Nexenta Extends its Open Software Defined Storage (OpenSDS) Market Leadership via Open Source User Community and Membership

Nexenta (@Nexenta), the global leader in Open Source-driven Software-Defined Storage (OpenSDS), today announced that the Nexenta User Community is growing in record numbers by serving as a driver of OpenSDS innovation. The Nexenta User Community gives thousands of IT professionals a forum to discuss the latest in software-defined storage solutions and the ability to work with new open source releases unavailable anywhere else. Participation in the Community is a driver of Nexenta’s OpenSDS innovation, architectures, solutions, and software and hardware platforms.

• Over 100,000 Nexenta Community Edition solution transactions at no cost.
• Over 46,000 users and community members.
• Over 10,000 questions and comments.

 “As a NexentaStor Community Edition (CE) user for over 4 years now, I continually see the benefit from using the community edition as this provides me with a great solution for home lab use, as well as being able to spread the word into the enterprise and having a solid background on the solution,” said Larry Smith Jr., a Nexenta community member. “If all companies provided a community edition to home users for their labs, now that would be amazing.”

The Community allows a growing base of visionary storage professionals to engage in dialog around OpenSDS issues and leading practices.  The Community provides early access to upcoming Nexenta software releases, forums on topics of interest, and a renewed plug-in development program with Nexenta prizes for winning designs.  The latest forum is for NexentaStor on OpenStack, which is based on the company’s leading practice and configuration guides that make use of the Nexenta Cinder driver and its new certification for the Kilo release of OpenStack. 

“In a world where data and application growth are exploding, IT staff needs a way to stay on top of the techniques that will keep their companies ahead of the curve,” said Dominic Watts of premium partner, NAS UK. “Nexenta’s commitment to facilitating the contributions of experts from around the world, places them in a class above any other company. Their belief in an open, collaborative environment gives my customers the freedom to develop stronger ecosystems and most importantly, control their own destiny.”

“The software-defined storage market is growing quickly, and it promises to be one of the key enterprise storage technologies of the future,” said Eric Burgener, research director at IDC.  “While many enterprises have deployed it, others are still learning about how best to leverage it.  Community programs like Nexenta’s OpenSDS User Community provide easy, free access to this technology, and Nexenta’s proven track record of working with open source software developers provides a welcoming forum for storage professionals to familiarize themselves with its benefits.”

“Our community represents a place where we collaborate with our users on the advancement of OpenSDS,” said Thomas Cornely, Nexenta’s Chief Product Officer.  “Nexenta’s open source-based software and our investment in a platform committed to the freedom of choice that open, software-defined storage represents, demonstrates that together we can drive meaningful change.  Our growing membership shows that the world wants to move toward the untethered independence that Software-Defined everything –what we call OpenSDx—provides.”

The Nexenta Community also includes news, links to white papers and social content.  The NexentaStor Community Edition, version 4.0.3 is available today, and the next generation of NexentaStor will be released to the Community in the coming months.

Nexenta is an active participant and contributor to OpenStack efforts, helping to promote the standard. The company not only participates in the vibrant software development community via the Nexenta Community, but also contributes through multi-OS support (e.g., Illumos, BSD, LINUX, OSX, etc.), and along with other major brands, through open-zfs.org efforts.