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  5. NexGen: The Next David to Battle Midrange SAN Goliaths: Page 3 of 3
Data Centers

NexGen: The Next David to Battle Midrange SAN Goliaths: Page 3 of 3

Small vendors, especially startups, often tend to follow baseball great Willie Keeler's advice of "hit 'em where they ain't" by targeting a market niche that has potential, but where larger vendors either don't play or have a very small footprint. NexGen, with its NexGen n5 Storage System, does just that but with a more direct twist. And that makes it very interesting.
DAVID HILL
November 29, 2011

The first is to fully exploit the speed of SSDs, which cannot be done if the SSDs are merely acting as HDD clones and are, therefore, held back by the limitations of storage controllers designed for HDDs. The second is to separate performance (which is delivered by SSDs) from capacity (which is delivered by HDDs). Why does this approach matter, and how does it differ from other solutions? Because it provides the means for administrators to easily and effectively manage storage performance and data placement in virtualized environments:

  • Performance QoS--IT administrators can provision performance as if it were capacity. That is. they can see how much of existing performance capabilities have already been provisioned and what is left, and allocate the rest of the capabilities
  • Dynamic Data Placement--This capability enables assigned QoS levels to be maintained over time and despite changing circumstances

    Now back to capacity. NexGen claims to be able to provide up to 90% lower storage operating expenses (with the usual caveat that "your mileage may vary") through an approach called Phased Data Reduction. Data reduction is a good term to use as it really describes what is happening. This is in contrast to the currently fashionable term "data deduplication," which, while useful, tends to be associated with backup on secondary storage and is not comprehensive enough to deal with all the issues required to squeeze down the size of primary storage. Not surprisingly, NexGen’s approach offers significant cost benefits; the company says that using its Phased Data Reduction solution across all storage tiers can ensure up to 58% lower cost per gigabyte as compared to a leading competitive alternative.

    Overall, NexGen makes a good case for why it is the new David to shake up the Goliaths of the midrange SAN market. The company promises that it can deliver the predictable performance that business- and mission-critical applications require from storage, allowing companies to take full advantage of server virtualization, and that it does so with increased shared storage efficiency that makes the solution competitively attractive.

    Now the original David beat Goliath, but, in the real world, the outcome may not be the same. The Goliaths have existing market share, well-established distribution channels, and deep and capable engineering and financial resources that start-ups can only dream about.

    Still, NexGen provides a comprehensive integrated midrange SAN solution for virtualized environments today that will likely gain advanced software features, such as remote replication, further down the road. Given the continuing uptake of server virtualization and its growing importance in business- and mission-critical applications, enterprise customers and competing vendors need to pay close attention to NexGen.

    As of this publication, NexGen is not a client of David Hill and the Mesabi Group.

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