CeBIT Open Source Project Lounge -- Nexenta

The giraffe is the heraldic animal for Nexenta.

In a nutshell: How would you describe your project in one or two sentences?

Nexenta combines the OpenSolaris kernel with the GNU/Debian user experience to provide a versatile and powerful ZFS-based server
platform.

When did the project begin?

Back in 2005, when the iSCSI developers of the Linux kernel learned about Sun opensourcing ZFS, which had very exciting features.

How many active members does the project have?

There are about 10 active developers. There is a very huge user based (we've had over a million downloads from our site alone).

Why was the project created?

To bring the innovative features of OpenSolaris to the wide linux audience.

Why should a CeBIT visitor come to your booth?

To see why Nexenta is the best server platform in the world!

Who do you make your software for?

Nexenta is targeted to the server, especially the Storage market. Nexenta Systems, the parent company builds storage appliance
NexentaStor on top of Nexenta and sells it with commercial support.

Where do you see your biggest current challenges?

In the near future, the challenge is to port the latest Ubuntu release as quickly as possible. Nexenta follows Ubuntu LTS releases, and ports
all packages to the opensolaris kernel.

If you could hire a full-time project developer now, what problem should he or she be ready to solve?

To identify challenges with porting Ubuntu packages to Nexenta. We have quite a powerful auto-builder already setup, but we need to also
automate patching, and figure out a way to work with upstream (ubuntu and debian) and get our patches in there.

Under which license is the software currently offered?

The distribution scripts and tools are themselves released under the CDDL open source license (which is also used by OpenSolaris).
Individual packages in the repository are under their own licenses.

Internet adress: http://www.nexenta.org