News

Open Source Software-Defined Storage Backs New Hybrid Cloud Offering

• By David Ramel
• 04/09/2018

Open source, software-defined storage and a hybrid on-premises/cloud model have all converged in a new commercial offering announced by Nexenta.

The company specializes in enterprise-centric software-only storage management services for any scale-up or scale-out workload, using any protocol, on any software or hardware infrastructure -- what it calls Nexenta AnyCloud.

Nexenta has chosen the Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) cloud for extending its software-defined storage offering to a hybrid model.

The company is targeting users of its "open-source driven" Software-Defined Storage (OpenSDS) solution who want to go hybrid, wherein they can take advantage of AWS' cloud-native file and block storage services for their business apps, integrating with on-premises implementations.

To do that, the company launched NexentaCloud in AWS on the AWS Marketplace. Several services, coming with different storage capacities, are offered, all with free trials available.

OpenSDS is an open source project governed by The Linux Foundation, designed to meet "software-defined storage integration challenges particularly in scale out cloud environments dealing with multiple storage platform providers."

The Foundation project says it helps vendors build new solutions with open source software and standards, relying upon industry-wide collaboration to quicken development cycles and improve efficiency so vendors can focus on innovation rather than plumbing.

The Nexenta offering comes with enterprise features such as snapshots, cloning, thin provisioning and data compression, which the company said support business-critical functions such as business continuity and self-service test/development.

Specifically, Nexenta said, the AWS-based solution provides:

• Replication: integrated management of replication and storage operations for all workloads
• Advanced Analytics Insights: utilizes deep storage analytics across datacenters and cloud environments
• Pre-configured AWS instances: optimized for size and performance
• Lower TCO: optimizes storage costs with rapid deployment and removal of storage solutions

"As a modern music company, Ingrooves has been increasingly storing more and more content, and we were looking for a storage solution which also had the right data protection strategy in place," Nexenta quoted Nicolas Ratineau, Director of Systems Engineering for Ingrooves, as saying. "With the use of NexentaCloud, combined with NexentaStor on-premise, we are now optimized to remove our older data center from our bottom line costs, and instead utilize the benefits of the public cloud to create a true hybrid strategy. This gives Ingrooves a reliable DR in the cloud model and more importantly a more cost-effective, scalable option to handle growth, a few terabytes at a time."