Type Private Founded 2005 | Website nexenta.com | |
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Industry Computer data storage
Computer software Headquarters Santa Clara, California, United States Key people Tarkan Maner (CEO)
Alex Aizman (CTO)
Phil Underwood (COO) Products NexentaStor
NexentaConnect
NexentaEdge
NexentaFusion Founders Alex Aizman, Dmitry Yusupov Profiles | ||
Nexenta Systems, Inc. is a company that markets computer software for data storage and backup, headquartered in Santa Clara, California. Nexenta develops the products NexentaStor, NexentaConnect, and NexentaEdge.
Contents
Origins
In 2005, Nexenta was founded by Alex Aizman and Dmitry Yusupov, software developers and former executives at network vendor Silverback (later acquired by Brocade). Aizman and Yusupov previously worked together as the authors of the open source iSCSI initiator software in the Linux kernel.
The company was created to support the open source Nexenta OS project after Sun Microsystems released the bulk of its Solaris operating system under free software licenses as OpenSolaris. Nexenta OS was an operating system that integrated Sun's Solaris kernel and core technologies with applications from the popular Debian and Ubuntu operating systems.
Data storage
The company's entry into the data storage included use at Stanford University in 2012 and 2013. The field had been dominated by companies such as EMC Corporation and NetApp, who sold hardware storage appliances. These vertically integrated businesses where hardware and software were controlled by the same entity created switching barriers for customers and allowed the vendors to command high prices for their products.
Nexenta intended to compete by creating a storage system that did not require specialized hardware. Instead of producing hardware, the company would provide software to run on low-cost commodity computing hardware, a model later marketed as software defined storage.
Partnerships and open source
Much of Nexenta's business comes from partners that provide hardware and services alongside Nexenta software. The company's software is pre-installed on storage systems from vendors including Cisco Systems and Dell.
Nexenta continued to contribute to free and open source software used in its products. When Oracle Corporation discontinued OpenSolaris in 2010, the company became a founding member of the illumos open source project that would replace it.
Products
Nexenta's product NexentaStor is software for network-attached storage (NAS) and storage area network (SAN) services. NexentaStor was derived from the Nexenta OS based on the illumos operating system. The software runs on commodity hardware and creates storage virtualization pools consisting of multiple hard disk drives and solid-state drives. Data can be organized in a flexible number of filesystems and block storage, and files can be accessed over the widely used Network File System (NFS) and CIFS protocols, while block storage uses iSCSI or Fibre Channel protocols. NexentaStor allows online snapshots to be taken of data and replicated to other systems. For high availability Nexenta uses RSF-1 cluster to build a "shared nothing" HA storage.