Certainly, I’m biased, as an SE for Nexenta, but allow me a bit of time on my soapbox for a moment, but this coming year is going to be a very exciting one here at Nexenta. There’s been some very cool developments, as I just came back yesterday from our new year’s kickoff.

We’ve put much engineering into making the interface as gui and comfortable as possible for the non-Solaris developer as possible, while in parallel, moving our core onto the newer, faster, and even more stable open-Illumos kernal. Development, documentation, core product is under constant development and critical update. In the last year there have been four point updates, and in the upcoming year, there is slated to be at least one major update, as well as minor updates too. Our products will be developed and supported in parallel for quite a time to come.

The enterprise functionality a customer looks for in the more traditional or legacy systems, but may be reluctant to pay for when looking at these new platforms is the sweet spot for Nexenta. We fill the bill. Plus there’s a scalability that most of the newer pod style or node type appliances simply cannot match. In many ways, our architecture makes more sense than anyone else’s.

There are interesting arguments that have been posed against our structure, and those interestingly seem to be against the “Roll your own” manner in which we’ve typically allowed our customers and partners to configure their storage on the hardware of their choice. Allowing them to pick and choose the drives, nics, controllers, even motherboards, or server architectures lock stock and barrell off our hardware supported list. Some of our potential customers balk at this, as they would like to define a use-case and pick a SKU that is tailored for it. Well, as we’ve recognized that need, we’ve moved toward it. Our partners, including such names as Dell and Cisco, as well as many other fantastic resellers have helped us to define pre-built designs that have sizings and IO profilers in that vein. Alongside this, we’ve been building sizing calculators to help the use-case and IO profile to help to define working set size and caching in a more accurate manner. Our channel is more mature, more educated, and very pumped.

2013 promises to be a great year for Nexenta.