News Coverage Archive

Later this year, many of the established storage players will finally be adding Storage QoS (Quality of Service) functionality to their systems. Though start-ups such as SolidFire and NexGen Storage (and some platforms such as IBM's XIV) have been touting this functionality for a few years now, most storage systems today currently lack Storage QoS.

If your primary storage vendor does not have Storage QoS on its roadmap, now is the time to start demanding it.

Virtual Graffiti, Inc., an IT solution provider in North America specializing in business, government and education, announced its partnership with NexGen Storage, Inc.
 
NexGen Storage offers a PCIe solid-state storage system designed to manage performance just like capacity. Unlike other shared storage system, NexGen offers both Storage QoS for managing performance and SLAs to ensure application performance. At the same time, NexGen's PCIe solid-state architecture avoids...

Similar to the concept of QoS (quality of service) in the networking realm, storage QoS lets you accelerate, control, and guarantee storage performance levels. I recently had the opportunity to meet with a customer who is considering deploying a virtual infrastructure.

Last week I did an overview of the performance-minded storage solution that NexGen has put together. In summary, by using SSD-based read AND write caching that’s moved in and out of the cache in an intelligent way, we can get better performance than traditional disk arrays with slower disks, and fewer of them. I’d like to do a quick tour of the hardware for their low-end model, the n5-50. It’s actually pretty straightforward and the internals are interesting enough that I decided to take...

Here are the 15 finalists in the enterprise storage system category in the Storage magazine/SearchStorage.com 2012 Products of the Year competition. The category covers Fibre Channel and iSCSI SANs, network-attached storage, multiprotocol systems, direct-attached storage (NAS), hard disk drives, solid-state storage, disk controllers, caching appliances, storage virtualization appliances and cloud storage gateway appliances. Enterprise storage system finalists are listed in alphabetical order...

2012 was a big year for solid state and the performance it enables. 2013 will take performance to the next level with storage solutions that can manage mixed workload performance easily, dynamically and efficiently. Most IT professionals have successfully rolled our their first production deployment of virtualization and are now looking to increase VM density, optimize their deployment and start virtualizing those stranded applications that tend to be mission critical or I/O intensive. Many...

Storage QoS is more than just a way to isolate workloads on a shared storage system to guarantee performance levels, it is the key enabler for long-term hybrid architecture viability, John Spiers, Co-Founder and CEO and Kelly Long, Co-Founder and CTO describe why. Topics include hybrid, benefits of storage QoS, storage media proliferation, hybrid storage system challenges, QoS controlled tiering and caching, storage efficiency and affordability.

NexGen Storage, Inc. announced its n5 Series storage system has been deployed by ROCORI School District for its district-wide VDI.

The school district consolidated its VDI storage and the data storage for all of its other applications and systems onto a single NexGen n5 Series storage system. Based on a hybrid solid-state architecture, the n5 Series storage system provides storage QoS capabilities that enable users to manage mixed workloads and guarantee performance for all...

NexGen Storage, Inc. announced new performance automation capabilities for Software-Defined Datacenters.

NexGen's ioControl 2.1 offers the ability to provision and guarantee VMware datastore storage performance. By offering embedded performance intelligence along with the ability to provision and guarantee VMware datastore performance within vCenter, NexGen makes it easy and affordable for mid-sized enterprises to guarantee application performance in virtual environments.

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I was struck at the most recent Next Generation Storage Symposium and Storage Field Day how multiple vendors are betting that the next big thing in storage is going to be managing storage performance via some form of quality of service. While the industry is busy integrating flash into its storage architectures, a few vendors are considering not just how to deliver higher performance to applications, but how to make the performance each application receives more predictable.
 
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Increasingly higher levels of VM density in virtual infrastructures are bringing users tremendous benefits on the compute side, including high utilization and efficiency. But as the number of VMs per physical server increases, storage and network resources often come under tremendous pressure. Each VM on a given server opens its own virtual storage connections and sends tens of thousands of IO requests over the same physical cables and to the same arrays. The stressed physical network and...

