OpenStor XE Storage Appliances with SSD Accelerators
VA Technologies and Nexenta are partnering to deliver Enterprise Class storage solutions with optional clustering capabilities based to deliver enterprise class performance at a fraction of the cost of proprietary solutions.

The OpenStor XE storage appliances gives customers Enterprise Class features such as automatic failover of head nodes, virtually unlimited file system size, single namespace, integrated search features, block level real time mirroring and infinite snapshots for backup and for disaster recovery. The revolutionary ZFS file system at the heart of NexentaStor eliminates the growing risk of silent data corruption through an integrated approach that includes RAIDZ and RAIDZ2 as well as end to end checksum algorithms for every transaction that together identify and correct data corruption before it has a chance to proliferate through the storage system.

Fast-file I/O Technology
All OpenStor XE storage appliances benefit from Fast-file I/O Technology to dramatically increase IOPs. VA Technologies Openstor Platforms are able to use Fast-file I/O Accelerators to dramatically increase IOPs whilst significantly reducing costs by using high performance commodity hardware and advances in ZFS based file-systems. VA Technologies are leading the way in Open-Storage for HPC.

A key component of Fast-file I/O Technology is the use of Accelerators to help smooth the data stream down to the disks. For random write IO, the accelerators are able to cache the random writes and turn them into a sequential IO stream to extract maximum write performance from standard SATA or SAS disks.

On random read IO, the Accelerators store hot files on SSD’s to provide a low latency cache removing dreaded seek time on standard hard disks. The SSD’s also allow the file-system to dynamically balance the ‘hot file cache’ without additional tuning. Openstor platforms actually increase in speed over time by utilising the read Accelerators.

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.