DDN storage acquisitions continue with Nexenta pickup

DataDirect Networks keeps expanding by acquisition. The high-performance computing storage specialist this week made its third acquisition in the past year, picking up software-defined storage vendor Nexenta.

DDN bought hybrid flash vendor Tintri out of bankruptcy last summer. The Tintri deal followed the pickup of the Lustre filesystem and customer base from Intel. DDN has long used Lustre as the foundation of its ExaScaler and GridScaler arrays.

Kurt Kuckein, a DDN senior director of marketing, said the vendor will rationalize the various file systems down the road, but the near-term plan is to target each one to specific data workloads.

Kuckein said DDN storage will remain focused on AI and big data customers seeking scalable high performance. Tintri by DDN is intended for storage analytics to boost virtualized applications.

“Nexenta by DDN will deliver software-defined, hardware-agnostic file, block and object services for enterprises and telcos,” including 5G– and internet of things-related applications, Kuckein said.

DDN did not disclose the purchase price of Nexenta.

Nexenta was an early player in software-defined storage. Since launching in 2005, Nexenta has raised more than $100 million from private investors, including a $20 million round from Tokyo-based Softbank in 2017.

DDN storage will gain 3,000 Nexenta customers and more than 2,000 petabytes of new storage capacity under management, the vendors said.

Nexenta’s NexentaStor software supports unified block and file storage on bare metal or in a virtual storage appliance. NexentaEdge object storage platform handles Amazon S3 and Swift clusters with built-in erasure coding.

Nexenta has server OEM deals with Cisco, Dell, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Lenovo. Existing reseller partnerships will remain intact, Kuckein said.

The addition of NexentaStor will give DDN ready-made file storage in the public cloud. The NexentaCloud product delivers enterprise NAS storage services through integration in Amazon Web Services.

As with Tintri, Nexenta will operate as a separate DDN engineering division, “but with an accelerated roadmap and a better framework for development and support,” Kuckein said. Nexenta CEO Tarkan Maner will lead the Nexenta by DDN storage division.