GigaOm Vendor Profile: OSNEXUS

An Exploration Based on Key Criteria for Evaluating Object Storage

Table of Contents

  1. Summary
  2. Key Criteria Analysis
  3. Evaluation Metrics Analysis
  4. Bottom Line

1. Summary

OSNEXUS QuantaStor is a software-defined storage solution based on the open-source Ceph project. QuantaStor eliminates all of the complexity of Ceph, thanks to advanced and easy-to-use management tools and the granular control over supported hardware resulting from the built-in storage grid technology. Even better, its tight collaboration with Western Digital lets OSNEXUS provide the same level of sophistication with an NVMe-oF backend based on WD OpenFlex technology. The solution is fully compatible with Ceph, eliminating any risk of lock-in, and it provides the same interfaces (block, file, and object) and services.

The product builds on the Ceph core to provide good S3 compatibility and efficient erasure coding and compression. It also uses data placement algorithms that are disk-, node-, and rack-aware for the best resiliency and availability.

Due to the outstanding control over infrastructure resources and the flexibility QuantaStor provides, you get fast provisioning and effective infrastructure utilization, which gives enterprises and service providers a composable infrastructure without the need for custom hardware or infrastructure the size of a hyperscaler. And though ease of deployment and management are the main selling points of this product, its flexibility and efficiency can also strongly impact TCO. Furthermore, thanks to NVMe-oF support, QuantaStor’s performance is better than that of other Ceph-based solutions.

Other additions made by OSNEXUS to Ceph include multi-cluster management, strong multi-tenancy capabilities, hardware integration, and remote replication. Security has also been improved and the product is certified to operate in compliance with several demanding regulations.

QuantaStor benefits from the large Ceph ecosystem for integration with Elastic and other tools for searching and event notifications, but the company itself doesn’t offer any solution that integrates these capabilities. The Ceph community is very active regarding the containerization of the entire solution and it is expected that QuantaStor will take advantage of this. A CSI plug-in for Kubernetes is available as well.

The product has a good analytics tool, the UI is easy to use with several standard dashboards already available, and the engine on the backend can be quickly customized to create additional dashboards with Grafana.

How to Read this Report

This GigaOm report is one of a series of documents that helps IT organizations assess competing solutions in the context of well-defined features and criteria. For a fuller understanding consider reviewing the following reports:

Key Criteria report: A detailed market sector analysis that assesses the impact that key product features and criteria have on top-line solution characteristics—such as scalability, performance, and TCO—that drive purchase decisions.

GigaOm Radar report: A forward-looking analysis that plots the relative value and progression of vendor solutions along multiple axes based on strategy and execution. The Radar report includes a breakdown of each vendor’s offering in the sector.

Vendor Profile: An in-depth vendor analysis that builds on the framework developed in the Key Criteria and Radar reports to assess a company’s engagement within a technology sector. This analysis includes forward-looking guidance around both strategy and product.

Full content available to GigaOm Subscribers.

Sign Up For Free