Nexenta has added all-new AWS cloud capabilities to its OpenSDS-based product line with its latest offering, NexentaCloud, which allows enterprises to run applications on AWS while remaining connected to their on-premises infrastructure.

Previously, Nexenta products, which use Open Software Defined Storage standards (OpenSDS), could only be used on-premises.

NexentaCloud is being offered through the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Marketplace or through channel partners and resellers who can add their own services. About 95 percent of the company’s sales are through the channel.

Customers also will be able to use NexentaCloud to replicate workloads from on-premises systems or from the cloud, while adding capabilities including NFS, Server Message Block (SMB) and iSCSI for file or block-level storage within an Amazon cloud, Mike Letschin, the field CTO for Nexenta, told Channel Futures.

The new product will enable users to do true rapid deployment of enterprise storage because it is cloud-based, said Letschin.

“Traditionally, to put enterprise storage in, you had to put in hardware, disk storage and more, and then get everything configured, which could take two to three months. This allows them to deploy enterprise storage and have it ready in about 30 minutes.”

Pricing will be based on usage and storage, with up to 5TB, 10TB, 50TB, 150TB or 300TB of storage. The services can be purchased on an hourly basis or by subscription.

NexentaCloud can used with NexentaFusion, the company’s management application, which also runs on-premises or in the cloud, as well as with NexentaStor, which can run under NexentaFusion.

NexentaCloud for AWS provides integrated management of replication and storage operations for all workloads, deep storage analytics across data centers and cloud environments, and preconfigured AWS instances which are optimized for size and performance. It also includes capabilities such as snapshots, cloning, thin provisioning and data compression.

Charles Kanavel, CEO of Kanavel Group, a Nexenta partner and reseller, told Channel Futures that NexentaCloud will help fill the gap in the marketplace for a hybrid software-defined storage product.

“Many storage competitors, including Dell EMC, Dell EqualLogic, Pure Storage, NetApp, HPE 3PAR and Hitachi, have hardware-based solutions with some cloud extensions,” said Kanavel. “Nexenta is an industry leader in software-defined storage and their cloud offering is a natural extension of their on-premises product suite.”

Software-defined storage product offerings such as NexentaCloud “will continue to disrupt traditional hardware storage players’ market shares as the world moves to the cloud,” said Kanavel. “What a lot of companies, which are looking to expand in multiple regions, will find compelling about Nexenta is the ability to manage storage workloads globally versus traditional data silos that exist by location today.”

Ingrooves, a digital music company, is using NexentaCloud to handle its increasing content storage requirements, while incorporating data protection with NexentaStor. 

“With the use of NexentaCloud, combined with NexentaStor on-premises, we are now optimized to remove our older data center from our bottom-line costs, and instead utilize the benefits of the public cloud to create a true hybrid strategy,” Nicolas Ratineau, director of systems engineering for Ingrooves, said. “This gives Ingrooves a reliable disaster-recovery-in-the-cloud model and more importantly a more cost-effective, scalable option to handle growth, a few terabytes at a time.”