Nexenta Systems Announces Continued Record Growth in 2010

July 20, 2010

Tools

Leader in OpenStorage Solutions Maintains Rapid Growth and Solidifies Position as Fastest Growing Company in Enterprise Storage Market

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Nexenta Systems, the world’s leading provider of OpenStorage solutions, announced today that it achieved accelerated growth in the first half of 2010 following a record 2009. In the last six months, Nexenta launched comprehensive partner programs, aggressively expanded its executive team to further its expertise and leadership in ZFS and OpenSolaris and released a breakthrough upgrade to its NexentaStor storage software, which helped power a 351 percent increase in revenues from the year prior. This explosive performance, which positions Nexenta as one the industry’s fastest growing enterprise storage companies, illustrates that NexentaStor is the ideal solution to meet the growing demand for affordable, high-performance storage solutions, which replace legacy storage technologies that lock in customers to rigid architectures.

NexentaStor is the most widely deployed independent storage solution built on the revolutionary open source ZFS file system. With NexentaStor, customers experience all the benefits of enterprise storage; high performance and air-tight data integrity, multiple replication methods and in-line data deduplication, without relying on the vendor lock-in and outdated technologies of legacy storage vendors. Nexenta’s customers save up to 80 percent on storage costs while benefitting from NexentaStor’s superior storage functionality, tight integration across virtualization products, and faster development cycles versus legacy, proprietary storage products.

Partner, Customer, and Financial Growth

Nexenta exceeded all of its customer, sales, and partner goals in the first half of the year, including:

Sales: Nexenta has experienced approximately 45 percent growth in sales from the first quarter to the second quarter.
Customers: NexentaStor has now achieved over 1,700 commercial deployments, and is used by over 29,000 registered users. 215 new customers were added in the first half of the year, representing over 240 percent more customers than were added in the same period in 2009.
Partners: 45 partners were added worldwide in the first six months, reflecting the company’s commitment and traction with the channel and initial success of its new partner programs. Nexenta now has over 120 partners and channel sales represent over 85 percent of Nexenta’s overall revenue.
Profits: While increasing the size of its team by over 60 percent, Nexenta maintained cash flow breakeven which allowed the company to complete a substantial debt financing.

Company Milestones

To support and further drive its growth, Nexenta continued to ramp up all areas of the company. Key milestones for 2010 include:

Launch of NexentaStor 3.0: Nexenta’s latest software revolutionizes storage by enabling customers to reduce their use of primary storage through in-line deduplication.
Expansion of the Nexenta team: Nexenta solidified its executive team and technology leadership by adding former Sun engineer and OpenSolaris expert Garrett D’Amore, former GlassHouse executive Rick Hayes, former Quail CEO and Sun VP Jason Yoho, ZFS expert Richard Elling, and added ZFS Co-Creator Bill Moore to the company’s board of advisors. Additionally, Andrew Bennett, a noted expert in HPC and storage system design and implementation joined as director of EMEA sales engineering based in London, UK.
New partner programs: Nexenta announced two new partner programs: a Partner Reseller program, which allows access to Nexenta product, support and service discounts; and the Nexenta Technology partner program, where partners can integrate industry standard hardware with NexentaStor software. Nexenta Technology partners that have already joined the program include LSI, DDR Drive, Coraid, and Compellent.
New training programs: Nexenta launched the Nexenta Training Program, two-day seminars for partners to become Certified Nexenta Engineers (CNE). Training sessions have already been offered in Las Vegas, Nev. and Rotterdam, The Netherlands, with several more planned in 2010 including a soon-to-be announced OpenStorage Summit.

Expansion of Nexenta’s Facilities: Nexenta has opened a sales and support office in New York City.
Awards: Nexenta was named by CRN as an “Emerging Storage Vendor” for the year 2010 and by eWeek as one of “17 Promising Storage Companies Flying Under the Radar.”

“The legacy storage industry has painted itself into a corner with proprietary, lock-in based technologies that lead to contentious relationships with customers and extremely high pricing that collectively now consumes over 42 percent of total IT spending according to industry analysts,” said Evan Powell, CEO of Nexenta. “Nexenta’s model of transparent pricing, perpetual licenses, and an open software-only business model that allows customers to benefit from the massive ongoing improvements in the price/performance of hardware is the only way enterprise IT can get out of this bind. As a result, NexentaStor adoption is widespread and accelerating across geographies and use cases. We are particularly proud of the relationships with Compellent and other partners who provide total solutions that include NexentaStor software.”

About Nexenta Systems

Founded in 2005 and privately held, Nexenta Systems, Inc., has developed NexentaStor™, the leading OpenStorage enterprise class hardware independent storage solution and sponsors NexentaCore, an open source operating system that combines the high performance and reliability of OpenSolaris with the ease-of-use and breadth of applications of Linux. Both solutions leverage the revolutionary file system ZFS.

Nexenta’s products have achieved VMware Ready status with VMware, an EMC company (NYSE: EMC), CitrixReady status with Citrix Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:CTXS), and other certifications.

More information about Nexenta Systems, Inc. and free trials of the ZFS-based NexentaStor can be found at www.nexenta.com or call (877) 862-7770.