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Nexenta Delivers Most Advanced Software-Defined Storage Solutions for All-Flash Arrays, VMware Horizon 6.0, and VMware Virtual SAN at VMworld 2014
[August 20, 2014]

Nexenta Delivers Most Advanced Software-Defined Storage Solutions for All-Flash Arrays, VMware Horizon 6.0, and VMware Virtual SAN at VMworld 2014


SANTA CLARA, Calif. --(Business Wire)--

Nexenta (@Nexenta), the global leader in Software-Defined Storage (SDS) (#softwaredefinedstorage), today announced new updates to its NexentaConnect and NexentaStor solutions. The latest addition to the NexentaConnect family, NexentaConnect for VMware® Virtual SAN™, adds full-featured SMB and NFS file services to VMware's Virtual SAN offering. NexentaConnect for VMware Horizon is also updated and improves upon the automation and acceleration for VMware Horizon® Virtual Desktop Infrastructures (VDI). NexentaStor release 4.1 now supports a performance optimized 'all flash mode' for low latency all flash reference architectures, VAAI integration and VMware vCenter™ Management Plug-in. These solutions will be revealed and demonstrated for the first time at VMworld 2014 US, August 24-28 in San Francisco.

"Nexenta's integration with VMware is a good move in today's fast-evolving SDS market. VMware is rapidly advancing its capabilities to enable the Software-Defined Data Center," said Simon Robinson, Research Vice President at 451 Research (News - Alert). "Nexenta's offerings augment and enhance the virtualization journey for customers as they seek to realize improvements in manageability, flexibility and efficiency."

"'Software-Defined' is changing the industry and allowing customers to simplify their infrastructure, reduce costs and achieve new levels of automation and scale," Gaetan Castelein, senior director, product management, Software-Defined Storage at VMware. "Nexenta's latest Software-Defined Storage solutions for all flash arrays and hyper-converged infrastructure powered by VMware Virtual SAN are great complements to VMware cloud infrastructure deployments."

"Enterprises today are challenged by ever-growing storage requirements driven by trends like virtualization, mobility, social media, the Internet of Things, and Big Data," according to Tarkan Maner, Chairman and CEO of Nexenta. "Nexenta and VMware are changing the game with our full featured Software-Defined Storage VDI deployments by delivering flexibility, simplicity and lower total cost of ownership."

NexentaConnect for VMware Virtual SAN

NexentaConnect for VMware Virtual SAN integrates with and augments VMware Virtual SAN by adding enterprise-class Windows and UNIX based file services without the need for any additional hardware purchases. NexentaConnect for Virtual SAN completes hyper-converged Virtual SAN deployments by utilizing local Virtual SAN storage in servers to deliver high performance NFS and SMB file services to Virtual Machines and Virtual Desktops, all managed through a single vCenter console. Additionally, NexentaConnect for VMware Virtual SAN:

  • Runs seamlessly on VMware Virtual SAN
  • Easily provisions file services (NFSv3, NFSv4, SMB) on Virtual SAN within minutes
  • Integrates management through VMware vCenter
  • Provides Security and Domain integration, AD with AAA and Kerberos support
  • Delivers capacity saving using inline compression and deduplication
  • Can store all files needed to maintain the virtual infrastructure
  • Provides IO acceleration with inline compression and advanced caching logic
  • Enhances performance and health monitoring
  • Delivers folder and volume level snapshots, replication and backup capabilities for DR scenarios
  • Maintains data integrity during various stress, network/disk/host recovery
  • Is 100% compatible with VMware HA and DRS
  • Is serviceable via Rest APIs
  • Is validated for VDI workloads up to thousands of users
  • Leverages VSAN data protection and high availability

More information on NexentaConnect for VMware Virtual SAN is available at nexenta.com/nexentaconnect, with the solution being made available in Q3 2014.

