NEXENTA SYSTEMS Inc. 

Enterprise Class Open Storage

NexentaStor provides enterprise class unified storage capabilities via a software solution that ends vendor lock-in while delivering superior storage management functionality with a particular focus on virtualized environments.

Nexenta 3.1

This new version of NexentaStor pushes past legacy storage solutions with massive savings and superior functionality:

• Enhanced Auto-Sync functionality provides the ability to synchronize to multiple destinations.
• Provides support for VMware’s vStorage API for Array Integration, which improves host CPU utilization in VMware environments.
• Increased performance, improved disaster recovery, and expanded hardware support.

NexentaStor 3.1 already incorporates ZFS-based, inline deduplication, a giant leap forward for the storage industry. NexentaStor 3.1 carries all the functionality of past versions but additionally focuses on Total Product Safety and Performance & Optimization. NexentaStor 3.1 includes an upgrade to VM Data Center to support Microsoft Hyper-V, making it the only storage management solution for virtualized environments to support all major virtualization vendors. With this release, NexentaStor continues to build on its position as the superior alternative to expensive, vertically integrated, proprietary storage technologies.

With NexentaStor 3.1, customers can advance their storage solutions with new functionalities, improved optimization, and an easy and cost-efficient growth plan. NexentaStor 3.1 extends functionality by focusing on two key critical areas: Total Product Safety and Performance & Optimization.

Total Product Safety

With NexentaStor 3.1, users quickly can administer a Golden Image (i.e., best configuration). With this feature, users can revert to known good configurations so as to help eliminate manual errors while configuring / reconfiguring systems. (More than half of all service tickets arise from incorrect configurations.) The system proactively sends alerts to IT administrators when configuration deviates from the Golden Image. These features deliver added benefits including:

• Administer a standard configuration quickly and then easily return to that image if manual or human errors occur while reconfiguring the system. This run-book automation simplifies the process of deploying NexentaStor.
• Proactive and automated alert mechanisms that notify IT administrators when the system configuration deviates from standard configuration, providing early warning of deviations from desired run-book configurations.

Performance & Optimization

With NexentaStor 3.1, users now can reserve pool space, ensuring that once they have reached their maximum limit of space, work does not stop. With this performance upgrade, users never run out of space accidentally, allowing for work continuation without disruption.

Nexenta 3.1 also reduces the amount of storage required in VDI deployments by providing SCSI UNMAP as a client-side feature that frees up storage in the back end, in the context of thin provisioning.

Nexenta 3.1 now enables synchronization to multiple destinations, thereby allowing users to do site-to-site replications across disparate destinations. It improves optimization by supporting CIFS cross-forest (groups of clients) trust. Other new features include SCSI Target Optimization, CIFS opportunity locking / client-side caching, and device drivers / I/O subsystems / virtual memory sub.

Benefits of the upgraded Performance & Optimization features include:

• Quickly replicate between different data centers asynchronously through the use of a new Layer 5 multi-connection, multi-destination, multi-pathing protocol, which ties together many replication streams to achieve industry-leading throughput.
• Support of metro cluster or stretch cluster deployments, and the capability to provide real-time failover between active/active clusters in different geographies up to 30 miles apart.
• Reserve space for future growth of physical and thin provisioned volumes, ensuring that users can operate with a storage buffer when storage capacity demands peak unexpectedly.
• Augment NexentaStor’s existing support for the CIFS standard, which is widely used by Nexenta’s customers to connect Windows machines to NexentaStor by incorporating support for cross forest trust and through more than 100 minor enhancements and fixes.

Improve the utilization of your VMware ESX/ESXi 4.1 and later servers.
NexentaStor 3.1 fully supports VAAI, VMware's vStorage API for Array Integration. This enables a number of storage-related operations, such as initializing a virtual disk and cloning a virtual machine, to be offloaded from the ESX/ESXi host to the array controller. Offloading operations from the ESX/ESXi host means extra CPU cycles for your applications improving the overall utilization of your server.
 

·R Reduce storage requirements in VDI deployments
by freeing up space at the back end through SCSI UNMAP, allowing for the shrinking of thin provisioned volumes. Combined with cloning and inline deduplication and compression, some users have seen more than a 100-to-one reduction in space for VDI when using NexentaStor.

These capabilities are leveraged to their fullest in the Nexenta Virtual Machine Datacenter (VMDC) 3.0 release based on NexentaStor 3.1. With its new support for Microsoft Hyper-V, NexentaStor 3.1 is the only product to support VMware, Citrix Xen, and Hyper-V from a single point within one unified environment—VMDC. VMDC allows storage administrators to see their entire virtual environment and to provision storage and storage policies, including backup, replication, and retention policies from a simple point-and-click interface.

Both NexentaStor and VMDC run on industry standard hardware, a fundamental pillar of Open Storage, which drive costs significantly lower than proprietary solutions. Cost savings are considerable upfront, at initial purchase, and even greater over time as customers can purchase capacity expansions from the market for industry standard hardware, as opposed to being locked-in to the outrageous costs of expanding legacy storage. Further, by making storage and virtualization management more efficient, NexentaStor with VMDC also reduces operational costs.

Simplify the management of your disk storage.
NexentaStor 3.1 introduces the ability to manage disks and JBOD's using either the command line or NexentaStor Management Viewer (NMV). With this capability, customers can more easily identify disk drives and monitor their disk environment. In addition, select JBOD's are integrated with NMV providing the user a graphical view of the their storage enclosure and disks with real-time led status.

