Nexenta

I am still at CeBIT where we have had many, many end users and partners interested in, for the first time, being able to run software plus industry standard hardware and arrive at a solution noticeably superior to legacy solutions. Much of the interest this week may be prompted by our announcement of the addition of primary storage deduplication to NexentaStor. While this and other improvements grab the headlines, inside of Nexenta we know that it is the “boring” things that win and retain customers.

We have committed ourselves at Nexenta to becoming world class at providing enterprise class storage solutions in partnership with  storage and server channel partners who deliver total solutions comprised of NexentaStor, industry standard hardware, and services.  Being successful at this model requires training a lot of partners on such tasks as how to discover customer requirements and how to explain exactly how NexentaStor and OpenStorage can best address these needs.  And, of course, it means building a solution that requires little in the way of support and that is easy to support when support is required.  While customers want great features, they fundamentally require accurate and insightful information when they are considering alternatives and also when they are running their business on NexentaStor.

And getting that information to end users, via partners, is not always simple.  For example, I just had a software company partnered with SAP stop by and ask if he could use NexentaStor in a HA cluster to provide seamless failover to the VMs.  He had been told that he cannot by a partner who is one of the most technically advanced partners we have.  In fact he can - IF he uses shared storage.  He cannot (yet) have a completely seamless failover if the storage is NOT shared.  This was the confusion.

Thankfully - due to lots of work by our marketing and solutions teams and especially the partners themselves who collaborate extensively - the above case is the exception and not the rule.   A critical mass has been reached and best practices about NexentaStor and ZFS are better shared and understood than ever before.  Of course events like the training March 16-18th in Atlanta, Georgia help as well.

What do you think?  How are we doing at sharing useful information.  And how would you like Nexenta to share information about capabilities and requirements?  What approaches have you seen work well?

Thursday, the third day of five for me at CeBIT was busy enough to be a complete blur — the highlight of my day was probably visits by NexentaStor users from happy customers including Muegler, the University of Kiel, and TWM who just stopped by to chat. Our booth, C27 in Hall 2, is actually not on the busiest aisle which may be why at least 80-90% of the visitors to our booth were there specifically to see us.   We had 3 of us staffing the booth most of the time today and quite often we still had visitors waiting.

It has been quite a bit of fun to jointly staff the booth with partners including ZStor from Germany and Inprove from Holland.    We’re all getting tired — even those ‘locals’ lucky enough to not have my jet lag!  While I like other parts of my job, interacting with actual users and partners and seeing the day to day acceleration of the shift to open storage is tremendously energizing and frankly a bit more fun than many other parts of building a company.

It was also nice to see that Thomas Krenn’s team was both excited and perhaps a bit tired at the end of the day due to the relentless interest in NexentaStor in their booth, also in Hall 2.

A number of visitors to our booth were escorted over by Anil Gulecha, of the Nexenta Core Platform which also has a booth in Hall 2. Catching up with Anil and the quickly growing Nexenta open source community’s efforts has been another highlight — incidentally Anil’s trip to get here from Bangalore was even longer than my own from California.

This week several articles were written about the importance of NexentaStor 3.0 and OpenStorage.  Journalists like Beth Pariseau and especially Ulrike Rieß of Speicherguide have understood for a long time the newsworthiness of our rapid growth and innovative, open approach to the market.  However as you can see below the 451 Group and others dug in via discussions with us, and customers, and other experts in the field to provide their particular perspective.   With one or two exceptions the following are not press release reprints but instead articles written by journalists or analysts.  There are dozens of syndications or reprints that appeared this week as well.

First eight articles appearing in US press:

1. Nexenta Brings Primary Deduplication To Cloud Storage

By Matthew Weinberger

TheVarGuy

March 1, 2010

http://www.thevarguy.com/2010/03/01/nexenta-brings-primary-deduplication-to-cloud-storage/

2. Storage Vendor Offers In-Line Dedupe, Microsoft Hyper-V Support, Huge Margins

By Steve Wexler

ChannelInsider

March 1, 2010

http://www.channelinsider.com/c/a/Storage/Storage-Vendor-Offers-InLine-Dedupe-Microsoft-HyperV-Support-Huge-Margins-695071/

3. NexentaStor Adds Primary Deduplication

By Stephen Lawson

IDG News Service (Syndicated: PC World, Network World, TechWorld, CIO)

