Nexenta Cloud Strategy

The Cloud can mean many things to many people. For some, it’s the ability to run an application “somewhere” on the Web. For others, it is “webtone”, the ability to use an elastic computational and storage resource when it is needed and where it is needed. For still others, it means the ability to have internal resources that can be shared with an enterprise with a minimum of management overhead.  For Nexenta, it means all this and more. Our strategy is to deliver rock-solid, high-performance storage where you won’t lose your data in the cloud. Ever.  For you, your business, your customers, or the world. We do this by providing critical infrastructure to both public and private cloud infrastructures.
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Elements of Cloud Storage

Data Sheet:
Nexenta Cloud Strategy: Unified Storage for Public or Private Cloud

Before we begin our discussion of public and private storage, it helps to understand that there are two fundamentally different kinds of cloud storage – storage for cloud compute and storage as a service.
The first is the storage sitting behind VMs, typically, running applications.  Using the AWS nomenclature, this is the storage for EC2 and elastic block storage.
The second is storage as a service accessed via object storage APIs. An example of a service doing this is Amazon S3.  Generally speaking the first type of storage for the cloud has significant performance challenges whereas the second is more about getting the data into the cloud and keeping it there safe, forever.

Public Cloud

Nexenta has many examples of delivering a cost-effective, scalable storage infrastructure that will never lose your data. Nexenta has done this for many service providers, large and small. You can click here to read about GridSouth Networks, LLC, a privately-owned Managed Service Provider, delivering high-capacity, high-performance grid networking, including 100 and 1000 Mbps Internet service, VMware vSphere Hosting, and managed Web hosting. Using NexentaStor, they were able to build a high-performance storage system that  gives the company the flexibility they needed for growth, while saving them up to 70% in procurement costs and more over time in lower total cost of ownership.

KT: Korea Telecom

A landmark example of how Nexenta participates in delivering public cloud services is KT, formerly known as Korea Telecom. KT is an integrated wired/wireless telecommunication service provider, with the largest portion of South Korea’s local telephone (95% of fixed line telephone subscribers) and high-speed Internet business.  KT wanted a solution that would complement its publically available Compute Service (CS) operations, where customers could use server resources within five minutes of sign-up. In particular, the company needed an OpenStorage solution that could run on standard hardware and provide extended functionality, such as de-duplication, compression, self-healing, synchronous and asynchronous replication, and HA cluster availability.
NexentaStor™ gave KT almost limitless future flexibility and scalability in performance and capacity. The scale-out architecture shifts the compute-intensive workloads into the storage tier, taking advantage of the underlying capabilities provided by the Intel Xeon processors. The capacity can be expanded cost-effectively using standard hard drives, while Intel SSDs provide accelerated read / writes where performance targets are more demanding.
In the final analysis, with NexentaStor’s help, KT was able to deliver cloud services to its customers at half the cost of Amazon.  As far as we know, KT is the only telco in the world that has beaten Amazon at its own game, with a less expensive set of solutions, matching almost all of the web services offered by Amazon.

Private Cloud

Nexenta also supports some of the largest private clouds in the world. At a large US financial services company, Nexenta provides more than 2PB for a wide array of internal Cloud Services, including API-generated VM provisioning. They also are using storage for a huge Microsoft Exchange implementation, as well as a substantial Disaster Recovery site.
We are particularly proud of our work with VMware.  VMware has brought cloud to the enterprise through a set of solutions that dramatically improve the flexibility of IT.  We have developed a number of ties into VMware’s proprietary APIs.  The combination of the resulting ease of use plus our innate ability to serve IO quickly and cost-effectively we believe delivers an impossible to match solution for VMware based hosting.
Customers like VMware seem to agree – we’re proud to have been one of three vendors that VMware used to host the very intensive workload of VMworld’s Hands on Lab in 2011.
Whether it is a storage infrastructure for backup of a private cloud, a platform for creating and managing Virtual Machines, or a Disaster Recovery site for your private cloud, Nexenta has delivered a solution in this space. See our case studies for more information.

NexentaStor: Storage Engine for Public Cloud, Private Cloud, Any Cloud

So how does NexentaStor deliver all this value to companies building out a public or private cloud? It is able to do this by providing a Unified Storage Environment.  NexentaStor can deliver storage services in any of the major network storage protocols, either as NAS or SAN. It supports all the major protocols needed to deliver a storage infrastructure; this includes NFS, CIFS, WebDAV, FTP, iSCSI and Fibre Channel. In order to handle the scale needed by Cloud Providers, NexentaStor is based on the award winning ZFS technology.
Running on any industry standard hardware, NexentaStor helps organizations implement high-performance, yet cost-effective data storage solutions with features such as inline deduplication, unlimited snapshots and cloning, unlimited file size, and high-availability support. In addition, NexentaStor functionality includes full integration with virtualization approaches, even in mixed vendor environments. This solution creates shared pools of storage from any combination of storage hardware supporting a public or private cloud, including SSDs, and while delivering end-to-end data integrity, integrated search, and inline virus scanning. NexentaStor also enables efficient one-click virtual machine and other storage provisioning. For more information, see the NexentaStor product page.

Web link: http://www.nexenta.com/