Nexenta, a Seagate Cloud Builder Alliance partner, is going after the U.K. storage market. The company recently announced a distribution partnership with Getech Ltd. that will make software-defined storage solutions more readily available to enterprises. Products such as NexentaStor will give organizations alternatives to more costly hardware-oriented solutions.
Getech is already a leading distributor of thin client desktops in the U.K., working with vendors such as Dell Wyse, Samsung and HP. Together with Nexenta, it may be able to meet enterprise demand for cost-effective answers to data storage and management at scale.
“We want to disrupt the ‘MESS’ (massively expensive storage systems) providers that are currently holding storage users hostage,” stated Nexenta CEO Tarkan Maner. “With data volumes growing at record rates and austerity biting hard, customers are looking for innovative and cost-effective approaches to storage and data management.”
The lion’s share of information is unstructured Tier 2 data, and Nexenta’s products use a management layer to handle access to file, block and object storage. NexentaStor addresses file and block access, while Nexenta Edge is tailored to Tier 2 cloud storage.
Edge will be Linux-based, with a scale-out architecture that could be combined into private storage systems. It may be taken up by hosted service providers, meaning that it could become the basis for public platforms too.
According to The Register, the prospects for Edge and Fusion – a hypothetical synthesis of NexentaStor and Edge – have gotten the attention of vendors such as Dell and SanDisk, which recently invested in Nexenta. Fusion could have an SDK and APIs that support platforms such as OpenStack and CloudStack. Like Edge and NexentaStor, it would be compatible with industry-standard hardware, making it a high-value, cost-effective solution for the data center.
