By Michael Richtberg, a Nexenta Advisory Board member and former VP of Strategy and Corporate Development at SoftNAS.
Thousands of Nexenta customers have come to trust our open-source driven software-defined storage software that enables a truly hardware independent storage solution. We offer full enterprise class data services for industry standard NAS and SAN protocols, which have become table stakes, used by virtually all organizations to run their business applications. All of these on-premises qualities found in our flagship NexentaStor solution are now available to our customers via the public cloud with NexentaCloud, running on Amazon Web Services (AWS).
The world of data services remains fundamental to the on-going operations of our business world. The inventory of existing applications and accompanying data will remain long past retirement of most of you reading this blog. Leveraging existing assets in the new public cloud IaaS platforms allows enterprises to gain excellent infrastructure flexibility, but there may be a need for more functionality.
Today’s on-premises NAS and SAN storage systems have evolved over years. Optimizations in data services like snapshotting, cloning, replication, compression, and numerous performance elements are almost taken for granted as core features for storage systems. As you enter the public cloud infrastructure, you may find “storage” but most of these advanced features, and even the protocols you’ve come to expect, just aren’t available on the public cloud storage systems.
NexentaCloud comes to you as a complement to the industry leading NexentaStor software-defined storage product. NexentaCloud brings you the same hardware flexibility but with the added ability to host your NAS/SAN on AWS. Supporting industry standard protocols, you can now use existing, unaltered applications that need SMB, NFS, or iSCSI protocols. Our “no data left behind” offering lets you create virtual storage appliances in just a few clicks using the AWS Marketplace options, available in various capacities.
What about hybrid?
This is where the real rubber meets the road! Not everyone is ready to make the shift to a full blown cloud only environment. In fact, most will find hybrid is the ideal use case for a long time. Through the unified management and analytics tools of NexentaFusion, you can see and adjust your on-premises and cloud deployments in a single pane of glass. If you need to adjust the data storage location for optimizing cost, performance, or geo proximity, then NexentaFusion provides the ideal solution for hybrid deployments. NexentaFusion can run on-premises or on AWS and it’s included for free with NexentaCloud! Concerned about over-spending or zombie workloads that keep running up your cloud tab? NexentaFusion helps you monitor activity and analyze your utilization for optimizing your storage deployments with ease.
NexentaCloud opens up your storage and data management possibility to best accommodate your needs for flexible data location and expansion. Taking advantage of different media and storage possibilities, Nexenta provides excellent cost and performance combinations for primary and secondary storage use cases.
At Nexenta, we’ve heard your requests for enabling flexible, agile, and extensible storage systems. Join us in the journey to the cloud!
For more information, visit us at https://nexenta.com/nexentacloud.