By: Thomas Cornely, Chief Product Officer
Deciding between NexentaStor and NexentaEdge is relatively easy if you understand the products and your applications. NexentaStor delivers unified file and block storage services, where NexentaEdge is our scalable object storage platform. So the question is simple: what are you looking for, file protocols or object storage APIs?
Key Differentiators Between NexentaStor and Nexenta Edge
It is true that both systems provide block services, although NexentaEdge’s block support is limited to iSCSI. But one easy way to choose between the two is if you want shared file services (e.g. NFS, SMB) then only NexentaStor offers that functionality. But if you want to start storing data the modern way using an object storage API such as S3 or Swift, then only NexentaEdge has that capability.
Other differences include that NexentaEdge is built on a Linux kernel versus NexentaStor that is built using OpenSolaris and ZFS. NexentaEdge was also built from the ground up to be our most scalable product, so if scalability is important to you, NexentaEdge will offer you the best choice.
Which one is right for you?
So the next question is, what applications and systems are you running, and what kind of storage are they looking for? If you are considering an OpenStack deployment, NexentaEdge was specifically designed with it in mind, along with full support for both the Swift and S3 APIs. NexentaEdge would, therefore, be the obvious choice for OpenStack.
What about containers – especially those with persistent storage? Cinder is one of the more promising ideas in that space, something NexentaEdge has full support for. In fact, NexentaEdge is so convinced of the concept of containers that we build it on containers. Using containers in our core product gives us a lot of experience with the challenges of running persistent storage with containers, and this experience is found in NexentaEdge.
If you are running a legacy application that requires NFS or SMB access, then NexentaStor is your product of choice. In addition, if you need Fiber Channel block access, only NexentaStor offers this.
The question is a little bit harder when discussing iSCSI, since both platforms offer iSCSI block access. Perhaps the deciding factor will be scalability or performance. While both products offer some level of scalability, we made scalability one of the core things we wanted to accomplish with NexentaEdge. NexentaStor can scale to petabytes, but NexentaEdge can scale to hundreds of them. On the other hand, if performance and low latency are your primary concern then NexentaStor is for you.
Most data centers will need both systems. First, a high performance, feature rich NAS that supports a variety of protocols. Legacy applications and data will be with us for decades consolidating them to a single storage platform that can reduce complexity and increase performance just makes sense. We deliver this with NexentaStor.
NexentaEdge is your choice for storing the petabytes of data that the internet of things (IoT) will generate, as well as delivering that data to modern applications like Splunk, Spark, Cassandra and CouchBase.