INTRODUCTION      

INTRODUCTION

NexentaStor™ is a fully featured NAS/SAN software platform with capabilities that meet and even exceed the capabilities of legacy storage systems. NexentaStor's rapid development is due in great measure to the feedback and input of well over 10,000 NexentaStor™ users and the ongoing progress of the underlying OpenSolaris and Nexenta.org communities, each of which are estimated to have hundreds of thousands of members.

Packaging

NexentaStor™ is packaged flexibly:

• File system: NexentaStor™ can be installed as a filesystem on a wide variety of servers and server blades.
• Software Virtual Appliance: NexentaStor™ is packaged as a virtual appliance with other products such as VMware's virtualization products.
• Community Version: NexentaStor™ is also packaged into a Community version for community use and for hardware and software developers that want to embed the product or integrate with the product.

Enterprise-grade features

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 synchronous mirroring for your disaster recovery and remote backup requirements.

You can even use NexentaStor to create write-once, read many volumes, or WORM volumes. This can protect your data from accidental -- or intentional -- deletion.

There is no silver bullet that can guarantee the security and integrity of your data. 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

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. With legacy storage systems, enterprise storage administration teams can easily spend thousands of hours a year tracking storage usage and allocating storage in order to insure that everyone has enough storage without wasting scarce IT spending. As the dramatic shift towards virtualization in the server market has shown, IT professionals have better things to do with their time and their budgets and prefer solutions that virtualize the underlying resources. With NexentaStor provisioning headaches are cured at their source -- in the file system itself. The add-on volume management solutions required by Linux or legacy solutions are not necessary with ZFS based solutions.

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.

And, one benefit of NexentaStor's availability as software is that you can run it within VMware or other virtualized environments. Plus, Nexenta offers VM Data Center, which is one of the industry's leading solutions for the management of storage for virtualized environments.

Unique management capabilities

NexentaStor users have at their fingertips the ability to set up unlimited numbers of snapshots. We have 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. We have also added capabilities to enable the simple provisioning of hundreds of NexentaStor instances -- with more multi-system management capabilities under way.

For example, administrators can:

• Install and provision NexentaStor in under 5 minutes thanks to an innovative wizard
• Create, grow, destroy, export and import storage volumes
• Share (via NFS/CIFS/RSYNC/FTP) volumes and folders
• Take snapshots, custom and automated, periodic and on-demand
• Implement user-defined snapshot retention policies and tiering structures
• 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
• Drill into performance with the aid of real time DTrace statistics

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.

Also, all upgrades are automatically snapshotted, which means you can roll back to a prior version of NexentaStor very easily should you encounter a problem. Plus, we allow you to snapshot your system configurations which means that larger users can standardize and clone their common NexentaStor configurations.

Storage without limits

The Expanding Digital Universe and continuing explosive growth of disk based storage means that limitations to legacy storage systems are going to be critically important in the months and years to come.

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. These include:

• 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. Again, thanks to the legacy nature of many existing solutions, each file system is often limited to a relatively small amount of data stored. There are no such limits when you use NexentaStor.
• Scalability: the choice is yours. With a legacy vendor or even other vendors entering the OpenStorage market you need to purchase hardware from that vendor. With NexentaStor you can scale performance the same way that you scale performance of other applications --> by adding to hardware performance by increasing memory available or CPU performance or the number of targets available. You can do all of this as and when appropriate -- without paying Nexenta any additional funds.