On June 1, 2010 we paid a visit to Nexenta, to attend a company presentation delivered by Jon Ash, VP of Sales and Marketing and and Brad Stone, CTO (on the picture on the left with Yacine Kheddache from Alyseo between them). There are 30 people working for Nexenta, a lot of the development being done in Russia, and there are also contractors working for them (including some figureheads such as one of the people who wrote ZFS, a file system devised by Sun, now acquired by Oracle); but the strength of Nexenta is not in its headcount. "We are 30 people plus 30,000 others who work for us, but I don't pay for the 30,000" Jon Ash says. By that he means that Nexenta is based on the opensource model and that the community developing for them are doing this for free, as is the case of Linux or any other opensource solution for that matter.

• Extremely scalable: it can be even run over a laptop. Nexenta licences is a universal licence which can be passed from one machine to another. Only software suite able to do compression, dedupe and in-box virus scan (according to Jon ash Sun can do all other features apart from virus scan).
• a graphical interface is made available to the administrator.
• Comparing us to other vendors, Nexenta offers - according to Jon Ash - more features, is more scalable all that a superior price
• "Nexenta is a kind of Linux for storage and that has never been done before". It's just storage that hasn't gone the non proprietary route and we are trying to change that, all at a price point which is making things more rewarding.
• The pricing is extremely aggressice, 60-70% lower than competitors but the discounts are low. This is just the opposite of what the market is doing on average. Jon Ash says that the "industry is set up in this crazy way" and that hardware vendors "own the client" and that this is not the way it should be.
• on the Web side: Communities, bloggers, partners and adwords lead to serious web traffic and that brings trial users, interested partners and eventually conversions. 3-5% conversion rates on average of the people that download the software. The result is that Nexenta is doing more web hits than Netapp on certain days only via word of mouth.
• Business model: the ZFS core is free but all that goes on top has to be paid for: Gui + all additional functionality (synch replication, optional modules etc.). Support also has to be paid for but the licence is perpetual and is paid once and for all.
• adoption hotspots
  • cloud computing with discussions engaged with all major providers at the moment. Some vendors are asking the company how you can deploy the software across 10,000 servers at the same time!
  • virtual desktops: handles bootstorms (ability to boot large numbers of desktops at the same time)
• What Nexenta provides is fast storage. Nexenta starts with the core and adds things to it and tries and make things better.
• Work with people like supermicro to achieve certification, work with LSI, HP, Xyratex and Dell certifications
• growing channel with 100+ resellers
• Nexenta is acknowledged to disrupt the market and if they succeed it will have a great impact on the industry, and if nothing else, it will have a huge impact on prices. Legacy storage technologies

Q&A

• how come you don't have more clients if it's so good and so cheap?
  • it's a different model, and Nexenta didn't want to scale before the service was built and there was certain functionality we needed. this is taking time to scale.
• how do teach your clients to store cleverly rather than just do dedupe and compress?
  • it's an area where we need to do more. We need to partner with different people in different areas and we are starting to partner with people in order to do that but this is not done yet. It's a huge opportunity for us.