Nexenta Systems, the leader in OpenStorage solutions, today 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 clear 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 a fully 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.”