NEXENTA LEADS EMERGENCE OF OPENSTORAGE MARKET AS ALTERNATIVE TO PROPRIETARY STORAGE VENDORS
OpenStorage Solutions Provider Announces Record Growth in 2010 and Continued Momentum in 2011
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.—February 22, 2011—Nexenta Systems, the world’s leading provider of OpenStorage solutions, today announced that 2010 marked a year of approximately 400 percent growth for the company, with revenue expected to at least triple again in 2011. Last year, Nexenta launched successful partner programs including alliances with LSI Corp., Supermicro and Compellent, expanded its team with proven industry leaders, secured strategic funding and hosted the first annual OpenStorage Summit. The company achieved the milestone of 2,000 total commercial sales in only its second year of commercial availability, a rate of growth believed to be unprecedented in the enterprise storage market.
The company attributes its extremely rapid growth to pent-up demand for affordable enterprise class storage. Other factors contributing to the record-setting growth include broad dissatisfaction with the lock-in-based business models of aging legacy storage providers that produce adversarial relationships with customers and the unique capabilities of NexentaStor, particularly in virtualization and cloud deployments.
Nexenta Announces the Following 2010 Growth Metrics:
- Revenue Growth: Year over year percentage increase in revenue from 2009 to 2010 was 385 percent.
- Capacity Under Management: Approximately 330 petabytes of capacity are currently under NexentaStor management, with over 100 of those petabytes in commercial deployments.
- Channel Success: Nexenta channel partners sold between $70-100 million of hardware using NexentaStor as the software component of the storage solution. The total value of solutions sold based upon NexentaStor is projected to increase to $400 million in 2011.
- Talent: Nexenta’s growth fueled the expansion of its team by over 250 percent.
Other 2010 Company Milestones Include:
Partners: Nexenta now has over 145 companies that are members of the Nexenta Reseller Partner Program. Twenty-five have made the transition from entry-level partnerships to Certified Nexenta Resellers. In addition, Nexenta’s Technology Partner Program has expanded to include cloud management software vendors including Abiquo, Mezeo and Desktone, and several solid state drive (SSD) makers including Intel, Pliant, STEC and DDRDrive. Finally, LSI Corp. and Nexenta launched a significant partnership under which NexentaStor is now certified for integration with all major LSI storage hardware including LSI SAS JBODs, HBAs, and the LSI SAS switch, which was launched at the OpenStorage Summit.
“As a leader in the storage market, LSI Corp. is committed to delivering storage solutions that provide our system builder channel partners with leading-edge capabilities and rock solid stability,” said Brent Blanchard, director of worldwide channel marketing and sales, LSI Corp. “We were extremely pleased with the results of working with Nexenta in 2010. Together we succeeded in delivering superior integrated solutions to the system builder channel that combine proven LSI storage technologies with the NexentaStor implementation of the ZFS file system. We are further increasing our activities with Nexenta in 2011 and expect to grow our joint sales dramatically."
OpenStorage Summit: In October, Nexenta hosted the first-ever OpenStorage Summit in Palo Alto, Calif. Participants spanned the entire OpenStorage value-chain and included Citrix Systems, VMware, Area Data Systems, Supermicro, Aberdeen LLC, LSI Corp. and Nordisk Systems, Inc. Speakers and presenters included Nexenta’s CEO, Evan Powell, Terri McClure, data storage analyst from Enterprise Strategy Group, Daniel Beveridge, senior desktop architect in the office of the CTO at VMware, Scott Cleland, senior manager of channel product strategy at LSI Corp., and Robert Read, WhamCloud’s principal engineer and a noted expert on the Lustre HPC computing platform. ZFS co-creator and Nexenta Advisor Bill Moore was the keynote of this event. The 2011 OpenStorage event will be held October 17-19. In addition, Nexenta is hosting a customer event in Amsterdam May 25–27; more details about these and dozens of other 2011 events at which Nexenta and NexentaStor will be featured are available at http://www.nexenta.com/corp/events.
