Nexenta 3.0
This new version of NexentaStor is the first commercial storage solution to incorporate ZFS-based in-line deduplication, a giant leap forward for the storage industry. NexentaStor 3.0 also includes an upgrade to VM Data Center to include support for Microsoft Hyper-V, making it the only storage management solution for virtualized environments to support all major virtualization vendors. With this release, NexentaStor continues to build on its position as the superior alternative to expensive, vertically integrated and proprietary storage technologies.

In-line DeDuplication
NexentaStor 3.0 revolutionizes storage by providing deduplication for primary (production) storage. This functionality enables customers to reduce their use of expensive and scarce primary storage. NexentaStor 3.0 exceeds the functionality of legacy deduplication by also offering bi-directional replication with compression and deduplication, superior end-to-end data integrity, and accelerated I/O through the native use of SSDs and hardware accelerators leveraged by the revolutionary ZFS file system.

VMDC Support for Microsoft Hyper-V
All the above listed capabilities are leveraged to their fullest in the Nexenta Virtual Machine Datacenter (VMDC) 3.0 release based on NexentaStor 3.0. With its new support for Microsoft Hyper-V, NexentaStor is the only product to support VMware, Citrix Xen and Hyper-V from a single point within one unified environment, VMDC. VMDC allows storage administrators to see their entire virtual environment and to provision storage and storage policies including backup, replication and retention policies from a simple point and click interface.

Industry Standard Hardware
Both NexentaStor and VMDC run on industry-standard hardware, a fundamental pillar of Open Storage, which drives dramatically lower costs than proprietary solutions; cost savings are considerable upfront, at initial purchase, and even greater over time as customers are able to purchase capacity expansions from the market for industry standard hardware as opposed to being locked-in to the outrageous costs of expanding legacy storage. Further, by making storage and virtualization management more efficient, NexentaStor with VMDC also reduces operational costs.

Storage Without Limits
A storage system built upon 32bit addressing is never going to be as flexible and scalable as one built upon a 128bit system. So NexentaStor, thanks in part to the use of ZFS, has a number of advantages vs. legacy and Linux or BSD based solutions.

Unlimited Snapshots
With the exponential increase in the amount of data stored, snapshots need to become more granular if they are going to be able to be restored in a timely manner. Legacy solutions are limited to up to 255 snapshots. By comparison, NexentaStor can accommodate 2 to the 48th snapshots. This means you can run hourly snapshots, for example, on all of your data which in turn means that you can restore in a timely manner and that the incremental amounts sent over the network can be smaller than daily updates.

Unlimited File System Size
Due to the underlying ZFS filesystem NexentaStor what equates to an Unlimited file systems size that can be managed as a single namespace.

Multi-level Data Protection
NexentaStor protects your organization's data with features and capabilities ranging from the most granular, per transaction data integrity checks to higher level backup and disaster recovery capabilities.

Every read or write made by NexentaStor utilizes ZFS data integrity. To avoid accidental and silent data corruption ZFS provides end-to-end checksumming and transactional copy-on-write IO operations. These operations eliminate the 'write-holes' and silent data corruption that have plagued storage solutions that are not based on ZFS.

At a higher level, NexentaStor enables you to protect your data through a range of backup and replication capabilities including unlimited incremental snapshot capabilities. Most legacy vendor solutions are limited to 255 snapshots, which limits your freedom when setting up backup and protection schemes for your data. Other open source based solutions offer at most one or two incremental snapshots since Linux based snapshots will spike your CPU with each additional snapshot spiking your CPU that much more.

NexentaStor also offers block-level mirroring via our CDP feature. Now you can easily set up real time mirroring for your disaster recovery and remote backup requirements. By using NexentaStor you are using an advanced file system, with superior data integrity features, as well as a complete variety of replication, backup and mirroring capabilities to reduce and even eliminate the risk of loosing your organization's data.

Inherent Virtualization
The purpose built VM DataCenter 1.1 plugin simplifies the management of VMware Infrastructure, and specifically ESX and related storage policies, with NexentaStor. This pluggable optional module integrates seamlesly into the NexentaStor web GUI, and provides a single point of control to manage all storage related aspects of a VMware based Data Center.

Capabilities include:

• Establish storage policies, including scheduled backups and replication, for each VM data set from one user interface
• Perform common VM management tasks such as starting and stopping VMs
• Use templates to clone VMs at a fraction of the time of cloning within VMware

The optional VM DataCenter module makes it simple for storage administrators to leverage the full power of NexentaStor's replication and other capabilities while also enabling them to perform common VM management tasks from the same interface.

NexentaStor is built from the ground up on the revolutionary file system ZFS which means that virtualization is at the core of NexentaStor. This virtualization enables thin provisioning and also improves performance via I/O pooling.

Storage pooling via ZFS also enables I/O pooling. This means that when you add more disks or systems to NexentaStor the overall solution accelerates. Please work with your certified partner for your particular use case, but across a range of data characteristics ZFS has been shown to outperform legacy file systems including UFS.

Integrated Search and General Ease of Use
NexentaStor users have at their fingertips the ability to set up unlimited numbers of snapshots. Included indexing and boolean search in order to enable the management of these snapshots. Using NexentaStor search storage administrators can easily find the content within files that they need to access. NexentaStor provides a graphical and console interface for centralized management of NexentaStor instances.

For example, administrators can:

• Install and provision Storage in under 5 minutes
• Create, grow, destroy, export and import storage volumes
• Share (via NFS/CIFS/RSYNC/FTP and HTTP) volumes and folders
• Take snapshots, custom and automated, periodic and on-demand
• Implement user-defined snapshot retention policies
• These policies can include Write Once, Read Many policies with the use of the optional 'WORM' module
• Automatically and periodically generate storage and service reports
• Manage the performance of the system and integrate the system into SNMP based management solutions
• Discover, configure, and create iSCSI sessions, deploy iSCSI-attached LUNs, and much more
• Establish fail-over groups with the use of the optional High Availability, 'HA', module.
• Indicate SSDs are available and then watch as NexentaStor automatically pulls the appropriate data onto the SSDs

The NexentaStor management suite includes the NexentaStor Management View, which is a web-based GUI, the NexentaStor Management Console, which includes wizards and the ability to record and replay commands across all deployed NexentaStor instances, and the NexentaStor Storage API, which is a fully documented network based API.

Full Management and Reporting
The appliance comes with a number of standard pluggable modules that perform essential Fault Management, Performance Monitoring and Reporting functions.

• Memory and CPU utilization
• State and status of appliance's hardware, including physical disks
• State and status of appliance's services and facilities
• Storage services
• NFS statistics
• Network utilization reporting
• State and operational status of the Nexenta Management Server.