Nexenta Solutions

As a Nexenta Premium Partner, Area Data Systems architects certified storage solutions designed around the NexentaStor software and backed by experienced development and support engineers. Area Data’s unique “engineer-to-engineer” approach ensures the solution you end up purchasing is tailored to meet your needs.

Clients trust Area Data Systems to design best-of-breed unified storage platforms with scalability, robust feature sets, and expert support. At the crux of this approach to architect an optimal storage platform, is the ability to discover and develop a solution, diagram a Proof of Concept (POC), and conduct test-bed evaluations to determine the optimal performance. 

NexentaStor is the flagship unified storage software from Nexenta that delivers built-proof data integrity and unlimited scalability for Big Data- and Cloud-optimized storage solutions. NexentaStor is commonly defined as Software-defined storage (SdS) built upon ZFS open source technology.  

Software-defined Storage allows organizations and IT staff to control how data is deployed, provisioned, and managed through a software layer. Nexenta's OpenStorage platform allows for a broader range of virtualization and cloud-computing services at a much lower cost.

An OpenStorage platform, such as the NexentaStor unified storage solution, is ideal for the exponential storage growth challenges found in the cloud and big data markets. Nexenta’s ZFS technology is leading the industry in its ability to automatically and intelligently use flash in a storage system. Enterprise NexentaStor features include:

• Inherent ZFS Benefits – In a nutshell, ZFS provides top-notch speed, hybrid storage pooling, and all the typically expected enterprise features like; thin provisioning, deduplication, and compression all in one magical package. More …
  • NexentaStor OS –Built on the open source NexentaCore platform, NexentaStor OS provides a solid foundation based on the OpenSolaris kernel
    • NexentaStor Management View – Centralized web-based tool allows a variety of functions to be performed from any location. Create, grow, delete, export & import storage volumes
    • NexentaStor Management Console – Record & replay commands across all deployed instances of NexentaStor.
    • Storage & Service Reports – Generate automatic & periodic reports to manage the performance of the system and integrate it into SNMP based management solutions
• High-Availability Clustering – HA storage clustering eliminates a single point of failure. HA storage clustering enables two NexentaStor instances to be configured as an active / active pair. At the same time, along with another NexentaStor instance, clustering provides high availability for shared storage accessible from both appliances. Storage is jointly managed via HA Cluster and is configured as shared storage to establish RAID and replication policies to protect the data itself. More …
• Unlimited Snapshots & Clones – Most legacy solutions are limited to 255 snapshots or artificially stunted to squeeze more money out of their customers. NexentaStor uses copy on write (COW), this means live data is never overwritten; instead, it writes data to a new block before changing the data pointers and committing the write.  Using copy on write allows for any number of customized, automated and periodic snapshots (read-only copies) and clones (read/write copies) to ensure granular recovery in a timely manner. So backups and rollbacks are simple and clones provide a space-efficient method of storing copies of shared data, like diskless clients and new client installs. More …
• Inherent Virtualization – NexentaStor supports all the mainstream virtualization vendors; Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix Xen and VMware vSphere. View and manage the entire virtualized infrastructure from a simple point-and-click interface.  NexentaStor dramatically simplifies the work of system administrators in setting storage policies for virtual environments. Perform common tasks, like stopping and starting VMs, create template-based clones, set-up backups, provision storage and set-up replication & retention policies. Virtualize data in the file-system to allow thin provisioning via I/O pooling for hypervisor virtualization solutions to improve capacity utilization and performance. More …