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back to article Last round, folks: Dell 'n' pals pull out wallets as Nexenta preps for IPO

Nexenta is clearly keen to be top dog of the software-defined storage world. After reportedly experiencing 100 per cent year-on-year growth from 2013 to 2014, Nexenta says it is gearing up for an IPO in the next 18 months or so – with channel and geographic expansion and a final funding round coming. Nexenta says it has …

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  1. CheesyTheClown

    Why?

    To be fair, Nexenta is probably the best solution right now for storage if you want something that's really third party. But...

    1) It's fibre channel support is horrible

    2) It's FCoE support is utterly awful

    3) It has great NFS support, but it's SMB support is kinda half assed

    4) It's user interface is archaic and barely usable.

    5) It's options for backup and management just isn't very good

    6) It's support for things like VAAI NFS is present... kinda sorta.. it's just not there

    7) Support for OpenStack storage is ok, but it simply doesn't offer anything you can't just get with Ubuntu or RedHat running swift and cinder.

    8) It's iSCSI target isn't great. It's better than Microsoft's but that's not saying much.

    9) It's yet another system to manage and just doesn't have the integration that modern data centers should expect

    10) It doesn't have PowerShell or PowerCLI support. It doesn't have full vCloud Orchestrator, System Center or UCS director automation support.

    11) It's REST API looks like it's documented with a 4 year old with chocolate all over his fingers.

    12) Calling or mailing support at Nexenta is a gamble. You might as well google the Oracle docs for Solaris since Nexenta is simply not likely to respond with anything more than an offer to sell you something.

    13) At some point, Oracle will probably sue the hell out of Nexenta for license violation and it won't matter if Nexenta is in the right or not. They'll be lucky to keep their heads above water throughout the lawsuit.

    Don't get me wrong, I LOVE ZFS and use it in my production environment since it's by far the most incredible solution out there, but I just don't see what NexentaStor has to offer other than a REALLY expensive storage stack with tons of half implemented features.

    If you actually think you need NexentaStor, you haven't done your research... while I think they'd make a good $99 storage system, I couldn't imagine paying more than that.

    Sadly, while there are hundreds of cheap and crappy Linux, BSD and Solaris storage solutions out there right now, Nexenta might be the best of the cheap and crappy. But for OpenStack, the stock SWIFT and Cinder solution is best. For Windows, Storage Spaces is truly the best thing ever made. For VMware ... there is no good storage solution for VMware at the moment. For some reason, VMware decided that they would focus on another generation or two of legacy crap packaged as a $2500 per CPU add-on. You almost have to use a SAN appliance from EMC, NetApp or Hitachi to even keep your head above water there. Nexenta could fit that hole, but unless you want to use some fairly odd SuperMicro twin servers for running Nexenta, there isn't many good hardware solutions for hosting it out there.

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  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I kinda get your point Mr. Clown

    I know that they built their technology lynchpin under the premise that storage orchestration was going to be the main pain point in the new SDx datacenter, and that they would be at the forefront to address that with their REST API.

    But it seems that most enterprise folks don't care. At least the one's I talk to. Now with Vvols around the corner in ESX 6, I can't see how storage orchestration will even matter anymore in a VMware environment since that will be addressed by the hypervisor talking directly to the storage controller without the need of an orchestration platform to act as a go-between.

    At that point Nexenta's only value to the enterprise would be "cheaper" storage on commodity box's? That play hasn't worked for anyone at scale yet.

    The direction that enterprises are looking at is the distributed software defined storage / hyper converged solutions. (Nutanix, Simplivity, Atlantis)

    I would venture to say the major OEM''s would pass on them, and let this company progress or fail on its own innovation or lack there of.

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  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    From the trenches…

    I’ve worked in house and I’m now a reseller. After spending 20+ years battling it out in the trenches, I can honestly say that it’s a good thing when we see a company like Nexenta take on the likes of EMC and NetApp. I think the core ZFS is the superior storage file system and the ability to be a do it yourselfer and put a superior software platform on top of any hardware is big. Ok, so there are a few solutions that let you put some form of software on any hardware, but Nexenta has an impressive group of partners and lets resellers build platforms on their choice of servers ranging from the traditional DIY hardware or enterprise servers. I’ve even seen solutions from some of the up and coming vendors like Quanta. Vendor support though is only part of the battle and having the support for NFS is key in my VMware environments, albeit the speed of adoption on some of the VMware tech could be faster. In windows environments it is all about integration with active directory and the latest release seems solid for that as good if not better than some of the alternative software storage solutions. Honestly the block support is nice for me, but not something that I am seeing used as much so it works and I’ll take it. Building all that and the fact that I’ve personally set up deployments that net between 50-80% savings over NetApp and EMC makes Nexenta an easy model to adopt.

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