Storage Virtualization Track at Cloud Expo

Nexenta Systems, the five-year-old open storage player, has come up with in-line deduplication for primary or production storage including virtualized storage, calling it a first.

It means more data can be stored on a server by reducing duplicate data, a winnowing process usually reversed for backup and replication, and should cut pricey high-speed proprietary storage needs.

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The widgetry's in the NexentaStor 3.0 upgrade of the start-up's enterprise-class storage solution, which is based on Sun's open source Zettabyte File System (ZFS), and Nexenta's own Virtual Machine Datacenter (VMDC) 3.0, a new release of its virtualization management platform.

NexentaStor 3.0 also includes support for Microsoft Hyper-V, making it the only storage solution to support all the major virtualization environments and it does it from a unified VMDC environment. VMDC can also be used to clone a virtual desktop for hundreds of users.

The new NexentaStor cut is said to be the first commercial storage solution to incorporate ZFS-based in-line deduplication, described as a "giant leap forward for the storage industry."

At least it could cut storage costs.

Nexenta claims to exceed the functionality of legacy deduplication by offering bi-directional replication with compression and deduplication, superior end-to-end data integrity, accelerated I/O through the native use of SSDs and hardware accelerators leveraged by ZFS.

VMDC lets storage admins see their entire virtual environment and provision storage and storage policies such as backup, replication and retention policies from a point-and-click interface.

NexentaStor runs on x86 servers - particularly white boxes - although Nexenta is really after cloud merchants like Amazon - and provides NAS and SAN capabilities like support for CIFS, NFS, iSCSI and Fiber Channel storage access.

It claims its customers typically experience a 75% cost savings compared to proprietary solutions thanks to compression, thin provisioning and the use of hybrid storage pools that leverage SSDs plus disks.

NexentaStor 3.0 will be available by the end of March. Free trials can be had at www.nexenta.com/freetrial.

Nexenta also sponsors NexentaCore, an open source operating system that's supposed to combine the high performance and reliability of OpenSolaris with the ease of use and breadth of applications of Linux. Both solutions leverage ZFS.

The company claims more than 20,000 total registered users and 975 license sales, a 5% conversion rate, since starting in April 2008. It says it saw 650% growth last year and something like 400%-450% so far this year. It also claims more users than ZFS.

At CeBit this week it announced a partnership with Thomas Krenn AG, an online European retailer of servers, storage and hosting, which is going to sell the stuff with its Unified Storage and dual-Nehalem servers.