If you have been following along, I remarked in http://jmlittle.blogspot.com/2007/09/multi-tier-storage-revisited.html that "the increasing capabilities of Nexenta's storage solution and its underlying OpenSolaris base have proceeded a pace, and I believe the future is very bright for this solution". Its one of the few bright spots that I've had the privilege of using to enable commodity-based storage solutions. I've been an early adopter of the NexentaStor multi-tier storage appliance, and I am happy to hear that not only is it approaching its first general release to customers, but a release candidate is being made available to the public. Although I run it directly on hardware, the VMware evaluation version of the product has been deemed fit enough for people to kick the tires and see exactly how this fits in the organization. Check out http://www.nexenta.com
Many will ask how this is different from either the hardware based NAS and Disk-to-Disk solutions, and others will wonder how does this compare to FreeBSD and Linux based solutions and projects already on the market. It comes down to what its does best now, and the potential of where it will go in the future. If you haven't been catching the storage news lately, NexentaStor is the first major product being built on the ZFS filesystem which brings to commodity storage much of what has till now only be accessible by the hardware vendors. Its that secret sauce that has justified those large margins and high priced "vendor-provided and tested" disk drives. What if you could just build it out on your own? Many open source solutions supposedly allow for just that, but its somewhat beyond a do-it-yourself level: the pieces aren't necessarily all integrated, nor is the complete solution truly comparable to commercial solutions or are they production ready. The test is would you feel safe having 50TB of your backups on that solution?
ZFS is all fine and good, but its the integration I speak of that have made me settle on this particular product. It also brings a fully developed commercial grade NFSv4 server solution, fully managed snapshots with the necessary scheduling, multiple replication and tiering services to integrate it anywhere in my digital archive flow, virtualized and thin provisioning, iSCSI target and client support of said storage, and when installed on brawnier hardware architected to grow, it will quickly eclipse many heavily marketed primary storage solutions, at a true fraction of the cost.
Nexenta is building this on OpenSolaris and their own hybrid opensolaris/debian-style distribution. Its has just started to stretch its legs when it comes to potential. However, our use is in second-tier storage, and that truly is where is shines right now. We've already thrown 50TB of disk at this via SCSI, iSCSI, SATA, and the like. It enables reuse of the storage you have now for a credible tiering architecture, and its both the web based interface and extensive command line interface that allow both legacy and new storage components to be managed. I could go to a zetabyte of storage with unlimited snapshots with the current installation, but one would undoubtedly want a more thought out long term hardware architecture. At least the current design allows for phasing in new technology while phasing out the old in the same pools I use today. Long term, I have high hopes that the product further simplifies data growth and management of a multitude of devices.
Now that this is finally available for public consumption, I'll be able to speak more and provide good best practice advice. Here is some ready advice to keep in mind:
1) As per disk capacity grows while prices drop, the exposure window of rebuilding any lost disk makes it more clear that RAID10 provides the best of all worlds for volume growth, redundancy, and recoverability.
2) Don't throw away your primary storage. Its still a mature product, and NexentaStor is best suited to secondary storage at this time. Long term, you can migrate that primary storage into the second tier, managed by NexentaStor. Once you are familiar and comfortable with commodity based storage solutions, you'll find it moving to primary storage environments when its good and ready.
3) That all said, commodity based storage solutions are now here. The wait is over, jump on in today.
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