Software-defined storage vendor Nexenta has launched a range of products aimed at cutting the capital and operational expense of managing data.

The releases include:
- NexentaEdge, an object storage system for open source cloud infrastructures

- NexentaConnect – set to improve the workability of VMware’s SAN products

- NexentaStor 4.1, a revision of an existing product aimed at making Flash Storage available more cheaply and without proprietary lock in

According to Nexenta’s VP of marketing strategy Jill Orhun, the bottom line is that the company aims to use software to get better performance out of existing hardware on the market, cut the cost of ownership and lower the pricing options.

“A lot of data centers and enterprises are starting to use flash storage now, but flash often runs on proprietary devices which are much more expensive,” said Orhun.

“While the high price can be justified by the uptick in performance, we can provide a more cost effective offering.”

NexentaEdge 1.0 promises high performance global inline deduplication on petabyte scale clusters and is suited to OpenSource cloud infrastructures and big data repositories where performance, scale and operational costs are critical issues.

Nexenta’s CEO Tarkan Maner said: "Legacy hardware and new appliance-based systems are not designed to handle the workloads and variety of big data but the legacy vendors keep chucking more hardware at the problem.”

Nexenta's integration with VMware is a good development for service providers because the latter is gravitating toward the software-defined data center model said analyst Simon Robinson, research VP at 451 Research.

“Nexenta’s offerings augment and enhance the virtualization journey for customers,” said Robinson.

Dell’s CTO for engineered solutions and technology Sam Greenblatt said the new products will help the data center industry manage costs as data volumes increase.

“NexentaConnect for VMware Virtual SAN is an example of Nexenta helping enterprises get the most of storage and unlock the true potential of the data center,” Greenblatt said.