaStor is projected to increase to $400 million in 2011.

Main executives

• Evan Powell, CEO: most recently founding CEO and then VP of marketing and business development at Clarus Systems; prior to that an early employee at ThinkLink, where he was director of business development; formerly helped build Working Assets
• Alex Aizman, CTO and co-founder: co-creator of the iSCSI stack that was accepted into the Linux kernel, mid 2005, with Dmitry Yusupov (see below); both also built the hybrid operating system Nexenta Core Platform with an OpenSolaris kernel and a GNU (Ubuntu/Debian) user space; formerly director of software architecture at Neterion, and director of software engineering at Silverback Systems (acquired by Brocade)
• Dmitry Yusupov, VP software, co-founder: previously also at Neterion and Silverback Systems
• Jon Ash, VP sales: most recently VP sales at Storwize and MaXXan
• Rick Hayes, VP technical ops: previously principal consultant for the data center practice at GlassHouse Technologies; was director of global services at MaXXan
• Brad Stone, VP product management: co-founder of MenloWare and CTO at Resonate
• Jason Yoho, VP business development: CEO of Quail Technologies and VP business development at Active Reasoning

≠ of employees
150

Technology
Its core storage platform, Nexenta NexentaStor is a software-only storage OS based on Linux and a storage-optimized file system based on the OpenSolaris / Open Storage ZFS file system.  Products built on top of this platform provide capabilities in managing multi-vendor environments, efficiencies in storage administration and management, and core storage capabilities for content management and compliance.

Products

• NexentaStor: Foundation for Nexenta products, it is required for all other products. Pricing is based on the amount of storage managed and the level of support desired (gold – see below – or silver). There are two free and one commercial versions.
• Nexenta Applications: They improve the management of storage or leverage the capabilities of other products. For example, Nexenta Pomona provides policy-based storage management capabilities that improve management across the entire Nexenta infrastructure. Also, the VM DataCenter Plugin simplifies the management of storage for VMware ESX servers and for Xen servers.
• Nexenta Plugins: They provide add-on capabilities to the core storage platform. These capabilities can include improved operation with virtualization vendors and high availability. For example, the Target 2.0 Plugin enables users to create block storage (iSCSI or FC) that can be accessed over a storage network by SCSI initiators.
• Nexenta Adapters: They provide additional functionality and integration with third-party products. They can inter-operate independently from Plugins but also can provide enhanced functionality. For example, the Adapter for Citrix StorageLink can operate independently of the VMDC application but would be of a value when both the application and the adapter are installed together.
• Implementation Services: To facilitate installation and customization of Nexenta products.

Price
The NexentaStor Enterprise Gold Edition with perpetual license and one-year support varies between $1,900 to manage 4TB to $23,500 for 128TB

Roadmap
Nexenta 3.1 in 2Q11 following 3.0 released in March 2010

≠ of customers
Roughly 1,000 customers and 3,000 commercial deployments

Partners
145 companies are members of the Nexenta Reseller Partner Program with firms like Enigma Networks, Core Micro, Nitech, TrustIT, next-IQ, Nemco, Datasy, and E4 Computer Engineering. Technology partners include cloud management software vendors Abiquo, Mezeo and Desktone, SSD makers Intel, LSI, Pliant, STEC and DDRDrive, as well as Pogo Linux, server manufacturer Supermicro, and storage firms Aberdeen LLC, Dell/Compellent and ONStor.

Customers
The firm added almost 1,000 additional customers in 2010. Among them are CADENAS, Max Plank Institute and Porsche Motors in Germany, Dutch National Broadcasting and Motek Entertainment in the Netherlands, dozens of customers in the UK including Bounty and Trend Micro, ITCORE in Japan and maybe the biggest one, KT in Korea. In USA, Nexenta has hundreds of users including Disney, Ford, NOA, Citrix, Impulse Advanced Communications, Intermountain Electronics, Juniper, Minerva Networks, Workers Compensation Board of Manitoba, and dozens of universities and hosting companies. Approximately 330PB of capacity are currently under NexentaStor management, with over 100PB in commercial deployments.

Competitors
EMC and NetApp