NexentaConnect 3.0 for VMware Horizon®

NexentaConnect 3.0 for VMware Horizon provides improved acceleration and automation for VMware Horizon 6 Virtual Desktop Infrastructures (VDI). This new release builds on NexentaConnect's advanced features provided by both the VMware Horizon Suite as well as the core VMware vSphere® products. NexentaConnect helps users better integrate storage and desktop management, and also offers up to a 75% increase in desktop density per host and up to a 10x improvement in end user experience via reduced latency. Additionally NexentaConnect 3.0 provides:

  • Advanced analytics on a per desktop and pool basis
  • Simplified desktop management
  • Read cache acceleration to accelerate non-persistent environments
  • Adancements in write caching capabilities and SAN offload to accelerate all virtual desktops
  • Support for graphics intensive desktops utilizing Blast or GPU acceleration
  • Ability to import existing Horizon desktop pools seamlessly into a NexentaConnect storage and acceleration solution
  • Support for VMware Horizon 6 or Citrix XenDesktop on vSphere infrastructures
  • Simple to configure disaster recovery functionality for maximum availability



NexentaStor 4.1

NexentaStor 4.1 brings the economic benefits of Software-Defined Storage to high performance, low latency all flash block and file shared storage configurations. This update to the market-leading SDS solution also hardens support for VMware and Microsoft integration. For IT executives and storage administrators who have been grappling with new demands on high performance, enterprise-class storage environments, NexentaStor 4.1 introduces all-SSD reference architectures with inline data de-duplication and compression and support for the latest hardware. Among other enhancements in NexentaStor 4.1:


  • VMware VAAI and vCenter Management Plug-in
  • Performance optimized "all flash mode" for all-SSD reference architectures
  • Reference architectures with up to 150TB of raw SanDisk (News - Alert) or HGST SSDs
  • All flash, block and file storage configurations with unlimited snapshots, clones and long distance replication
  • High performance inline data reduction (compression and deduplication)
  • Support for high performance 12Gbps SAS (News - Alert) and 16Gbps FC
  • Support for SMB 3.0

More information on NexentaStor 4.1 is available at nexenta.com/nexentastor, with the solution being made available in 4Q2014.

Supporting Quotes:

"Coupled with Aberdeen's (News - Alert) ZXP Series of Nexenta optimized storage configurations, Nexenta continues to help enterprises liberate themselves from the traditional proprietary hardware storage approach, and have a full-featured, unified storage solution that scales to meet growing storage requirements," said Moshe Ovadya, President and CEO at Aberdeen LLC. "Our customers will benefit from the new products and features in their software-defined storage portfolio."

"Our mission is to provide the latest high-performance, power-optimized technologies into the data center and Nexenta is a key partner in making that happen," said Dan Johns, Head of Technical Services at Boston Limited. "They have proven that they can solve the price and performance conundrum in VDI implementations. The new product enhancements that Nexenta is unveiling will continue to impress our customers who need high performing storage to work in a wide variety of environments without paying a fortune."

"Cisco's UCS E-Series servers and NexentaConnect for Horizon simplify your branch office infrastructure with a converged platform," said Jay Chokshi, Manager, Product Management at Cisco. "The combination of Cisco, Nexenta and VMware technology gives virtual desktop administrators the means to accelerate performance, provide greater desktop density, and keep TCO in line."

"Citrix XenDesktop offers great value for delivering joint VDI customer deployments using NexentaConnect for Virtual SAN in combination with VMware Virtual SAN. When used in a XenDesktop environment running on top of VMware vSphere, this integrated solution gives our customers a full and comprehensive storage offering at the lowest cost per desktop with the easiest options to deploy and maintain." Calvin Hsu, Vice President of Product Marketing, Desktop and Applications Group, at Citrix.

"Nexenta is a trusted partner of Dell (News - Alert), and enables us to provide end-to-end solutions to our customers," said Sam Greenblatt, VP&CTO Engineered Solutions and Technology at Dell. "NexentaConnect for VMware Virtual SAN is another example of Nexenta helping enterprises get the most of storage and unlock the true potential of the data center."

"HGST's broad portfolio of enterprise storage solutions are engineered with high-performance, high-capacity, reliability and endurance in mind," said Ulrich Hansen, vice president of SSD product marketing, HGST. "Together with Nexenta, who continues to advance the Software-Defined Storage Market with its NexentaStor platform, we are able to provide enterprise customers with powerful hardware and software solutions that are built to enhance the modern data center infrastructure by enabling enterprise-class scalability, accelerated performance, while minimizing latency and TCO."

