Software-Defined Storage (SDS) company OSNEXUS provides enterprise-class storage using commodity hardware and specialized software to deliver storage services, advanced features, and management capabilities on its QuantaStor SDS platform. Compared to traditional enterprise storage that requires proprietary or custom storage systems, software-defined storage platforms such asQuantaStor have much lower up-front and on-going operational costs.OSNEXUS has engineered out the complexity that historically has burdened organizations who struggle to keep up with massive data growth, to simplify storage processes for IT professionals in all types of industries. QuantaStor SDS increases IT agility by enabling organizations to leverage hardware from any vendor, as well as the option to use existing IT infrastructure to create a custom storage solution to any storage need. Organizations can achieve massive scale by increasing storage capacity and performance as needed up to 64 nodes and 64 petabytes.
The QuantaStor Software-Defined Storage platform provides scale up and out file, block, and object storage and is designed to make storage management easy while reducing overall enterprise storage costs. A broad set of use cases are solved by QuantaStor SDS including server virtualization, big data, cloud computing, and high performance applications through scale-out physical and virtual storage appliances. QuantaStor supports all major SAN/NAS protocols including iSCSI/FC and NFS/CIFS/SMB and delivers a complete array of enterprise features and capabilities that can be installed on any 64-bit Intel or AMD server or virtual machine.QuantaStor SDS was designed with advanced grid scale-out management technology to enable the deployment of multiple appliances that can be managed from any location as a single unit.
The Story of an Innovator
Steve Umbehocker, CEO of OSNEXUS, founded OSNEXUS in 2010. He has worked in the enterprise software and storage industry for 20 years, holding engineering leadership roles at companies including Citrix Systems, Symantec, and Veritas. Steve holds over twenty patents in the areas of storage systems technology, SDS, and cloud computing.Most recently, Steve and OSNEXUS were awarded a patent for “Global Management of Tiered Storage Resources”.
An All-in-One Product that Meets All Your Storage Needs
QuantaStor SDS addresses the needs of a broad range of industries, including compute-intensive applications in fields such as energy, storage needs in the financial sector,media and entertainment use cases, as well as big data management for life sciences organizations. In the cloud, QuantaStor Virtual Storage Appliances (VSAs) increase the performance and efficiency of data centers as storage appliances are shifted to run as virtual machines, providing shared storage without the cost of additional dedicated hardware and software.
The life sciences industry, for example, is struggling to keep up with massive data growth due to advancing technologies such as genomics. The processing of data from one genome produces about 1.5 gigabytes, that in turn creates huge amounts of storage needs for each genomics organization that stores thousands of sequenced genomes each day.Genome researchers and other life sciences professionals require storage systems that are high-performing, secure, and scalable. The processing of large datasets also requires fast storage that can concurrently handle many simultaneous write streams as data is processed.
QuantaStor SDS can meet any storage workflow for pharmaceutical and life sciences organizations, from accessing, collaborating, and managing massive amounts of structured and unstructured scientific data to backup and migration strategies, object storage, genome-based file access, encryption, and compliance. QuantaStor SDS’ hyperscale grid technology enables the scaling of storage up and out to 64 physical or virtual storage appliances and 64 PB locally or dispersed across geographies. Easily provision storage from any appliance in the grid from a single web-based user management interface with no special client-side software to install.
New Technology for QuantaStor SDS
QuantaStor’s new SDS Data Migration Edition helps enterprises migrate and transport multiple terabytes of file, block, and object storage between data centers and on-premises sites using mobile hardware and a custom licensed edition of QuantaStor SDS. Use cases for Data Migration Edition include cloud storage migration, data center consolidation, disaster recovery, content distribution, and workflows where today’s WAN technologies are insufficient and too expensive for large data transfer.
QuantaStor also has a new Capacity-as-a-Service (CaaS) license for SDS, enabling enterprises to dynamically manage and provision their storage license capacities online through a new QuantaStor Cloud License Service portal.The CaaS license combines the power of QuantaStor’s high-performance software-defined storage platform with the OSNEXUS Cloud License Service (CLS) to help automate, install, and provision software-defined storage for Cloud Service Providers, higher-education, and enterprise customers.
The new addition of Global Namespaces for QuantaStor SDS simplify NAS storage management and increase end-user productivity by combining shares into easy-to-access groups that are accessible across a storage grid of appliances. Steve Umbehocker states, “High-growth, geographically-distributed storage environments make it increasingly difficult for users to manage their data. That reduces an organization’s agility and slows productivity. With QuantaStor, users get the performance benefits, high-availability, and ease of use that come with Global Namespaces without having to suffer from the latency and network costs that come with typical scale-out NAS solutions.”
QuantaStor SDS in the Cloud
Today, QuantaStor SDS can be provisioned in the IBM Bluemix cloud and will be available on every major cloud platform in the near future, enabling companies to manage their storage in their own data centers or via virtual machines in the public cloud.