Tag Archives: Nexenta

NexentaStor CE – an introduction

I spent some time at Christmas upgrading my home lab in preparation for the new VCAP exams which are due out in the first quarter of 2012. In particular I needed to improve my shared storage and hoped that I could reuse old h/w instead of buying something new. I’ve been using an Iomega IX2-200 for the last year but it’s performance is pretty pitiful so I usually reverted to local storage which rather defeated the purpose.

I started off having a quick look around at my storage options for home labs;

Why pick Nexenta?

I’d used OpenFiler and FreeNAS before (both are very capable) but with so much choice I didn’t have time to evaluate all the other options (Greg Porter has a few comments comparing OpenFiler vs Nexenta). Datacore and Starwind’s solutions rely on Windows rather than being bare metal (which was my preference) and I’ve been hearing positive news about Nexenta more and more recently.

On the technical front the SSD caching and VAAI support make Nexenta stand out from the crowd.

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