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We are thinking of evaluating Nexenta for a Tier 2 storage solution. It looks great, but I have doubts over its future after the demise of OpenSolaris.

I know that Nexenta uses an OpenSolaris kernel and ZFS. Now that OpenSolaris is no more, will Nexenta die a slow and painful death?

I have scoured the net, and there does not seem to be any discussion on this topic out there. Anyone in the server fault community know if Nexenta has a future with OpenSolaris dead?

Also, anyone have any "in production" Nexenta experiences to share?

Stefan Lasiewski
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SvrGuy
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3 Answers3

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Nexenta, Joyent, and a handful of others seem to have gotten behind Illumos

cagenut
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Nexenta is indeed utilizing Illumos as the OS core. From what I understand, the OpenSolaris and ZFS bits they are using are truely open-sourced, and that genie can't be put back in the Sun/Oracle bottle. See this page for Nexenta's statement on this.

We are currently building out a 16TB Nexenta Enterprise box... I'll let you know how it goes. Pre-sales support experience was OK however (I had questions on zfs send/recv usage and NIS support.)

Will Dennis
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I have deployed a series of boxes with Nexenta (about 250TB total deployment atm.) There was a learning curve for our Linux only shop, but all in Nexenta is a solid product and ZFS is a fantastic filesystem. I don't regret making the move at all.

Oracle has not totally killed OpenSolaris, what they have said is that instead of doing development in public, once they do a full release of Solaris 11, they will do a code dump for all the OpenSolaris community to merge in. So Nexenta will still get updates from the Oracle Devs, you will just need to wait longer.

n8whnp
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