Louisville, Colorado-based solid state storage developer NexGen Storage said today that it has upgraded its products, to provision and guarantee performance for VMware datastore storage volumes. The firm said its updated ioControl 2.1 software lets specifcy VMware datastore performance from within vCenter, which will help its customer guarantee application performance in virtual environments. The updated software also provides monitoring of workloads, quality-of-service settings, and...

Louisville, Colorado-based solid state storage provider NexGen Storage said today that it has deployed its systems at the Colby-Sawyer College in New Hampshire, as part of a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) deployment. Financial details of the win were not disclosed. NexGen said that the college is using its NexGen n5 Series storage system, to deploy 600 VDI desktops. Virtual desktops are used by companies to remotely manage and centrally deploy desktop PC images, rather than maintaining...

NexGen Storage today announced the expansion of its management team with the appointment of David Bangs as senior vice president of worldwide sales and Bruce Helart as vice president of engineering and operations. The company also named Larry Cormier to its board of directors. Bangs, Helart and Cormier each bring strong track records of success and proven leadership, and will focus on accelerating NexGen’s growth strategy, building its leadership position in solid-state storage and...

NexGen Storage and Veeam Software have announced a technology alliance through which Veeam instant VM restores, and backup and offsite replication capabilities for disaster recovery, are available now to NexGen customers of n5 Series systems at no additional cost. The companies say that Veeam Backup & Replication, combined with NexGen's n5 Series storage systems leverages next generation PCIe SSD storage technology and integrated backup images to enable VM recovery within seconds versus...

NexGen Storage: Provisioning And Monitoring Storage In VMware Environments

Louisville, Colo.-based NexGen Storage is previewing its NexGen Storage vCenter Plug-in, which allows VMware administrators to provision and manage virtual machine datastore capacity and performance by leveraging NexGen’s Quality of Service (QoS) feature set.

The QoS feature set includes Provision Data Stores that allow administrators to provision new QoS-driven datastores from a single interface...

Startup hybrid hard drive and flash storage array vendor NexGen Storage this week made a play for mindshare in the SAN market with a guarantee that its array would significantly increase performance over a customer's existing infrastructure.

"It's the industry's first solid-state storage performance guarantee," said Chris McCall, vice president of marketing for the Salt Lake City-based company.

NexGen also unveiled a joint offering with Baar, Switzerland-based Veeam Software...

There are so many new uses of flash storage coming onto the market that it can be hard to keep up. Here are a few of the more innovative applications.
 
NexGen n5.
 
By leveraging PCIe solid-state in the n5 systems, NexGen seeks to improve performance by placing solid-state next to the CPU. NexGen Storage has expanded its n5 Series to add more performance and capacity in the same footprint. It delivers PCIe SSD storage system with Quality of Service (QoS) to ensure...

NextGen Storage is taking its solutions on the road.

Storage Election 2012 is a 35-city educational roadshow beginning August 1. Stops along the way include Arlington, VA; Baltimore, MD; Bellevue, WA; Boston, MA; Dallas, TX; Englewood, CO; Indianapolis, IN; Las Vegas, NV; Milwaukee, WI - New York, NY; North Miami Beach, FL; Palo Alto, CA; Parsippany, NJ; Philadelphia, PA; Portland, OR; Salt Lake City, UT; and Winter Park, FL.

The campaign will focus on three different...

The expansion gives businesses larger storage capacity options and a range of redundant elements to boost security and data protection.  Storage specialist NexGen announced the expansion of its n5 Series of storage systems with Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe) solid-state offerings in a range of configurations and all boasting both 10GbE and 1GbE network options in a compact 3U footprint. The appliances feature redundant storage processors, redundant fans, hot-swap disk...

Eight months after coming out of stealth with a storage system using solid-state PCIe cards and using its own type of quality of service,...

While data storage vendors are improving I/O's on their arrays by replacing disk drives with solid-state drives to (SSDs) or layering SSDs onto traditional drives via tiers of all-SSD storage, Louisville, Colo.-based NexGen Storage is taking a different direction.
 
The company's new n5 Series arrays blend flash and SAS disk-based storage in an architecture that yields 5x to 10x lower cost per gigabyte than all-SSD arrays while delivering SSD-like performance, according to NexGen...

