The Nexenta Planet

So, I’ve been asked by several people who are involved with OpenSolaris User Groups around the world about illumos.

Given the clear demise of OpenSolaris, it seems to me at least, to be kind of silly to continue to meet using that name.

Some groups have reverted to pure Solaris usage. Which is fine for those groups that want to focus on Oracle products and want to come under the Oracle umbrella that it has for user groups.

For groups that are more interested in open technology, perhaps it is time to start up some “illumos interest groups” (IIGs)? (Calling them “User Groups” at this point seems rather premature… I think there are only a very few of us that are actually “using” illumos at this point.. but I hope that number to grow very much very soon.

Btw, are there any folks interested in illumos in either Riverside County or North San Diego County? (California) I’d be interested in participating in an interest group if there was one that didn’t require me to drive over an hour to get to.

I had tried to dial in to ARC today, but no luck. But then someone else pointed out that we have not seen any ARC cases since the tap was turned off.

In fact, I posted a query about this to the opensolaris-arc mailing list today, and I got back an interesting automated reply:

This mailing list is no longer active and accepting posts. Mailing
list archives can be found at
http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/opensolaris-arc/. You can check
http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo to find another list to
which to send your email.

So, OpenSolaris ARC is dead. This has ramifications that go beyond just ON. Because there are other consolidations that we were promised were going to continue to be developed in the open: JDS, X11, and the pkg-gate. If the decisions for these technologies are no longer being made openly, or even the opinions being made available, then this makes Oracle’s promise to continue to work with the community on them seem hollow.

So, what’s left for “OpenSolaris” as so named? There are some code drops still being made. How long will that keep up? Are they continuing to take contribution from external parties? (I don’t work on those gates, so I don’t really know.) I’d like to know if the other consolidations have shut down too. At least the key decisions relating to those consolidations seem to have moved behind closed doors.

As many of you that are users know from personal experience, Nexenta has been conducting a customer and user survey over the last several weeks.

We now have a lot of data to share.  I’m considering a webinar or other public conversation about it.  Feedback welcome.  Is this interesting to you or more so just to us

The data I share here is from 1937 surveys we sent out.  We received 668 fully complete surveys.  Thank you SurveyMonkey and for our crack marketing analytics team.  For those of you dying to know, someone in Latin America won the iPad raffle.

There are many comments from the survey to the effect that overall I’m happy, but…..(and I think some of those that commented read this blog).   We are responding to every question or issue raised in the survey.  There were 42 such responses.

We have statistically significant responses for the high level information I can share here however not for all the detailed cross tabs that we might really want to know.  This is one reason we are extending the survey currently by inviting an additional 5,000 responses.  So, if you are a registered user please check your email and spam filter if you are interested in another chance to win an iPad and to give your feedback; the invitation to fill out the survey is in our customer newsletter that is emailing over the next day or two.

Enough with the preliminaries.  There are a few ways to measure customer SAT.  You can ask them their satisfaction, you can ask them their propensity to recommend, and you can ask them their propensity to buy.  Here we did all three:

In a way this is a perfect storm for legacy storage vendors.  What we’re seeing is NexentaStor often being purchased under the radar – by divisions or developers or perhaps to spin up a new application.  As you can see word of mouth and propensity to purchase are even higher than customer satisfaction.  And then, over time, NexentaStor earns its keep and more and more storage and use cases migrate onto the platform.  More on that point later.

First, here is another view of customer SAT:

Back of the envelope, those numbers seem about right.  We have 42 ‘complaints’ received out of the 667 responses, or 6.3%.  The above chart suggests approximately 5% of users have not had a good experience.

So our challenge is to pay attention to both sides of the equation.  Yes — follow up with those that have less than good experience but also make sure we understand why some 40% of customer sales are now coming from existing customers.  What do you all like so much?  Per my prior post, often it is features, not just the price.

Speaking of sales coming from existing customers, here is another graph that gives you some idea of adoption patterns.

Perhaps not surprisingly given the number of new users, NexentaStor tends not to be used for all the data in particular accounts.  We do see customers growing – as I mentioned above 40% of all sales now come from existing buyers.  But we also see that there is tremendous opportunity for customers to use NexentaStor more.

And here is where the community comes in.  While we continue to get better partners and continue to hire many more people and to share in these groups the best practices about business continuity and NexentaStor for example I also believe that events like the upcoming OpenStorage summit in Palo Alto are absolutely invaluable for us all to share notes *live* about what works, and what would be really cool, and how to fix whatever is broken.   It is our growing community of users and, yes, survey respondents that are allowing OpenStorage to continue to accelerate while improving overall total product quality.

So, if you want to become a Certified NexentaStor Engineer, or you just want to attend some of the sessions and hear Bill Moore and Garrett D’Amore discuss the future of ZFS and Illumos, please join us at the OpenStorage summit in late October.  Note that there is a $100 fee to cover our direct expenses to attend the summit.  Learn more here.

And please keep the comments coming!

Today we announced a strategic partnership with a company that has revolutionized the market for industry standard servers and storage components, Supermicro.  This announcement will prove to be more significant to the storage industry than the bidding war over 3PAR.

I have a lot of respect for 3PAR’s software, which turns industry standard hardware into a SAN with many ZFS like capabilities.

However, today’s bidding war over 3PAR just confirms:

- Storage is a massive, massive market – now some 42% of IT spending

- Storage is sticky – thanks to a) the physics of moving data around and b) the proprietary technologies of legacy vendors, it is extremely hard to shift storage vendors

- Storage is strategic – not just because of the money and the lock in (which might be enough) but also because storage enables or gets in the way of all significant IT initiatives including, most importantly, virtualization

What the amounts being thrown around for 3PAR do not take into account is that storage is being commoditized.  The hardware went first — all the hardware is basically the same  whether you buy it from a Nexenta partner or via your legacy array vendor.  And now the channel is being trained and provided with tightly integrated solutions that enables the much larger commodity server channel to compete with the storage market with superior total solutions.

As Wally Lauw, VP of Sales at Supermicro puts it in an article on the partnership we announced today:

“Our channel partners can now offer another complete, certified Supermicro SBB storage solutions that deliver unmatched performance, availability and features.”

In other words, storage is being commoditized now not just because of price but also because of features, features, features.  See for example the results of a recent survey of NexentaStor paid customers:
As our VP of Sales puts it – you give up nothing by going with OpenStorage and NexentaStor; you gain built in multi-level data integrity, the only solution in the industry with a single view into all the major virtualization vendors, inline dedupe and compression with on the box virus scan, and, as we emphasize today with our announcement of the relationship with Supermicro, an unmatched breadth and depth in the channel.

As always, comments welcome.  And congratulations to the 3PAR team.

The old OpenSolaris Governing Board has dissolved unanimously today.

So, we’ve had some “issue” reports relating to the mpt driver. In almost all cases, the results are related to situations where people are using SATA drives, and hooking them into SAS configurations.

Look, I really, really wanted to avoid entering the packaging debate. I mean, its an emotional decision, right?

A little birdie told me that the last update to Oracles hg repository for ON was this one:

Illumos milestones reached today.

I’m pleased to announce that I’ll be giving a brief talk at this month’s SVOSUG meeting, Thursday Aug 26, at 6:45 pm in Mountain View. It will cover Illumos, and I will be joined by a colleague who will talk a bit more about Nexenta as well. If you’re in the Bay Area at that time, it would be great to have a chance to meet.