Nexsan and Vates Unveil Joint Solution for Secure, High-Performance Virtualized Workloads

Nexsan, a pioneer of highly reliable, cost-effective enterprise storage solutions, and Vates, an active company in open-source virtualization solutions, introduced a joint foundation for secure, seamless, high-performance virtualized workloads combining Vates Virtualization Management Stack (VMS) and Nexsan Unity enterprise unified storage.As organizations look for better alternatives to costly, closed virtualization ecosystems, Nexsan and Vates deliver a modern, scalable, and cost-effective infrastructure with Vates’ open-source hypervisor built on Xen architecture plus Nexsan’s on-premise storage for file, block, and/or S3 object storage, with comprehensive data protection. The joint solution offers flexibility, reliability, and long-term sustainability without complex licensing or proprietary platforms.

Vates VMS combines XCP-ng, a secure, Linux-based virtualization platform, and Xen Orchestra (XOA), its complete management and backup interface, for full enterprise-grade virtualization capabilities including live migration, HA, snapshots, and centralized management. Unity’s RAID-protected, high-throughput architecture, large cache memory, Fast-Tier acceleration, and multi-threaded I/O paths make the most of XCP-ng’s efficiency and serves even the most performance-intensive workloads. Integration and setup is frictionless because both platforms are Linux-friendly, standards-based, and API-driven, requiring no vendor-specific drivers or middleware.

Key features include:

Low-latency VM performance delivers consistent throughput for mixed workloads (VMs, databases, file servers, or backup targets)
Multipathing support to ensure balanced traffic across multiple network interfaces for maximum resilience and speed
Browser-based management consoles in XOA for virtualization and Unity Management GUI for storage give clear visibility from VM-level to infrastructure
Supports all standard protocols with full functional compatibility validated across iSCSI, NFS, and FC configurations with no custom plug-ins or complex configuration steps
No vendor-specific drivers or middleware required; attach Unity LUNs or shares directly to VMs or clusters using standard storage protocols
Shared architecture for VMs, backups, and cloud applications to reduce management overhead and storage sprawl
Enterprise-grade security through Unity’s built-in immutable snapshots that protect VM data from ransomware, cyberattack, or human interference
High availability/disaster recovery through native asynchronous replication to off-site storage resources, ideal for multi-site XCP-ng deployments
Optimize for performance and/or cost by tiering SSD to HDD or full NVME, thin provisioning, compression to maximize capacity, high-density chassis for industry-leading PB per rack.

“As virtualization and storage evolve beyond proprietary ecosystems, Vates VMS and Nexsan Unity represent a practical, future-proof platform for modern IT environments,” said Olivier Lambert, CEO, Vates. “Together, they provide the performance, resilience, and openness needed to power today’s virtual workloads, from the data centre to the edge.”

“If the goal is freedom from VM vendor lock-in with complex license models, validated enterprise reliability and interoperability, operational simplicity, data security and continuous availability, flexible scalability to multipetabyte-scale, and affordable entry cost plus long-term ROI, this joint solution should be on the shortlist,” said Vincent Phillips, CEO, Nexsan.

Nexsan Unity is a multi-protocol storage platform providing block, file, and object access (FC, iSCSI, NFS, SMB, S3) from a single, unified system. With intelligent tiering, snapshots, replication, and immutable data protection, Unity supports the entire VM lifecycle – from active workloads to long-term retention. Unity enterprise storage systems are available through Nexsan’s channel of industry-leading solution providers.