Is Nexenta exposing a vast core storage market vulnerability?

Nexenta CEO and evangelist Tarkan Maner has talked about potentially displacing double-digit petabytes of NetApp storage at a global net giant. He mentions that SAP has an RFP (a "request for proposal"; essentially a solicitation from a body interested in buying something) out to move 74PB of secondary storage off EMC and …

[Mr.Nobody]

Nexenta seems cool - but seems a little lacking

We have a very small vmware cluster in one location that isn't production or all that important in any sense. Its running on a decade old FC array that takes up more room than a car, and we only need 5TB of storage.

Wanted to buy a filer, but mgmt said no. We bought a commodity server and figured we would install freenas, nextena, rockstor - check them all out and see what worked best. For VMware I a big fan of NFS, and not a fan at all of iscsi. We will use it, but only if we don't have much of a choice. We also wanted CIFS so we could get off the virtualized Windows File Server.

Rockstor - Has tons of promise. I really like brtfs, but doesn't do LACP, so its out unless everything else sucks more.

Freenas - NFS performance is terrible for VMware - apparently this is a common problem. ISCSI is excellent, but I don't want to use iscsi. Spent several hours trying to get it to join our AD, and couldn't do it. Also apparently a common issue. At this point I said screw it, on to nexenta.

Nexenta - Took a while to sort out the inanities of using LACP out of the box. The initial wizard forces you to use a standard access connected link, which I didn't want to do. After swearing at it and figuring out how to get into the shell instead and create an LACP group I was able to get it working. Took a lot of rebooting after creating LACP connections to work - which is not a good thing in my book - but it worked.

AD join was a piece of cake, and CIFS performance is nothing short of incredible. I was very much looking forward to...

NFS - great as long as you run it over a primary interface. Tried setting this up to use a private non-routeable subnet between the VMware hosts and the nexenta box to fence off traffic, and no matter what I do - its not useable. I can mount the NFS shares over the private vlan, vmware seems happy with them, but any writes do not occur. Run the same mount over the primary nexenta interface and it runs great.

I started a discussion on the nexenta forums, and the responses were pretty poor. Everyone kept asking me about the ZFS config and all sorts of other questions that are not the problem.

Haven't tried iscsi yet.

Nexenta seems promising, but it also seems to have its quirks. I am sure if I had support and training it could be very usable, but I am not 100% sold on this being a one for one replacement for a netapp filer.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Nexenta seems cool - but seems a little lacking

You've basically described the fundamental perception issue with free/opensource products that have a commercial offering as well. You have no budget, no support, you try something out and it doesn't quite work right. In your mind, it's of course the product's fault because you surely know better, but you have no support - you're stuck.

Whereas with the large traditional vendors, there's no way for you to try the product whatsoever without talking to them, and when you finally get a demo unit somewhere, there's already an engineer dedicated to your account - a strategy designed to ensure that if you have any trouble, a solution is just an e-mail away, and you generally are guided not to bother to look elsewhere.

I have the same issue with Linux in general - every time I install a new distro, I spend a few hours figuring out what the f$ck they changed vs. what I'm used to, where the config files are (or are they even files anymore), what daemons they are using, how the packaging system works, etc. Undoubtedly hit a few known bugs along the way. After that it's great and "just works(tm)".

Be more annoying and the answers will come to you. Forums are a great resource, so is IRC (yes, it still exists); worst case hit up a Sales team and give them a lead. Even if you don't follow through with a purchase, vendors will generally help you during the "trial" period.

[Anonymous Coward]

Cheap white-box storage

Ideal if you have cheap white-box data. I wouldn't run a business on it.

[ByteMe]

Can't argue...

Having spent over a decade in enterprise storage, both as a customer and selling it, I can't argue with the basic point of this story. Enterprise storage companies, with their 60 points of margin and massive sales organizations, are going to lose a huge piece of their business to server-based-storage. Call it HCI, SDS, server SAN, or whatever you want. This shit is happening. You hear it from customers and you can see server vendors positioning themselves for it.

Is Enterprise storage dead? Absolutely not. However, it's going to be squeezed into a niche where 1 copy of primary data lives. Ditto for all-flash-arrays. The rest will be carved-up between different flavors of server-based storage and will save customers a lot of money.

Fun times.

[Jim O'Reilly]

Who makes those expensive arrays?

Let's get real! The traditional large storage vendors get their gear built by ODMs in China. There is NO secret sauce in the hardware, though quality varies depending on supplier. The same is true of drives. The large vendors do quality control (which costs maybe 1%) and then mark up the drive price 10X.

Appliance based redundancy has made much of the storage mantra redundant. We don't need enterprise drives with 2 interfaces. We don't need RAID.

The mega CSPs figured this out 5 years ago and they buy storage platforms direct from China. They roll there own code, but that's beyond most companies.

Traditional vendors have a lot of code, but it was designed in a different era with proprietary architectures and RAID as the focus. By starting from a blank sheet, Nexenta and others are offering a modern code base with today's design focus, and ultimately that should be better than the traditional code sets.

[Alan Brown]

Why buy Nexenta

When Jovian is cheaper and TrueNas is cheaper still _with_ hardware.

Seriously. Nexenta's pricing structure is completely ridiculous, considering they are simply providing a software product - and an opensource one at that.

[chrismevans]

Enterprise Support

Enterprises (the big ones) continue to buy from the likes of EMC/NetApp/HDS because of the support model. They know that if they spend enough annually, any P1 problem will be dealt with instantly (I know, I've experienced many). This level of support was needed when applications were monolithic "pets". As we gradually move to the web-scale era, traditional apps will be re-written and their storage will go with them to cheaper solutions, because the storage doesn't have to be 100% resilient. Of course not all apps will go this way, so some Tier 1 enterprise storage arrays will still be needed, but they will be the minority. The traditional technology is not going away (yet), but is in a period of attrition.

[Anonymous Coward]

A little late, but the article cites some misleading information....

I'm an employee of one of the companies listed in the 4th paragraph... and while yes, we are deploying NexentaStor, it is in NO way displacing "enterprise arrays" in our environment. And to further clarify, our deployment is early in the proof of concept stage.... for archive storage. That means things that would usually go to tape.

So here I am, posting a reply to an article 8 months old, and we are *just now* expecting our hardware to arrive, much less be deployed. So always take these articles with a grain of salt. I do, and now that I have some concrete information that the Register also falls prey to the normal media faux pas, I'll enjoy a little extra salt when I read it.