Nexenta delivers SDS for All-Flash Arrays, VMware Horison 6.0, and VMware Virtual SAN at VMworld 2014

Nexenta has announced new updates to its NexentaConnect and NexentaStor solutions. The latest addition to the NexentaConnect family, NexentaConnect for VMware® Virtual SAN™, adds full-featured SMB and NFS file services to VMware’s Virtual SAN offering. NexentaConnect for VMware Horison is also updated and improves upon the automation and acceleration for VMware Horison® Virtual Desktop Infrastructures (VDI). NexentaStor release 4.1 now supports a performance optimised ‘all flash mode’ for low latency all flash reference architectures, VAAI integration and VMware vCentre™ Management Plug-in. These solutions will be revealed and demonstrated for the first time at VMworld 2014 US, August 24-28 in San Francisco.

"Nexenta's integration with VMware is a good move in today’s fast-evolving SDS market. VMware is rapidly advancing its capabilities to enable the Software-Defined Data Centre," said Simon Robinson, Research Vice President at 451 Research. “Nexenta’s offerings augment and enhance the virtualisation journey for customers as they seek to realise improvements in manageability, flexibility and efficiency.”

“’Software-Defined’ is changing the industry and allowing customers to simplify their infrastructure, reduce costs and achieve new levels of automation and scale,” Gaetan Castelein, senior director, product management, Software-Defined Storage at VMware. “Nexenta’s latest Software-Defined Storage solutions for all flash arrays and hyper-converged infrastructure powered by VMware Virtual SAN are great complements to VMware cloud infrastructure deployments.”

"Enterprises today are challenged by ever-growing storage requirements driven by trends like virtualisation, mobility, social media, the Internet of Things, and Big Data," according to Tarkan Maner, Chairman and CEO of Nexenta. "Nexenta and VMware are changing the game with our full featured Software-Defined Storage VDI deployments by delivering flexibility, simplicity and lower total cost of ownership.”

NexentaConnect for VMware Virtual SAN
NexentaConnect for VMware Virtual SAN integrates with and augments VMware Virtual SAN by adding enterprise-class Windows and UNIX based file services without the need for any additional hardware purchases. NexentaConnect for Virtual SAN completes hyper-converged Virtual SAN deployments by utilising local Virtual SAN storage in servers to deliver high performance NFS and SMB file services to Virtual Machines and Virtual Desktops, all managed through a single vCentre console.

Additionally, NexentaConnect for VMware Virtual SAN:
· Runs seamlessly on VMware Virtual SAN
· Easily provisions file services (NFSv3, NFSv4, SMB) on Virtual SAN within minutes
· Integrates management through VMware vCentre
· Provides Security and Domain integration, AD with AAA and Kerberos support
· Delivers capacity saving using inline compression and deduplication
· Can store all files needed to maintain the virtual infrastructure
· Provides IO acceleration with inline compression and advanced caching logic
· Enhances performance and health monitoring
· Delivers folder and volume level snapshots, replication and backup capabilities for DR scenarios
· Maintains data integrity during various stress, network/disk/host recovery
· Is 100% compatible with VMware HA and DRS
· Is serviceable via Rest APIs
· Is validated for VDI workloads up to thousands of users
· Leverages VSAN data protection and high availability

More information on NexentaConnect for VMware Virtual SAN is available at nexenta.com/nexentaconnect, with the solution being made available in Q3 2014.

NexentaConnect 3.0 for VMware Horison®
NexentaConnect 3.0 for VMware Horison provides improved acceleration and automation for VMware Horison 6 Virtual Desktop Infrastructures (VDI). This new release builds on NexentaConnect’s advanced features provided by both the VMware Horison Suite as well as the core VMware vSphere® products. NexentaConnect helps users better integrate storage and desktop management, and also offers up to a 75% increase in desktop density per host and up to a 10x improvement in end user experience via reduced latency. Additionally NexentaConnect 3.0 provides:
· Advanced analytics on a per desktop and pool basis
· Simplified desktop management
· Read cache acceleration to accelerate non-persistent environments
· Advancements in write caching capabilities and SAN offload to accelerate all virtual desktops
· Support for graphics intensive desktops utilising Blast or GPU acceleration
· Ability to import existing Horison desktop pools seamlessly into a NexentaConnect storage and acceleration solution
· Support for VMware Horison 6 or Citrix XenDesktop on vSphere infrastructures
· Simple to configure disaster recovery functionality for maximum availability

NexentaStor 4.1
NexentaStor 4.1 brings the economic benefits of Software-Defined Storage to high performance, low latency all flash block and file shared storage configurations. This update to the market-leading SDS solution also hardens support for VMware and Microsoft integration. For IT executives and storage administrators who have been grappling with new demands on high performance, enterprise-class storage environments, NexentaStor 4.1 introduces all-SSD reference architectures with inline data de-duplication and compression and support for the latest hardware. Among other enhancements in NexentaStor 4.1:
· VMware VAAI and vCentre Management Plug-in
· Performance optimised “all flash mode” for all-SSD reference architectures
· Reference architectures with up to 150TB of raw SanDisk or HGST SSDs
· All flash, block and file storage configurations with unlimited snapshots, clones and long distance replication
· High performance inline data reduction (compression and deduplication)
· Support for high performance 12Gbps SAS and 16Gbps FC
· Support for SMB 3.0