Increased data integrit
NexentaStor supports a variety of redundancy options when creating volumes, including mirroring and RAID-Z. RAID-Z1 is similar to RAID-5, providing single-parity protection, but RAID-Z prevents stripe corruption or “write holes” (caused by the nherent read-modifywrite architecture that RAID 5 uses). NexentaStor also supports RAID-Z2, which provides double-parity protection (similar to RAID-6), and RAID-Z3, which enables triple-parity protection.
Inherent storage virtualization
Nexenta’s ZFS implementation enables thin provisioning, seamless growth, and improved resource utilization. NexentaStor pools blocks from almost any type of underlying device (SAS, iSCSI, FC, IDE, USB, SSD, CF, etc.). Capacity can be added dynamically, without interrupting services. Excess capacity can be released and made available to other volumes as needed.
Intelligent data replication
Through ZFS “send” and “receive” commands, NexentaStor replication services support highly efficient, intelligent snapshot copies. Once initial replication occurs, only the differences between source and destination snapshots are subsequently transferred, conserving network bandwidth and the number of I/O operations.
Compression
Like deduplication, compression conserves space and reduces I/O. ZFS compression occurs at the block level and not at the file level, as in other file systems. For cloud deployments, compression is often an effective option for optimizing capacity of NexentaStor storage volumes.
Unlimited snapshot and cloning
The Nexenta ZFS implementation supports replication and system cloning through point-intime copies or “snapshots.” Snapshots can be used to speed both VM cloning and migration, as well as appliance provisioning and data replication.
Virtually unlimited file system
scalability to support large-scale capacities. The maximum size of an individual file or file system in NexentaStor is 16 EiB (264 bytes). This basically removes any practical limits on the size of files, directories, and file systems.
Deduplication
Administrators can optionally configure data volumes for inline deduplication, which ZFS intrinsically supports. Deduplication conserves capacity and decreases I/Os when data is highly redundant.
Accelerated write performance
ZFS’s block allocation algorithms condense an I/O stream of many small random writes into a single, more efficient, sequential write operation.
