Storage startup Nexenta‘s latest release, NexentaEdge, aims to provide companies with a place to dump their big data.
The software-defined tool will target enterprise and cloud service providers who use open-source cloud infrastructures like OpenStack and want a big data repository for vast amounts of unstructured data.
Marketing and strategy VP Jill Orhun told CBR that Edge was created in response to customers trying to stretch its NexentaStor product beyond its capacity as an enterprise applications and cloud-focused solution.
Customers can use Edge to store far more data than they are able to with Stor.
Orhun said: "On NexentaStor, we have service provider customers who are pushing the product, trying to use it for all-flash environments. Once we saw that we said okay, we need to meet our customer base in the direction they’re heading.
"You need to scale out to get to a petabyte-scale environment and that’s where NexentaEdge comes into play. It allows you to handle emerging big data applications, for much, much larger environments than you could handle in a NexentaStor environment."
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By providing inline deduplication, Nexenta claims Edge will also reduce the total cost of ownership by reducing the amount of disk capacity the data is stored on, meaning the startup can target ordinary businesses that want to take advantage of petabyte-level storage.
Michael Letschin, director of product management, said: "It’s a big shift in the market I think. We’ve been very used to traditional file and block storage. To move in to some of the larger scale-out multi-petabyte type environments, it just can’t be supported with a traditional file and block system."
But its main use cases may not appear until larger web applications start to be created, he added.
"Most enterprise applications haven’t needed to be at that [multi-petabyte] scale," said Letschin. "You’re not going to put an Exchange environment in on this object store, or SQL. They aren’t made for that. It’s really designed for those next-gen systems that are still being developed as we speak."
But for now, big data will drive most use cases, according to Nexenta CEO Tarkan Maner, positioning Edge as a software-defined alternative to simply buying more hardware from storage stalwarts – or the ‘storage mafia’, as he calls them.
"It has become the norm for the legacy vendors to keep chucking more hardware at the problem," he said in a statement.
"[Edge delivers] ultra-scale, performance and TCO from block and file to object storage on any platform and for any workload or app."
NexentaEdge 1.0 should be available worldwide in the last quarter of the year.
Picture: Tarkan Maner
