Two NexentaOS derivatives compared

Twin Studies

Article from ADMIN 14/2013

By Jens-Christoph Brendel

What can tinkerers save on storage, and what do you gain if you opt to spend more and buy a turnkey solution? We compared a do-it-yourself solution with a preconfigured appliance from the same source.

Nexenta Systems [1] claims its storage platform provides 80 percent of the cost savings offered by heavyweights such as IBM or EMC. Different models of DIY and preconfigured storage devices are possible, all with one thing in common: They are based on NexentaOS [2], which links the kernel of the OpenSolaris successor Illumos to GNU userland tools and Debian packaging. The core element is the modern and powerful ZFS filesystem, with its snapshots and integrated RAID levels, unlimited capacity and file size, and block-level mirroring.

Differences

NexentaOS (also known as Nexenta Core Platform, NCP) is free software that continues to exist today under the Illumos umbrella. NexentaStor also calls itself "Open Storage," but the term only means that it uses open standards and protocols. The product is commercially licensed. NexentaStor [3] distinguishes between the Community Edition and the Enterprise Edition. The Community Edition is free, but not intended for production systems (which the EULA explicitly forbids), is limited to a maximum of 18TB, and lacks advanced features such as active/active HA clusters, the Virtual Machine DataCenter plugin for integrating various hypervisors, auto sync, or the ability to use WORM storage for archiving. However, for home use or in an academic environment, the community edition offers an unbeatable, low-budget solution. If you opt for the Enterprise Edition, on the other hand, you will find it in prebuilt appliances by Nexenta partners, such as Boston, Racktop, Thomas Krenn, CDW, or transtec.

Netgear [4] takes a third approach: Without being a certified Nexenta partner, it develops its own storage operating system, ReadyDATAOS, that

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