Storage Vendor Offers In-Line Dedupe, Microsoft Hyper-V Support, Huge Margins

Nexenta Systems’ CEO Evan
Powell has 93 reasons why the channel should be excited about NexentaStor 3.0,
a major upgrade to the company’s enterprise-class, hardware- independent
storage solution based on the file system ZFS, and Virtual Machine Datacenter (VMDC)
3.0.

Due out at the end of the month, it is called the first commercial storage
solution to incorporate ZFS-based in-line deduplication, as well as including
support for Microsoft Hyper-V, making it the only storage solution to support
all major virtualization environments.
 
Powell tells Channel Insider the average value of a NexentaStor-based
deployment is more than 10 times the price of the NexentaStor license, with
partners making 30 percent on the software. "When you buy a NexentaStor
based solution, only 7 percent of that purchase goes to Nexenta." That
leaves 93 percent for partners’ pockets.

"That’s a pretty radically different value proposition for partners. One
of the differences for our partners is that they make a lot more money."

The value proposition to customers is even better, he adds. End users’ TCO
(total cost of ownership) savings are often 75 percent or more when they
purchase a NexentaStor-based solution versus a legacy solution.

At the end of January the company, which is based in Mountain View, Calif., and
has been shipping product for almost two years, stated 2009 was a "breakthrough
year" with a 740 percent increase in full-year revenue from the previous
year and an increase in quarterly sales of 630 percent from the last quarter of
2008. It doubled its channel to 100 partners globally, accounting for 75
percent of total revenues. There are around a 1,000 licenses sold, with more
than 20,000 users, making Nexenta the fastest growing storage company in the
last 10 to 15 years, says Powell.

The release of 3.0 significantly opens up the market for the storage, server
and virtualization channels looking to provide industry-standard solutions at a
fraction of the cost of the legacy storage vendors.

"We need more partners." He says they’re increasingly working
with Citrix Xen partners and are starting to get traction with VMware and
Microsoft HyperV partners too.

"It’s these virtualization experts who want a virtualization-friendly
solution as part of their design." With the new release, there’s also an
opportunity for whitebox partners looking to expand into storage, he adds.

Powell says what makes NexentaStor 3.0 significant for deduplicating primary
storage is its bidirectional 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 the ZFS file system. With its
support for Hyper-V, NexentaStor is the only product to support VMware, Citrix
Xen and Hyper-V virtualization platforms from a single point within one unified
environment, VMDC. VMDC
allows storage administrators to see their entire virtual environment and to
provision storage and storage policies, including backup, replication and
retention policies from a simple point and click interface.

Additional capabilities include greater ease of use for high availability
functionality; enhanced support for a broader array of hardware including 10Gbe
Ethernet and SAS-2 controllers for increased performance; and simplified
disaster recovery support via multiple enhancements to underlying ZFS based
replication.

The company’s primary audience is customers fed up with vendor lock-in for
legacy storage systems. "If I look at legacy storage vendors, they’re
making a huge amount of money on customers that are locked in and customers are
getting sick of it."

With the release of NexentaStor 3.0, the company not only offers tremendous
cost savings, but also offers real best-of-breed technical innovation, says
Powell.