NexentaStor Developer edition versioon 2.2.1 was released a couple of days ago.
Check the release notes before downloading the NexentaStor iso image.
Nexenta Systems, the leader in OpenStorage solutions, today announced that 2009 was a breakthrough year for the company. Key milestones for the year included a 740 percent increase in full year revenue from the previous year and an increase in quarterly sales of 630 percent from the last quarter of 2008. The growth reflects the overwhelming global demand for an open alternative to legacy proprietary enterprise storage, particularly in virtualized environments, and Nexenta’s flagship product, NexentaStor, as the product best able to meet this demand.
“We will ramp up open source innovation even higher in 2010 to meet our customers most complex storage and data center requirements.”
NexentaStor is the leading hardware independent storage solution built upon the breakthrough open source ZFS file system. With NexentaStor, customers can for the first time experience the benefits of enterprise storage, including high performance and air tight data integrity with multiple replication methods, without the vendor lock-in and aged technologies of legacy storage vendors. Nexenta’s OpenStorage model allows customers to save up to 80 percent of storage costs while reaping the benefits of superior storage functionality, tight integration across virtualization products, and faster development cycles versus proprietary storage products.
Customer, Partner, Revenue and International Growth
2009 was a breakthrough year for the company in which it achieved remarkable growth in virtually every area of the company. Key milestones for the year included:
- NexentaStor license sales increased by almost 700 percent year over year. Sales to service providers (such as Hosting and Internet Service Providers) and Research and Development departments within large organizations fueled a significant part of the growth.
- Addition of 50 partners worldwide, reflecting the company’s commitment to the channel. Sales through the channel grew to account for 75 percent of total revenues.
- Sales in Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) grew from 10 percent to over 25 percent of overall sales year over year.
Open Storage Innovation
The driving force behind Nexenta’s growth is the company’s commitment to delivering a robust commercial solution to handle the most extreme enterprise storage requirements at a fraction of the cost of legacy proprietary offerings. In 2009, Nexenta advanced its commitment through strategic partnerships and product innovation, including:
- Incorporation of enhancements to the open source ZFS file system within NexentaStor, enabling the company to collaborate with customers and partners to provide best of breed solutions. This integration led to the embedding of NexentaStor into numerous storage solutions sold by resellers globally.
- Increased virtualization implementations with VMware, Citrix, and Microsoft as enabled by Nexenta’s VMDC virtualization management application and the StorageLink Adapter for Citrix XenServer. VMDC is unique in the industry in that it helps manage storage in heterogeneous virtualization environments. The StorageLink adapter helps manage storage for Citrix/Xen and Microsoft Hyper-V environments.
- The introduction of Pomona, an advanced software suite that automates the provisioning and management of multiple NexentaStor and other storage systems. With Pomona, customers can define flexible and reliable policies for storage provisioning that dramatically reduces the labor involved with storage provisioning and management, particularly in virtualized environments.
“Nexenta’s OpenStorage approach gives customers a viable choice to proprietary closed storage software and is the driving force behind our rapid growth and the increased reach of our channel program,”
said Evan Powell, CEO of Nexenta. “We will ramp up open source innovation even higher in 2010 to meet our customers most complex storage and data center requirements.”
About Nexenta Systems
Founded in 2005 and privately held, Nexenta Systems, Inc., has developed NexentaStor™, the leading open storage 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.
This tutorial shows how to set up a high-availability storage with two storage servers (Ubuntu 9.10) that use GlusterFS.
Each storage server will be a mirror of the other storage server, and files will be replicated automatically across both storage servers. The client system (Ubuntu 9.10 as well) will be able to access the storage as if it was a local filesystem.
GlusterFS is a clustered file-system capable of scaling to several peta-bytes. It aggregates various storage bricks over Infiniband RDMA or TCP/IP interconnect into one large parallel network file system. Storage bricks can be made of any commodity hardware such as x86_64 servers with SATA-II RAID and Infiniband HBA.
About Glusterfs: Gluster Storage Platform is an open source clustered storage solution. The software is a powerful and flexible solution that simplifies the task of managing unstructured file data whether you have a few terabytes of storage or multiple petabytes. Gluster Storage Platform integrates the file system, an operating system layer, and a web-based management interface and installer.
The Iomega® iConnect Wireless Data Station is a simple way to bring all of your desktop and portable USB storage into your network. Plug your external USB drives or USB thumb drives (any brand) into the Iomega iConnect device and they are automatically connected to and accessible on your network. Remote access allows you to connect, share, and access your files securely from anywhere in the world via the Internet. Wireless connectivity allows you to place the Iomega iConnect device in the most convenient location in your home without having to run another cable. Taking backup data off-site for disaster recovery has never been easier. Simply back up all your networked computers through the Iomega iConnect device, and then take your hard drive off-site for safekeeping.
The Iomega iConnect device truly makes your USB drives “smart” and includes the ultimate set of advanced media features, such as the DLNA®-certified UPnP® AV media server, and iTunes™ server so that content can be easily shared between computers and any other digital media adapters such as game consoles, Iomega ScreenPlay products, digital picture frames or networked TVs. Picture Transfer Protocol, torrent download compatibility, and the Cooliris™ slide show plug-in round out the advanced media features. Embedded RSA® BSAFE® encryption for protected installs and upgrades..
