Japanese GMO Internet Group Adopting Nexenta

Nexenta Systems, Inc. announced that GMO Internet, Inc. (GMO), a Japanese internet services provider, has chosen NexentaStor to support its international data center and hosting expansion.

The announcement coincided with OpenStack Summit Tokyo where developers, cloud computing specialists, IT decision makers and others in the region came together to be informed about the latest developments and practical implementations of OpenStack cloud software.

Alongside its portfolio of ecommerce, security and payment solutions, GMO is responsible for developing and operating Japan’s most used domain and cloud solutions. As such, GMO must continually innovate to maintain its lead in the country’s competitive hosting market – and maintaining the premium quality of its Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) ‘ConoHa‘ is integral to this. However, to meet growing demand from customers for foreign data center services – with performance and extra functionality like redundancy and load balancing built-in – GMO realised that its traditional appliance storage simply could not deliver on this, nor do so at a competitive price.

To deliver an advanced distributed storage system at a reasonable cost, GMO selected NexentaStor – for its all-flash, multi-site and backup HDD storage capabilities – and coupled it with Dell PowerEdge R720xd. The fact that NexentaStor is also integrated with the OpenStack Cinder driver – and so maximizes hardware performance for storage services with SSDs – was another key contributory factor in GMO’s decision making process.

“We were confident that NexentaStor could meet our requirements. Indeed, Dell and Nexenta already support reference architectures that deliver on enterprise requirements like ours,” said Naoto Gohko, chief executive architect, GMO. “Equally, there’s good alignment between OpenStack advancement and how we want to improve our cloud services. We plan to build on this success by working with Nexenta to increase OpenStack integration and expand our business, offering our customers advanced features and great services, including expanding our data centers into other countries.“

GMO has also leveraged the OpenStack API to build ConoHa’s easy-to-use control panel. Mailing and database services in ConoHa are also based on the company’s customized OpenStack implementation, and the company plans to expand its services offering by leveraging its OpenStack engineering skills. Another positive outcome is that one service based on ConoHa enables video streaming on smartphones – initially, GMO thought it would need a CDN deployment for the video streaming service, but once it deployed NexentaStor it discovered NexentaStor performance was enough on its own.

“NexentaStor gives GMO a flexible and scalable architecture that can be easily expanded to meet the needs of its customers today and tomorrow,” explained Tarkan Maner, chairman and CEO, Nexenta. “OpenStack integration is essential for any business looking to expand its cloud and datacenter offering – making the integration of advanced features and services easier than ever before. We’re delighted to be working with GMO.“

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