Nexenta launches ‘revolutionary’ Software-Defined Scale Out Object Storage solution

Object storage is increasingly taking center stage as a required storage option to support emerging cloud-based and Big Data applications. Breaking with the constraints of legacy enterprise storage, modern object stores are specifically designed to run on extremely low cost shared nothing clusters and present all capacity as one single pool. Key characteristics include scaling to virtually unlimited sizes while remaining easy to manage and highly resilient to device and node failures. IDC forecasts that worldwide revenue for file-based and object-based storage will reach $38 billion by 2017, a 65% increase from the estimated $23 billion revenue in 2013. Even more significantly, IDC forecasts total capacity shipments for file and object storage to reach 173 exabytes by 2017, more than four times the capacity shipped in 2013.

"The challenge for IT decision makers is that the growth in unstructured data is placing huge pressure on already tight IT budgets," said Ashish Nadkarni, Storage Systems Research Director, IDC. "File-based and object-based solutions are much more versatile and will quickly outpace more rigid, hardware-based options. Software-based storage solutions based on commodity hardware platforms will lead the charge in the file- and object-based storage market."

NexentaEdge is a new scalable solution that helps enterprises store and manage the growing amount of unstructured data including film, medical images, graphic designs and cloud backup/archive. The solution allows users to store any amount of data in a single, highly available repository with industry leading TCO thanks to inline data deduplication functionality.

Complementing the existing NexentaStor solution, NexentaEdge 1.0 features include:
• Industry-standard x86 server utilization running Ubuntu or Red Hat Linux
• iSCSI Block, Cinder, Swift and S3 Object APIs
• Scale out, shared nothing architecture of any scale
• Always on, high performance global inline deduplication and compression
• Continuous real-time optimization of performance and capacity utilization
• Network optimization to reduce bandwidth requirements and avoid congestion
• Self-healing capabilities using strong cryptographic hashing to guarantee data integrity
• Designed to take advantage of key/value drives optimized for next generation scale-out object storage (e.g. Seagate Kinetic)

"The explosion of unstructured data driven by today's trends of social, mobile, the Internet of Things, and Big Data is hard to ignore. The legacy hardware- and new appliance-based systems are not designed to handle these sorts of workloads, data types and volumes. However, it has become the norm for the legacy vendors to keep chucking more hardware at the problem," said Tarkan Maner, CEO at Nexenta. "Nexenta delivers the most comprehensive Software-Defined Storage portfolio on any hardware platform, across any type of protocol or workload. With today's announcement of NexentaEdge we are extending our disruptive technology capabilities. Now, we are providing enterprises and cloud service providers with a state-of-the-art Software-Defined Solution portfolio delivering ultra-scale, performance and TCO from block and file to object storage on any platform and for any workload or app."