NexentaStor adds primary deduplication

NexentaStor 3.0, which is being introduced on Tuesday at CeBit in Hanover, Germany, is the latest version of a storage system that is based on the open-source ZFS (Zettabyte File System) technology developed by Sun Microsystems. The company will also release Nexenta Virtual Machine Datacenter (VMDC), a management application based on NexentaStor. The new software will be available by the end of this month.

NexentaStor offers an alternative to proprietary storage systems with an open-source platform that runs on x86 servers used for storage from Nexenta or third-party "white box" system makers. Its latest version offers further advances, including what it says is the first system to support all three major hypervisors in one unified environment, VMDC.

Deduplication reduces the amount of storage capacity taken up by certain kinds of data, by identifying duplicate bits and reducing them down to one instance. Deduplication typically is performed only on backup or replicated copies of data.

NexentaStor 3.0 can perform this task on current information that is going into primary storage, the data that has to be available in real time for use in applications. With some types of data, this allows enterprises to cut down on their need for primary storage, which is often the most expensive type of storage because it requires high speeds. That data reduction can also pay performance benefits itself, by cutting the number of disks in the system and the bits that have to traverse the data center, said Nexenta CEO Evan Powell.

Turning to the open-source NexentaStor for deduplication can free enterprises from reliance on proprietary storage platforms that typically are used for this task, Nexenta said. Those proprietary systems can proliferate if there are multiple storage systems used in a data center.