Are large storage arrays dead at the hands of SSD? Short answer NO not yet.  There is still a place for traditional storage arrays or appliances particular those with extensive features, functionality and reliability availability serviceability (RAS). In other words, there is still a place for large (and small) storage arrays or appliances including those with SSDs.
 
Is there a place for newer flash SSD storage systems, appliances and architectures? Yes.  ...

Just as the last round of consolidation in the data storage industry has come to an end, the sudden growth of flash memory in data centers looks poised to start another one.

 After big payoffs in the last few years on scale-out storage, venture investors have heavily bet on the next transition in storage--the move away from hard disk drives and toward flash storage in the data center.

Streamlines Purchasing for Government Agencies and Offers Profitable Growth Opportunities for Resellers.  NexGen Storage recently announced that its products are now available through Promark Technology’s Government Service Administration (GSA) schedule. NexGen provides the only midrange shared storage solution that offers both Storage QoS for managing performance and Service Levels to guarantee performance for mission-critical applications in mixed-workload and virtual server...

For delivering midrange SAN with storage QoS. NexGen Storage, Inc. announced an Enterprise Strategy Group Lab Validation Report on the NexGen n5 Storage System's ioControl storage. Typically available only with multi-million dollar systems, NexGen is the first storage vendor to deliver storage QoS in a...

The next big thing: It's a subject that keeps analysts, entrepreneurs and computer science majors up at night. But what on earth is it going to be? For every one that captures the popular imagination and generates a new crop of billionaires, hundreds of others fall by the wayside.  Yet the folks quoted below have gone out on a limb and shared their thoughts on that elusive next big thing. Don't be too hard on them.  Performance Quality of Service (QoS):  Kelly...

It was just last year that many of us in the storage chattering class were talking about how the market for mainline storage systems had consolidated after 3Par and Compellent were swallowed up by HP and Dell respectively leaving the market with just one or two smaller vendors to keep the big boys honest. That discussion failed to recognize that solid state storage had made the transition to the mainstream, and there was a new wave of startups building storage systems optimized for flash....

By Chris Mellor

Using flash memory, deduplication and predictable performance the iSCSI array has been reinvented by the founders of LeftHand Networks in the shape of NexGen Storage's n5.

LeftHand Networks was acquired by HP and is now the HP P4000 line. It competes with Dell's EqualLogic iSCSI arrays, and NexGen is...

Louisville CO-based NexGen Storage, which recently emerged from stealth with a solid state storage offering with Quality of Service designed for business critical virtualization, has inked its first distribution deal, with Promark Technology.

The deal covers both the U.S. and Canada. There is short term exclusivity, but Charles Bass, vice president, vendor relations and strategic accounts for Promark, expects that once they grow NexGen's business to the 8-12 million level, "they...

The New Year is traditionally a time to make resolutions to lose weight, stop smoking or drink less. We asked several storage veterans what their top wishes were for the year.
 
1. Buzz-Kill
 
Greg Schulz, an analyst with StorageIO Group wants to see an end to the buzzword de jour. "Vendors, VARs and customers need to look beyond buzzword bingo, focusing on what can be applied to solve problems vs. solutions looking for problems in order to stretch budgets further," he...

The health of the storage sector can be seen in the number of interesting startups that have cropped up. A few years ago, venture capitalists were investing in almost nothing storage related. Times have changed. Here are a few companies to keep an eye on.
 
1. Cloudera
 
With cloud computing mania reaching fever pitch, it is understandable that the bulk of storage startups are found in this sector. Under that umbrella, however, they cover a wide range of differing...

For midrange SAN with SSD. NexGen Storage Inc. is teaming up with Fusion-io Inc. to deliver the industry's first Fusion-powered, midrange SAN designed for business critical virtualization.
    
With the integration of the Fusion ioDrive into the NexGen SAN, customers can extend low latency Fusion-io performance and implement virtual machine high availability for any application connected to the SAN. The NexGen n5 Storage System...

The NexGen storage system is designed from the ground up to take advantage of solid state storage and is the first system that we know of that integrates storage tiering from the first release. It is also the first storage system to use PCIe SSD for its solid state tier instead of using drive form-factor SSDs. This architecture provides the storage controller direct access to the high speed tier, removing the latency inherent in traditional SAS or SATA backplane networks.

The demand...