LifeLine supports Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) and Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA), enabling users to save, store, and play back music, photos, videos, and other digital content. The software is also said to offer an integrated iTunes server, as well as a torrent download manager for managing peer-to-peer file transfers. In addition, users can remotely access and administer the device through a personalized web address, says the company.
The Iomega® iConnect Wireless Data Station is the simple way to bring all of your USB storage into your network. Connect, share and access files anywhere – even over the Internet.
More info about features, prices etc can be found on the iConnect website
Choosing the right Storage Technology for Your Organization
IT Professionals has a post with some background information on the most common storage technologies that are currently available: NAS, SAN, DAN and iSCSI. If you’re running a small/medium seized business this may help you decide which one is best for you:
Although the need for storage is evident, it is not always clear which solution is right for your organization. There are a variety of options available, the most prevalent being direct-attached storage (DAS), network-attached storage (NAS) and storage area networks (SAN). Choosing the right storage solution can be as personal and individual a decision as buying a home. There is no one right answer for everyone. Instead, it is important to focus on the specific needs and long-term business goals of your organization. Several key criteria to consider include:
- Capacity – the amount and type of data (file level or block level) that needs to be stored and shared
- Performance – I/O and throughput requirements
- Scalability – Long-term data growth
- Availability and Reliability – how mission-critical are your applications?
- Data protection – Backup and recovery requirements
- IT staff and resources available
- Budget concerns
While one type of storage media is usually sufficient for smaller companies, large enterprises will often have a mixed storage environment, implementing different mediums for specific departments, workgroups and remote offices. In this paper, we will provide an overview of DAS, NAS and SAN to help you determine which solution, or combination of solutions, will best help you achieve your business goals.
Read the article explaining the differences and uses of:
- DAS: Ideal for Local Data Sharing Requirements
- NAS: File-Level Data Sharing Across the Enterprise
- SANs: High Availability for Block-Level Data Transfer
The team behind Amahi Home Server have release version 5.1
Google is apparently in the process of migrating their current EXT2 file-systems over to the more current EXT4 file-system (Ubuntu 9.10 uses it by default)
Phoronix reports
This was brought up in a JFS benchmarking discussion. Google’s Michael Rubin shared that they chose EXT4 after benchmarking it as well as XFS and JFS (possibly with our Phoronix Test Suite carrying out some of the testing, which they have used in other areas). Their results showed EXT4 and XFS performing close to one another, but with it being easier to upgrade from EXT2 to EXT4 rather than EXT2 to XFS, they went with the easier path. Btrfs is still too experimental for Google to even consider that an option at this point.
Also they have now hired the main developer behind EXT4: Ted Ts’o
Will Google become even faster with processing large quantities of data, and displaying them to the end-user?
Andrew Gillis has announced the release of VortexBox 1.0, a Fedora-based server distribution that turns an unused computer into a music server or jukebox:
“VortexBox 1.0 released. After several months of hard work we have released VortexBox 1.0. It has many of the features requested by the community including: FLAC to Apple Lossless (m4a) mirroring through the web GUI; MusicBrainz and CDDB used for ID3 tags; tool tips for each section in the GUI; Logitech SqueezeCenter 7.4.1 pre-installed and configured; software upgrade through the web GUI. VortexBox 1.0 also has a lot of bug fixes including better handling of existing cover art. You can update to this version from the command line.”
Read the release announcement and visit the project’s home page to learn more about this distribution.
IBM today released a report tracking the effective use of business analytics at successful businesses. The report, “Breaking away with business analytics and optimization,” said that all businesses can differentiate their performance by analyzing data better and by delivering insight to decision makers at all levels of an organization.
Those with a successful strategy “achieve both top and bottom line impact — especially important in the current economy,” the report said.
“Business school graduates understand how to manage cash but don’t understand how to manage information,” added Ambuj Goyal, general manager for business analytics and process optimization at IBM (NYSE: IBM) in response to a question from InternetNews.com.
Martin Michlmayr has published several guides about running Debian on the Linksys NSLU2 (“Slug”) router/NAS device, including one on migrating a Debian NSLU2 installation to Marvell’s SheevaPlug NAS design. With the latest guides on troubleshooting, booting, modifying, and cloning Debian on the NSLU2, the documentation is essentially complete, says Michlmayr.
The free guides cover a number of topics about running Debian Linux with the much-hacked, Linux-ready Cisco/Linksys NSLU2 router and network-attached storage (NAS) platform. Topics are said to include:
- Troubleshooting: common problems and their solutions
- Internals about the boot process of Debian on the NSLU2
- Modifying a NSLU2 firmware image
- Cloning a NSLU2
- Migration guide: How to move your Debian installation from your NSLU2 to a SheevaPlug
I believe my NSLU2 web page now covers everything Debian users need to know about the NSLU2,”
reports former Debian project leader Michlmayr on his Cyrius.com site where he has posted documentation for Debian porting projects in partnership with the NSLU2-Linux project.
“While I’ll continue to maintain and update this information, I don’t expect to make major additions. Instead, I’ll focus my attention on the SheevaPlug (a great replacement for the NSLU2) and other devices, such as NAS devices from QNAP.