Nexenta Systems, the world’s leading provider of OpenStorage solutions, will help run the VMworld Europe (Oct 18-19, 2011) Hands on Lab (HOL) using industry-standard hardware that delivers enterprise performance for a fraction of the cost of traditional, legacy storage solutions. Nexenta is a VMware select level Technology Alliance Partner.

Throughout VMworld Europe, Nexenta will be running a near-identical VMware Ready-certified configuration to what it ran with great success at VMworld US in September where 7.9 billion storage operations were performed by four NexentaStor systems.

The HOL, classified as a true public cloud, is considered one of the most popular aspects of the conference and demand for seats is high. More than more than 18,000 lab seats of HOLs are expected to be live at any one time during the Copenhagen event.

Jim Fitzgerald, vice president of business development at Nexenta, said: “Running the VMworld Europe HOL is about delivering high availability (HA) and sheer performance. We’re looking to emulate what was achieved at VMworld US where we ran four out of eight HOL vertical application areas for the duration of the show. To give an idea of the scale of the challenge, we had a peak load of 154,000 4KB NFS operations at sub-1ms latency and peak bandwidth on a single Nexenta controller of 1,300MB/sec.”

To help meet user demand, Nexenta is providing four ZFS-based ‘SuperRack’ NexentaStor storage appliances leveraging standard SuperMicro off-the-shelf X86 machines; a pair of HA servers were used in each instance. Data resides on 2TB Seagate SAS drives while STEC 8GB Zeus RAM and Zeus IOPS (200GB) SSDs are used for read and write caching. The 720 TB raw capacity solution has a list price of USD$325,000.

To get a closer look at both the back- and front-end hardware that was used to create the HOL, users should attend session “LAS 4000: Cloud Infrastructure: Management and operations.” To pre-book a NexentaStor demonstration during VMworld Europe please contact: sales@nexenta.com