VMDC Support for Microsoft Hyper-V

All the NexentaStor capabilities are leveraged to their fullest in the Nexenta Virtual Machine Datacenter (VMDC) 3.1 release based on NexentaStor 3.1. With its new support for Microsoft Hyper-V, NexentaStor is the only product to support VMware, Citrix Xen and Hyper-V from a single point within one unified environment, VMDC. VMDC allows storage administrators to see their entire virtual environment and to provision storage and storage policies including backup, replication and retention policies from a simple point and click interface.

Industry Standard Hardware

Both NexentaStor and VMDC run on industry-standard hardware, a fundamental pillar of Open Storage, which drives dramatically lower costs than proprietary solutions; cost savings are considerable upfront, at initial purchase, and even greater over time as customers are able to purchase capacity expansions from the market for industry standard hardware as opposed to being locked-in to the outrageous costs of expanding legacy storage. Further, by making storage and virtualization management more efficient, NexentaStor with VMDC also reduces operational costs.

Storage Without Limits

A storage system built upon 32bit addressing is never going to be as flexible and scalable as one built upon a 128bit system. So NexentaStor, thanks in part to the use of ZFS, has a number of advantages vs. legacy and Linux or BSD based solutions.

Unlimited Snapshots

With the exponential increase in the amount of data stored, snapshots need to become more granular if they are going to be able to be restored in a timely manner. Legacy solutions are limited to up to 255 snapshots. By comparison, NexentaStor can accommodate 2 to the 48th snapshots. This means you can run hourly snapshots, for example, on all of your data which in turn means that you can restore in a timely manner and that the incremental amounts sent over the network can be smaller than daily updates.

Unlimited File System Size

Due to the underlying ZFS filesystem NexentaStor what equates to an Unlimited file systems size that can be managed as a single namespace.

Multi-level Data Protection

NexentaStor protects your organization's data with features and capabilities ranging from the most granular, per transaction data integrity checks to higher level backup and disaster recovery capabilities. Every read or write made by NexentaStor utilizes ZFS data integrity. To avoid accidental and silent data corruption ZFS provides end-to-end checksumming and transactional copy-on-write IO operations. These operations eliminate the 'write-holes' and silent data corruption that have plagued storage solutions that are not based on ZFS.

At a higher level, NexentaStor enables you to protect your data through a range of backup and replication capabilities including unlimited incremental snapshot capabilities. Most legacy vendor solutions are limited to 255 snapshots, which limits your freedom when setting up backup and protection schemes for your data. Other open source based solutions offer at most one or two incremental snapshots since Linux based snapshots will spike your CPU with each additional snapshot spiking your CPU that much more.

NexentaStor also offers block-level mirroring via our CDP feature. Now you can easily set up real time mirroring for your disaster recovery and remote backup requirements. By using NexentaStor you are using an advanced file system, with superior data integrity features, as well as a complete variety of replication, backup and mirroring capabilities to reduce and even eliminate the risk of loosing your organization's data.

Inherent Virtualization

The purpose built VM DataCenter 1.1 plugin simplifies the management of VMware Infrastructure, and specifically ESX and related storage policies, with NexentaStor. This pluggable optional module integrates seamlesly into the NexentaStor web GUI, and provides a single point of control to manage all storage related aspects of a VMware based Data Center.

Capabilities include:

• Establish storage policies, including scheduled backups and replication, for each VM data    set from one user interface
• Perform common VM management tasks such as starting and stopping VMs
• Use templates to clone VMs at a fraction of the time of cloning within VMware

The optional VM DataCenter module makes it simple for storage administrators to leverage the full power of NexentaStor's replication and other capabilities while also enabling them to perform common VM management tasks from the same interface.

NexentaStor is built from the ground up on the revolutionary file system ZFS which means that virtualization is at the core of NexentaStor. This virtualization enables thin provisioning and also improves performance via I/O pooling.

Storage pooling via ZFS also enables I/O pooling. This means that when you add more disks or systems to NexentaStor the overall solution accelerates. Please work with your certified partner for your particular use case, but across a range of data characteristics ZFS has been shown to outperform legacy file systems including UFS.

Integrated Search and General Ease of Use

NexentaStor users have at their fingertips the ability to set up unlimited numbers of snapshots. Included indexing and boolean search in order to enable the management of these snapshots. Using NexentaStor search storage administrators can easily find the content within files that they need to access. NexentaStor provides a graphical and console interface for centralized management of NexentaStor instances.

For example, administrators can:

• Install and provision Storage in under 5 minutes
• Create, grow, destroy, export and import storage volumes
• Share (via NFS/CIFS/RSYNC/FTP and HTTP) volumes and folders
• Take snapshots, custom and automated, periodic and on-demand
• Implement user-defined snapshot retention policies
• These policies can include Write Once, Read Many policies with the use of the optional 'WORM' module
• Automatically and periodically generate storage and service reports
• Manage the performance of the system and integrate the system into SNMP based management solutions
• Discover, configure, and create iSCSI sessions, deploy iSCSI-attached LUNs, and much more
• Establish fail-over groups with the use of the optional High Availability, 'HA', module.
• Indicate SSDs are available and then watch as NexentaStor automatically pulls the appropriate data onto the SSDs

The NexentaStor management suite includes the NexentaStor Management View, which is a web-based GUI, the NexentaStor Management Console, which includes wizards and the ability to record and replay commands across all deployed NexentaStor instances, and the NexentaStor Storage API, which is a fully documented network based API.

Full Management and Reporting

Nexenta provides appliances with a number of standard pluggable modules that perform essential Fault Management, Performance Monitoring and Reporting functions.

• Memory and CPU utilization
• State and status of appliance's hardware, including physical disks
• State and status of appliance's services and facilities
• Storage services
• NFS statistics
• Network utilization reporting
• State and operational status of the Nexenta Management Server.

NAS are a fully certified channel partner for Nexenta Systems Inc and we supply the full portfolio of Nexenta’s software solutions.