The internet has become a massive repository of information, an important advertising medium, and the ideal cloud storage management service for almost every industry. From small startups to multinational companies, organizations are storing massive amounts of enterprise data and information relevant to their operations on websites. They all require an efficient and scalable storage platform to maintain and organize this information. Life Sciences organizations today are struggling to keep up with massive data growth due to advancing technologies, and sectors like Genomics are producing up to 40 exabytes of data per year. The current market is crowded with storage providers, most of which offer a traditional model known as the ‘multitude of silos’ construction. However, organizations find it difficult to organize their data using that traditional model; a unique and adaptable solution is becoming increasingly essential. A new data storage model called Software Defined Storage came into play to solve some of the problems associated with legacy storage systems such as high prices for software and hardware combinations and vendor lock-ins. With Software Defined Storage, companies can buy commodity hardware and install separate software to manage their data; a more economical approach than traditional storage systems. OSNEXUS Corporation (OSNEXUS) stands out as a Software Defined Storage company with its storage grid technology that is built into its QuantaStor SDS platform, which simplifies storage management by allowing all data to be managed from a ‘single-pane-of-glass’ web interface which requires no additional software to install; a leap in progress for open storage platforms. QuantaStor SDS enables organizations to use standard server hardware as their storage appliances but OSNEXUS has gone further to provide reference configurations and certifications with every major server manufacturer on the market which provides leverage and choice in hardware purchase decisions for Life Sciences organizations. The use of multiple generations of servers and the use of servers from different manufacturers is fully supported by the QuantaStor SDS platform, which enables organizations to grow their storage grid(s) on demand, at the best price, and without the procurement delays and high capital expenditures of traditional proprietary SAN/NAS solutions. QuantaStor SDS scales to over 60PB per grid which is essential to addressing the data growth and data security challenges surrounding Life Sciences and at an average savings of 50% or more versus traditional solutions, QuantaStor enables organizations to collect more data and retain it longer so that deep analytics can be done in active and future research.
Insightful Innovation
Steven Umbehocker, Founder and CEO of OSNEXUS brings over twenty years of experience in the enterprise storage software industry to the challenges of hyper-scale storage management. He currently holds over 20 patents in Storage Systems Technology, SDS, and Cloud Computing, and has previously led engineering teams at some of the world’s largest IT companies, including Citrix Systems, Symantec, and Veritas Software. In 2009, Steven was leading the development of new enterprise storage management technologies for XenServer and saw the need for a new kind of storage system that would scale as a grid across sites and datacenters in order to eliminate the complexity and scalability issues inherent to traditional storage systems. The result of that vision was the founding of Open Storage Nexus (OSNEXUS) in 2010 and the creation of QuantaStor SDS with a team of storage veterans from Veritas and Citrix.
A Unified Data Store
QuantaStor SDS is OSNEXUS’ flagship product and offers file, block, and object storage in a single system. Besides QuantaStor, OSNEXUS provides primary product-specific services, including Virtual Storage Appliances (VSAs) available in the Microsoft Azure cloud. VSAs are virtualized instances of QuantaStor SDS which may be added to storage grids made up of both physical and other virtual appliances. OSNEXUS also offers the QuantaStor SDS Cloud License Service, which gives customers the convenience of self provisioning license keys. IT professionals from the Life Sciences sector find this solution especially useful because it enables their IT organizations to quickly scale, deploy, and redeploy appliances to a multitude of research projects with ease.
Distinctive Features
QuantaStor SDS is an all-in-one solution that meets the needs of a variety of different industries and use case scenarios including server virtualization, big data, cloud computing, and high-performance applications through scale-out physical and virtual storage appliances. Data is protected using end-to-end encryption, which combines data-at-rest encryption which is AES-NI accelerated combined with protocol-level/on-the-wire encryption with SMB, IPsec, and HTTPS across any storage grid. QuantaStor provides Pharmaceutical and Life Sciences organizations the data transfer speed necessary for accessing, collaborating on, and managing massive amounts of structured and unstructured scientific data, backup and migration strategies, object storage, genome-based file access, encryption, and compliance. OSNEXUS features like hardware and software disk drive encryption with Intel AES-NI technology and advanced user security with role-based access controls are unmatched in the market. QuantaStor SDS is protected against system failure through replication, and incorporates expedited disaster recovery mechanisms like data snapshots.
The Future of Storage
Many companies use public clouds to store their data, which seem like a low-cost option for data storage. In industries like Life Sciences, however, when petabytes (one million gigabytes) of data are produced, public clouds are not economical. As an example, Amazon Web Services charges $0.03/GB per month, which is $0.36/GB per year which equates to $360/TB per year. At the scale of one petabyte that amounts to $360,000/year or $1.8 millon over 5 years. In contrast, a dedicated QuantaStor solution including hardware, software, and cloud-hosting would save as much as 75% or more versus AWS S3 or other cloud object storage services. That’s before transfer costs are factored in, and when one accounts for the need for researchers to run advanced analytics applications against the data – the savings can easily come to over 90% versus AWS.
Looking Ahead
OSNEXUS has grown organically at a terrific pace since its inception in 2010. In its early days, the company focused on developing its innovative QuantaStor SDS, engineering and creating an unbeatable open storage platform. Today, OSNEXUS continues to expand the capabilities of QuantaStor SDS at an even faster pace with new innovations in security, data replication, and application integration.In the coming years, QuantaStor will also include data integration features into the SDS grid architecture, which will improve users’ decision-making ability by reducing the complexity of information available. QuantaStor SDS users will be able to utilize visual tools like graphs, charts, and dashboards to better understand their storage, and simplify capacity planning accordingly. QuantaStor SDS is available worldwide from a network of partner resellers and distributors and OSNEXUS has been helping industry giants like IBM, Cisco, CenturyLink, Intel, and Microsoft bring SDS innovations to their customers. The company aims to sustain and build upon these strong partnerships to expand their world-class, practical open storage technology.
Source :- The 10 Most Innovative Pharma and Life Sciences Solutions Providers 2018