Expanded Executive Team: In 2010, Nexenta added to its deep bench of industry experts to help drive innovation and development of the NexentaStor software platform. Hires included Garrett D’Amore, a former Sun engineer and the leading contributor to the OpenSolaris operating system for the past five years, Richard Elling and Craig Morgan, each notable ZFS training and deployment experts, Rick Hayes, vice president of technical operations and former principal consultant for the data center practice at GlassHouse Technologies, and Jason Yoho, vice president of business development and former CEO of Quail Technologies.
Strategic Funding: Nexenta received funding from Translink, a U.S.-based venture capital fund with close relationships with a number of Nexenta customers, including co-investor KT, as well as additional investment from existing investor Javelin Venture Partners. The endorsement of Nexenta by strategic investors and customers serves as yet more recognition that Nexenta is emerging as a leader of a fundamentally better enterprise storage industry.
Significant Customers: Nexenta added almost 1,000 additional customers in 2010. Sales included European customers Max Plank Institute and Porsche Motors in Germany, Dutch National Broadcasting in the Netherlands, dozens of customers in the United Kingdom including Bounty and Trend Micro, and leading infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) company ITCORE in Japan. KT is now a marquee customer; their public cloud, which is comparable to offerings from Amazon, Rackspace and others, is based upon NexentaStor and has been measured as the world’s fastest cloud. In the United States, hundreds of organizations became commercial users, ranging from Disney to Ford to NOAA to Citrix to Juniper to dozens of universities and hosting companies.
Awards/Honors: Nexenta is one of eight finalists named in the storage management tools category in Storage magazine's and SearchStorage.com's 2010 Products of the Year competition. In June 2010, Nexenta was selected by Everything Channel as a CRN Emerging Storage Vendor. The annual list recognizes companies that are delivering high margins for solution providers with innovative and easy-to-use technology.
“In 2010, we made extremely rapid progress towards achieving our mission of enterprise class storage for everyone,” said Evan Powell, CEO of Nexenta. “Our success indicates that there is an untapped demand for storage solutions that offer enterprise class capabilities without the aging technologies and lock-in based business models of legacy storage solutions. Together with our partners, we are proud of the progress we have made in transforming the storage industry. We will be launching additional capabilities throughout 2011 and expect the transition to OpenStorage to accelerate.”
NexentaStor is a software-only solution built upon the ZFS file system. NexentaStor is typically purchased from systems integrators and VARs as a part of a total solution comprised of NexentaStor plus certified storage hardware from vendors such as LSI Corp., Quanta, Dell, Supermicro and Intel. NexentaStor provides NAS and SAN capabilities including support for CIFS, NFS, iSCSI and Fiber Channel storage access. In addition, NexentaStor is the only solution that gives storage administrators a unified view into their virtualization environment, including Hyper-V, Citrix and VMware hosts and their related storage. NexentaStor provides customers with the capabilities of enterprise class unified storage, including massive throughput and IOPS, air tight data integrity with multiple replication methods, and tight integration with leading virtualization solutions, all without the vendor lock-in and aged technologies of legacy storage vendors.
About Nexenta Systems
Founded in 2005 and privately held, Nexenta Systems, Inc., has developed NexentaStor™, the leading OpenStorage enterprise class hardware independent storage solution and sponsors NexentaCore, an open source operating system that combines the high performance and reliability of OpenSolaris with the ease-of-use and breadth of applications of Linux. Both solutions leverage the revolutionary file system ZFS. Nexenta’s products have achieved VMware Ready status with VMware, CitrixReady status with Citrix Systems, Inc., and other certifications.
More information about Nexenta Systems, Inc. and free trials of the ZFS-based NexentaStor can be found at www.nexenta.com or call (877) 862-7770.
Media Contact:
Katy Garlinghouse
Schwartz Communications
(415) 512-0770