Two players in the area's revitalized data storage industry are teaming up to build solid-state storage devices and to collaborate on sales and marketing.

NexGen Storage Inc. announced Tuesday it will use the Fusion-io ioDrive in its NexGen n5 Storage System.

NexGen Storage is a Louisville-based company founded by the founders of LeftHand Networks Inc. Fusion-io Inc. (NYSE FIO) has a research and development center in Superior. Its corporate headquarters is in Salt Lake City,...

NexGen Storage has forged a partnership with flash-based hardware acceleration solutions maker Fusion-io to combine the latter’s technology with its own.  The company said the ioMemory powered NexGen n5 Storage System, a hybrid mid-range SAN that’s designed to cut bottlenecks in virtualized environments, can cut overheads related to storage operating expenses by up to 90 percent. This is credited to its patent pending Phased Data Reduction technology. NexGen claims that the...

A visual look at 5 up-and-coming storage companies' offerings.  As the sheer amount of content on the Web has continued to increase exponentially, so too have the storage needs of large enterprises. We’ve reached the point where companies’ data storage needs can’t be solved solely via traditional physical storage servers and thus require solutions such as moving to the cloud or implementing large-scale caching operations on solid-state drives. The following companies’ products are among...

Following on from the Colorado-focused news I had in my last post, last week saw another local (at least to me!*) storage company emerge from stealth. NexGen Storage offers a hybrid PCIe solid state (which does all the heavy-lifting) and spinning disk platform. While that combination is no longer unique, the company’s advanced ability to set, control, and deliver performance levels by application (a proactive ‘performance QoS’ if you will) should garner it plenty of attention, especially in...

NexGen Storage of Louisville says it has closed a $10 million round of funding.  Next World Capital led the financing, which included existing investors Grotech Ventures and Access Venture Partners. Last week, NexGen unveiled its flagship product, the NexGen n5 Storage System.

The company says the n5 system has 76 times higher storage density than a typical disk-drive system, resulting in up to 90 percent storage operating expense savings.

NexGen Storage was founded by...

NexGen has established their PAID (Profit, Advanctage, Insight and Deals) partner program, with an aggressive deal protection program which gives a significant gap between registered and non registered deals. 

Louisville CO-based NexGen Storage has emerged from stealth and announced general availability of its first product, a solid state storage system with Quality of Service designed for business critical virtualization. The NexGen n5 Storage System seamlessly integrates an...

NexGen Storage Inc., a startup that develops data-storage technology, debuted its first retail offering Tuesday. The Louisville-based company has been working in stealth mode for two years and boasts many veterans of the area data-storage industry. Co-founder and chief executive John Spiers was a founder and chief technical officer of LeftHand Networks Inc., and co-founder and chief technology officer Kelly Long was a co-founder and chief software architect at LeftHand Networks. NexGen...

Storage virtualization abstracts the users from the management of individual disk drives. Instead, the administrator creates a volume and the storage system maps that volume to particular disk drives that it has installed. This technology saves the storage administrator the job of designing and provisioning a volume’s capacity and RAID layout. This efficiency in provisioning storage capacity is the value that most virtualized storage systems provide. However, when it comes to provisioning...

NexGen Storage a local storage company came out of stealth today and is also generally available. Their storage system has been in beta since April 2011 and is in use by a number of customers today. Their product uses DRAM caching, PCIe NAND flash, and nearline SAS drives to provide guaranteed QoS for LUN I/O. The system can provision IOP rate, bandwidth and (possibly) latency over a set of configured LUNs. Such provisioning can change using policy management on a time basis to support...

NexGen Storage has come out of stealth mode with a mid-range SAN it built from the ground up to solve the shared storage mess and unleash the full power of virtualization. The NexGen n5 Storage System uses off-the-shelf hardware to achieve VM density...

Louisville, Colorado-based Nexgen Storage, the new storage firm co-founded by Kelly Long and John Spiers, said today that it has debuted its solid state storage systems. NexGen said that it is shipping a new, solid state storage system specifically aimed at providing quality-of-service capabilities for the virtualization market. NexGen Storage is backed by Access Ventures and Grotech Ventures; Spiers was previously founder of LeftHand Networks. Among features of NexGen's products are ability...