NexentaStor leverages the ZFS file system and is optimized for use in 2nd-tier NAS and iSCSI applications requiring open, low cost, high performance storage as well as dramatically simplified provisioning, expansion, backup, replication, and archiving. It is also used as a primary NAS in businesses that wish to expand at closer to commodity pricing. It supports unlimited snapshots, snapshot mirroring (replication), block level mirroring, integrated search, and easy management of extremely large storage pools.

NexentaStor is not only the great NAS but also good teammate with Server Virtualization. With VM Data Center optional module, NexentaStor virtualize underlying storage in order to provide high performance, low cost, vendor independent enterprise storage to virtualized environments, including Citrix / Xen, Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware. With NexentaStor almost any underlying storage can be managed and presented to virtual servers via NFS or iSCSI or Fiber Channel.

With the HA Cluster plugin, NexentaStor enables two storage head to be configured as an active / active pair. When installed and configured, each instance of NexentaStor is able to perform all regular functions, while at the same time along with another NexentaStor instance also providing high availability for shared storage accessible from both appliances.

The storage jointly managed via HA Cluster 1.0 configured is shared storage. You can also establish RAID and replication policies to protect the data itself in a number of ways with the aid of NexentaStor. The purpose of HA Cluster 1.0 is to eliminate as a single point of failure the NexentaStor instances themselves.