March 1, 2010

http://www.cio.com/article/560813/NexentaStor_Adds_Primary_Deduplication

4. Nexenta Pitches De-Deduplication-Enhanced ‘Open Storage’ for the Masses

By Henry Baltazar

The 451 Group

March 2, 2010

http://the451group.com/search/?keyword_filter=nexenta

5. Nexenta Debuts ZFS-based in-line deduplication

By Kevin Komiega

InfoStor Magazine

March 3, 2010

http://www.infostor.com/index/articles/display/articles/infostor/storage-management/data-de-duplication/2010/march-2010/nexenta-debuts_zfs-based.html

6. Nexenta Deduplicates ZFS

By Sharon Fisher

Network Computing

March 3, 2010

http://www.networkcomputing.com/deduplication/nexenta-deduplicates-zfs.php

7. Nexenta adds ZFS data deduplication to scale-out NAS systems

By Beth Pariseau

March 3, 2010

SearchStorage.com

http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/storage-soup/nexenta-adds-zfs-data-deduplication-to-scale-out-nas-systems/

8. Nexenta Unveils Gateway Deduplication for Tier 1 Storage

By Chris Preimesberger

eWEEK (Syndicated: BNET, EnterpriseTechBrief, Storage Biz-News)

March 3, 2010

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Data-Storage/Nexenta-Unveils-Gateway-Deduplication-for-Tier-1-Storage-434034/

And here are articles from European press specifically:

1. Nexentas backup kopplar till Hyper-V - Nexenta Backup Now With Hyper-V Support

By Tommy Engfors

TechWorld (SE)

March 2, 2010

http://www.idg.se/2.1085/1.298891/nexentas-backup-kopplar-till-hyper-v

2. Nexenta stellt Unified Storage System vor - Nexenta Introduces Unified Storage System

By Andrea Müller

Heise Open Source (GER)

March 2, 2010

http://www.heise.de/open/meldung/Nexenta-stellt-Unified-Storage-System-vor-943813.html

3. CeBIT 2010: Nexenta presents unified storage system

By Dj Walker-Morgan

The H Open (UK)

March 2, 2010

http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/CeBIT-2010-Nexenta-presents-unified-storage-system-944032.html

4. Storagevirtualisering får deduplikering - Storage Virtualization and Deduplication

By Torben B. Sørensen

IT-Dialog (DK)

March 2, 2010

http://it-dialog.dk/index.php/Software/storagevirtualisering-far-deduplikering.html

5. NexentaStor adds primary deduplication

CIO (GER) Syndication from CIO US article

March 2, 2010

http://www.cio.de/news/cio_worldnews/2226156/

6. NexentaStor 3.0 ermöglicht als erste Anwendung InLine-Deduplizierung für Primary Speicher - NexentaStor 3.0 is First to Offer In-Line Deduplication for Primary Storage

By Sebastian Cornley

Sebastian-Cornley.com Der private Blog von Sebastian Cornely (GER)

March 3, 2010

http://www.sebastian-cornely.com/nexentastor-3-0

7. CeBIT: Nexenta bandelt mit Thomas-Krenn an - CeBIT: Nexenta Partners With Thomas Krenn

By Engelbert Hörmannsdorfer

March 4, 2010

Virtualisierungs-guide.de (GER) Syndicated: Speicherguide.de (GER)

http://www.virtualisierungs-guide.de/default.aspx?tabid=150&articleType=ArticleView&articleId=12186

The Economist features this week an overview of the importance of information storage and management today and in the future.  You can see this special section here.

One graphic, shown above, probably warranted more discussion that it received in the special section.  What does it mean for all of us that our storage industry and storage technologies appear to be unable to keep up with the volume of information created?

How much longer will it take the necessary revolution in the price performance of medicine if we cannot close the storage gap?  What insights into effective (and not so effective) public policies will go unseen due to the storage gap?  How many billions of dollars will be wasted due to poorly targeted marketing and sales efforts due to this gap?

Our perspective at Nexenta is that the lock-in based legacy business model inevitably constrains supply of enterprise class storage.  Our mission is “enterprise class storage for everyone” and we think open approaches, like our own, are our only hope to closing the storage gap.

What do you think?

We’re exhibiting at CeBIT this week.  And so is the NCP, NexentaCore: www.nexenta.org.

NexentaStor is at:  CeBIT booth Hall 2, Stand C29

NexentaCore: located in the OpenSource Hall also in Hall 2.

If you are interested in stopping by and discussing OpenStorage, ZFS and NexentaStor please email us at marketing at nexenta.com .  We do have free passes available and will be happy to get them to you.