NexGen polishes guns, prepares to face hybrid array legions

Hybrid array startup NexGen is starting out afresh having been spun out of SanDisk, and now faces the full competitive force of hybrid competition from both mainstream array vendors and the up-and-coming trio of Nimble, Tegile and Tintri. What are its chances? NexGen was an iSCSI-based hybrid flash/disk array startup which …

[Anonymous Coward]

"A ground-up-designed operating system underlies this."

Sadly not - it's ZFS under the hood. Just like Tegile.

[cd_mccall]

Re: "A ground-up-designed operating system underlies this."

Disclosure: I work for NexGen Storage.

A correction to the ZFS comment. NexGen ioControl is not based on ZFS. The person that commented is misinformed. ioControl (the management software) was designed from the ground up. All data path, HA, caching, tiering, data reduction, thin provisioning, snapshot, replication, app integration, etc... have been developed from the ground up to be optimized around a Quality of Service management paradigm.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: "A ground-up-designed operating system underlies this."

Good to hear; thanks for setting the record straight. Probably why you should never trust word-of-mouth.

Out of interest, why would you say making a storage array OS from the ground up for flash make it better than ZFS?

[undercoverdave]

Re: "A ground-up-designed operating system underlies this."

Probably the QoS, which ZFS lacks.

ZFS is a good option, but there are other options out there that are not tied to Oracle and have real development happening behind the scenes, as this article proves.

[cd_mccall]

Re: "A ground-up-designed operating system underlies this."

Disclosure: I work for NexGen Storage.

There are both pros and cons of using something like ZFS. Pros include things like speed to market, comprehensive feature set, and decades of development and refinement. Cons include things like decades of development and refinement, detailed expertise and knowledge of data path, challenges around differentiation.

NexGen decided not to use an existing file system because the software design paradigm of the last few decades has revolved around disk drives and managing capacity. NexGen believes there is a big gap in the storage market around providing customers with the ability to squeeze every ounce of performance out of flash (and other emerging medias) and the ability to manage performance just as effectively as managing capacity to deliver predictable application performance in a shared environment. The easiest way to solve these problems are to start from scratch and design a new architecture and data path to avoid being burdened with legacy software designed for disk. It's taken us a lot more work from an engineering perspective and has taken us longer to get to market but we believe our approach will pay dividends in the long term. Thanks for your interest and question.

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh good, another 'new' player to the market and another set of reps, partners, telemarketers and advertising to bother us.

We have countless legacy players, a plethora of hybrid start-ups, hyper converged, MSPs and cloud offerings for storage. This section of the industry doesnt need new, it needs to consolidate.

[Bruce Hockin]

No, this market needs new vendors and solutions so that you don't get stitched up paying over the top for average solutions which lack the innovation need to truly help you deliver an improved user experience.

I appreciate, there are a lot of players out there now and many differing ways on improving your storage delivery, and this can become confusing. But if you are guy takes time to invest in understanding what each offers or used a partner to help you understand a few of your options (saves a bit of time) they you'll be the hero when you help your business deliver improved customer satisfaction and greater revenues whilst saving money in the process.