A report from Reuters says that Nexenta plans to IPO sometime in 2015. Nexenta is in the software-defined storage business. NexentaStor, the company’s core product, is built atop OpenSolaris/OpenStorage ZFS technology. The company also makes a free, full-featured, community supported edition called NexentaStor Community Edition.
ZFS is a file system-cum-logical volume manager that was first introduced with the Solaris operating system of Sun Microsystems, a company that was later acquired by Oracle. The ZFS source code was first made available outside Solaris on OpenSolaris. It is now the default file system on other Unix-like operating systems, like FreeBSD, PC-BSD, FreeNAS, illumos (an OpenSolaris fork), and OpenIndiana.
I’m not sure if all that makes Nexenta an Open Source company, but if it does, then we have another Open Source company jumping into the IPO waters. Will it sink or swim?
According to the Reuters report, Nexenta counts companies like GoDaddy, AOL Inc., and Softbank Corp as customers, but “will face stiff competition from other open source-based “software-defined storage” makers ranging from established names such as Red Hat Inc to start-ups such as GreenBytes Inc and DataCore Software.”
Whether it’s IPO is successful or not (I’m rooting for them), let’s just hope the company keeps developing NexentaStor Community Edition. The latest update is NexentaStor 4.0 Community Edition, which was released last month. As stated earlier, it is a fully-featured version of the enterprise edition. You just can’t use it for more than 18 TB of data. More about it at http://nexentastor.org/.