"We are constantly looking for ways to helping the medical staff create a collaborative care environment with better patient outcome, while keeping an eye on IT costs," said Aivars Apsite, Technology Strategist at Metro Health. "We look forward to the new features in NexentaConnect 3.0 for VMware Horizon that will allow us to further integrate storage and improve desktop management while leveraging our investment in our virtualized infrastructure."

"NexentaConnect for Virtual SAN is another step towards a software-defined data center," said William Bell, VP of Product Development from PhoenixNAP. "Solution providers coupling vSAN with NexentaConnect for Virtual SAN can now provide file services allowing customers to deploy robust, private cloud architectures. NexentaConnect fills the needs that our customers are looking for."

"We believe that in order to realize the full potential of enterprise solid state storage, we must deliver innovations in both hardware and software," said John Scaramuzzo, senior vice president and general manager, Enterprise Storage Solutions, SanDisk. "We are excited to work with Nexenta to bring all the benefits of flash to IT executives and storage administrators who are grappling with new demands on high performance, enterprise-class storage environments."

"Supermicro Green Computing Solutions integrate the most advanced Enterprise-class compute, storage, networking and software technologies to meet the evolving demands of any scale virtualization application," said Wally Liaw, Sr. Vice President of Sales at Supermicro. "Our ongoing collaboration with Nexenta is delivering customers an all SSD storage system and combined with our VMware certified Virtual SAN storage platforms, customers can achieve extreme performance with reduced latency in a highly energy-efficient next generation software-defined storage solution."

"Public safety agencies rely on TriTech to store, manage and secure emergency data from a variety of devices, sensors and end-points," said Scott Key, System Administrator, TriTech Software Systems. "Nexenta has proven to us that we don't have to sacrifice on price, simplicity, or manageability and integrates seamlessly with our VMware implementation. The updates to NexentaStor will only enhance the mission-critical services that we provide."

"We are delighted to partner with Nexenta to integrate Vital Labs vSphere storage management plugin with NexentaStor," said Tapesh Goyal, Founder of Vital Labs. "This joint solution will help VMware customers to manage NexentaStor seamlessly in vSphere environment. Using this plugin, administrators can provision, take snapshots, restore, clone and monitor NexentaStor from vCenter web console itself."

"VM Racks provides enterprise-class virtualization solutions and managed hosting to government, healthcare, and business organizations worldwide," said GIl Vidals, CEO, VM Racks. "As a vetted HIPAA hosting provider, VM Racks' maintains the highest level of audits and certifications. Compliance is critical to our business and that of our customers, and we can't compromise on storage. NexentaStor has provided us with an enterprise-quality solution. We look forward to the next version of NexentaStor as we continue to rely on Nexenta to help us balance scalability, performance, and cost in our storage system."

Further resources

NexentaConnect for VMware Virtual SAN datasheet and Joint VMware/Nexenta Whitepaper

NexentaConnect for VMware Horizon datasheet

NexentaStor datasheet

See product pages for validated and certified reference architectures with Cisco, Dell, HP, Supermicro, and others.

Tweet this: .@Nexenta #SoftwareDefinedStorage for All-Flash Arrays, @VMware Horizon 6.0 & VMware Virtual SAN at #VMworld 2014

About Nexenta

Nexenta is the global leader in Software-Defined Storage, delivering easy-to-use, secure and ultra-low cost storage software solutions. Nexenta solutions are hardware-, protocol-, and app-agnostic, providing innovation freedom and speed for organizations to realize the "true" benefits of Software-Defined Infrastructure-centric Cloud Computing. Nexenta enables workloads from rich media-driven Social Living to Mobility; from the Internet of Things to Big Data; from OpenStack and CloudStack to Do-It-Yourself Cloud deployments. Founded around an "open source" platform and industry-disruptive vision, Nexenta delivers its award- and patent-winning software-only unified storage management solutions with a global partner network. For more information, visit, www.nexenta.com, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube. Also, download the newly published Nexenta Special Edition Software Defined Data Centers (SDDC) for Dummies eBook.

VMware Horizon,vCenter,vSphere and VMware Virtual SAN are registered trademarks or trademarks of VMware, Inc. in the United States and other jurisdictions. The use of the word "partner" or "partnership" does not imply a legal partnership relationship between VMware and any other company.


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