Howdy all,
Lately I’ve been researching SAN storage (Let’s face it…I loooove storage;)). Not exactly for any special project but we had a meeting with a HP service provider here in Iceland. We were shown some 3Par slides, prices etc. I gotta give those guys some credit….I think the 3Par StoreServ 7000 is a brilliant product. There….I said it.
However I also starting reading up on Nexentastor Enterprise. Where have I been for the last years !
I got the “pleasure” of inheriting a Nexenta Community Edition box in a previous job. Man….I always disliked that box quite a bit. Never mind that….However after reading up on Nexentastor Enterprise Edition I wish I had known anything…anything at all about that product ! I would have switched over in a jiffy.
For those that don’t know anything about Nexentastor it is a software distribution (Based on Illumos kernel packaged with the Debian packaging tools) that runs on commodity hardware. It can offer iSCSI, NFS or FC based storage from everything from SATA to high end SAS drives. Just grab some (supported) JBODS, make sure you are running a supported firmware and some HBA and NICS and you are good to go. It can use SSD/Flash disks for a read and write caching (L2ARC/ZIL) and can push amazing amounts of IOPS/Mbps from cheap hardware.
Hopefully I will be able to test a Nexentastor installation on enterprise grade hardware soon enough to get some feel for how it performs as well as to see how the HA features work.
If this thing flies as high as Nexenta and some partners tell me then the good old enterprise storage vendors might have to start worrying about those guys, at least it looks like a killer product !
Check out the Nexenta webpage.
Bgrds,
Finnzi
Finnzi, looking forward to hearing your experiences with NexentaStor EE.