Nexustorage brings an innovative SDS approach

We had the privilege to meet Nexustorage during the 40th IT Press Tour and discovered a very interesting Software-Defined Storage approach. I discovered this company several months ago when I spoke with its CEO and founder, Glen Olsen, and we wait together the best moment to meet them. We reach that point and we're pretty honored that Glen picked the tour to unveil to the world its company, mission, product and technology.

The company, officially launched by Glen in February 2021, is located in Paraparaumu, a bit north of Wellington in New Zealand. Before that adventure, he spent some time at Caringo, PSInet, Logica CMG and EDS to name a few.

Nexustorage develops a universal data lifecycle management solution based on an intelligent storage layer named Nexfs that spans file, block and object storage. The team is finally ready to unveil its third public available release of Nexfs.

The central concept is the storage pool that glues diverse storage entities deployed on commodity hardware and organized hierarchically them to received data based on access and data placement rules. Nexfs re-exposes this combined layer via iSCSI, NFS, SMB, and S3 and therefore can be qualified as a unified storage product.

Nexfs layer relies on a multi-tier storage pool that hides data movement and data location on this pool. The solution runs on existing hardware and be coupled with new hardware, but globally it represents a way to protect investment and bring a new life for existing servers and storage units.

This new scalable file system is available free of charge with the community edition and is validated with Centos, Ubuntu and Debian Linux, being a software only solution. Disk filesystems xfs and ext4 with extended attributes are needed for tier-2 file systems.

The team has developed several key technology elements - SmartProtect, SmartTier, SmartClone and Nexassert - to enable this transparent optimized data placement logic:

• SmartProtect is a method to generate data protection by using replication for the primary to the secondary S3 compatible storage. The feature provides granularity to generate file copy each time a data chunk changes.
• SmartTier is the perfect companion of SmartProtect but can run also independently. This feature enables the move of data chunks to secondary storage within a pool built and controlled by Nexfs. Supporting 3 tiers in this first release with SSD, SATA and object storage, the data placement engine moves back and forth data between tiers. This data management layer masks the physical location of data blocks with the beauty to have some of them residing on fast storage and others on slow ones i.e unfrequent data on SATA and cold on object or cloud storage. In other words, the granularity is at sub-file level what Nexustorage team called a chunk and that chunk cn have different sizes. Frequent access chunks are maintained on fast storage and deliver the needed QoS with the right cost alignment among all tiers. The fact that an access to a migrated file is initiated, it doesn’t copy back the entire file but only the needed chunk.
• SmartClone is the capability to create redundant child file gold images on tier 3.
• Nexassert, under patent review, is the name of the technology developed also by Nexustorage to access data chunk where they resides. Thus, after the solution is used, the normal operation mode shows that files are not homogeneous stored in the same storage technology, i.e one storage technology, and finally their data chunks are distributed among SSD, HDD and object/cloud storage based on their access and frequency needs.

Exposing file and object are now pretty common but exposing a block interface, here iSCSI, built on object creates some huge constraints on the storage path. The team has made great development on this and supports for that Amazon S3, Cloudian and MinIO. You can boot and run Microsoft Windows and Linux servers that reside in cloud and object storage, Glen did a demo and booted a Windows VM from a VMDK stored on Nexfs.

For the future, Glen told us that his team plan to release SmartBackup that should work a bit like NetApp SnapDiff, SmartGuard to address the ransomware challenge, I anticipate some immutability here, and SmartIntegrityAssure. Nexustorage will introduce also a horizontal model to support multi-node cluster.

On the file system layer, Nexfs reminds what Veritas can do with VxFS and its Dynamic Storage Tiering feature layered on multi-volumes, each one having its own characteristics. VxVM creates a meta-volume called a volume set that encapsulates each volume. In that case, the file path doesn’t change at all, only the block map changes but the entire file is managed i.e the granularity is the file itself not a sub-file like it is with Nexfs. We also remember Enmotus who developed block-based tiering but it seems that the company ceased its operations now.

Nexfs is available via 2 components:

• Nexfscli is a management CLI released as open source available from https://github.com/nexustorage/nexfscli and downloadable from nexfscli from http://dlnexfsclipublicpreview.nexustorage.com/nexfscli.
• Nexfs Server is the engine available from http://dlnexfspublicpreview.nexustorage.com/nexfs.server.

Finally, I invite you to check below the presentation used by Glen during that session.