Sun Microsystems’ OpenSolaris was meant to be an experiment of sorts for Sun on how to introduce new technologies to the operating system and roll them out in a more Linux-like open way. A funny thing happened: Nexenta took OpenSolaris, along with the ZFS file system, and made a pretty good business out of it.
Nexenta offers a hybrid operating system featuring OpenSolaris, Debian Linux and ZFS plus other open source technologies to provide an operating environment tuned for storage systems. Enterprise Storage Forum looks under the hood.
While Sun Microsystems may have struggled with making money from its OpenSolaris operating system prior to Sun’s acquisition by Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL), that doesn’t mean that others haven’t had better success. Storage startup Nexenta Systems is now celebrating its second year in business and its CEO is claiming a positive revenue trend for its system built using OpenSolaris and the Zettabyte File System (ZFS) file system.
Nexenta Systems is a commercial, venture-backed company that has its roots in the open source Nexenta operating system, a hybrid OpenSolaris operating system that includes components from the Debian GNU/Linux distribution. Rather than simply commercializing the operating system, Nexenta System has instead focused its efforts on the needs of enterprise data storage networks.