Nexenta Announces Availability of Open Source Software Defined Storage Platform NexentaEdge

At the Vancouver OpenStack summit, software-defined storage company Nexenta announced the general availability of its NexentaEdge Block and Object Storage platform, as well as a strategic alliance agreement with Canonical and its Ubuntu OpenStack.

NexentaEdge was launched late last summer, as a scale out object storage solution with high performance block, swift, and S3 object services. Running on Intel-powered commodity servers, the Open Source-driven Software Defined Storage (OpenSDS) offering from Nexenta is optimized for big data, OpenStack clouds, and petabyte scale object based active archives.

Citing the disruptive power of those environments Nexenta Chief Product Officer Thomas Cornely said that "OpenStack clouds in particular require both high performance block services and extremely scalable object repositories." Cornely added that his company "is unique in its ability to concurrently meet these requirements and further drive down storage costs with inline deduplication and compression of all data at any scale."

Nexenta is reportedly close to being ready for an IPO in the next year or so, and has taken investments from SanDisk in 2013, and Dell last year.

Nexenta also jointly announced its strategic alliance agreement with Canonical, which will allow Canonical’s Ubuntu OpenStack customers to benefit from Nexenta’s full spectrum of OpenSDS products for their large scale private and hybrid clouds. The two companies said that they will build solutions that benefit large-scale Ubuntu OpenStack deployments on OpenSDS instances. Nexenta also joined the Canonical Charm Partner Program and will support the Juju service model from Canonical.

Helping to push the software defined storage disruption and greater adoption, Canonical launched Ubuntu Advantage Storage at the OpenStack summit - with metered pricing based on data stored, independent of total storage capacity deployed. The offering features NexentaEdge, as well as Ceph, Swift and SwiftStack. Canonical works with vendors to help leverage OpenStack clouds built on Ubuntu and the Canonical OpenStack distribution and said that user requested features are available in open source SDS technologies, such as scale-out management, RDMA transport enablement, support for SSD and NVMe acceleration, and flexible cache tiering.

"OpenStack deployments come with radical storage requirements," said Thomas Cornely, Chief Product Officer at Nexenta. "By partnering with Canonical on Ubuntu Advantage Storage, NexentaEdge delivers its streamlined architecture and unique functionality – inline deduplication, smart placement, and extremely high data integrity — in a production-ready, fully-supported package that addresses the storage needs of the most demanding cloud deployments while bringing new options to OpenStack administrators."