If you’re looking for an alternative to VMware’s ESXi and vSAN, there’s a European virtualisation player that’s worth checking out, especially at small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) scale. That comes from the German company EuroNAS, and its eEVOS , EuroNAS Enterprise Virtualization OS , hyper-converged infrastructure stack.
“We’re not very well known, and that’s because 80% of our sales up until now have been made via storage suppliers that use our system in white box products,” said Tvrtko Fritz, CEO of EuroNAS, who spoke to Computer Weekly’s French sister publication, LeMagIT, at a recent IT Press Tour event.
EuroNAS couldn’t name names, but it has, for example, gained some success in media post production, such as with the makers of the Game of thrones series in the US, and also by the BBC.
“10 years ago, several of our partners were coming into competition with Nutanix and asked us to add a virtualisation layer,” said Fritz. “Then in 2024, after the Broadcom purchase of VMware convinced a number of customers to flee the new pricing, the demand for this kind of solution exploded. Then we adapted to being a true competitor to vSAN.”
eEVOS is not the only VMware alternative in the VMware space that aims at SMEs. There’s Proxmox, too.
“Proxmos is free, while we are paid-for,” said Fritz. “That made us worry at first, but really we have a big advantage that they don’t. Namely, everything in our solution is graphically represented, like in VMware or Nutanix.
“We can be used by anyone, while only experts in Linux can use Proxmox, where a simple update needs several pages of documentation to know what to type in at the command line.”
From simple NAS to server virtualisation
From the start, EuroNAS has offered, as the name suggests, a way of making a server full of drives into a NAS box capable of providing shared storage accessible by all protocols (including the venerable AFP from Apple). It supports external disk shelves via Fibre Channel, iSCSI, NVMe-over-Fabrics and manages reliability using the ZFS file system, which provides a software RAID, compression and snapshots.
According to Fritz, this offering is often used with Seagate’s Exos Corvault enclosure, which runs to hundreds of drives and raw capacity of 2.5PB (petabytes). The unit on its own can’t be anything more than a server-mounted volume for archive use. But with EuroNAS added, access is shared and accelerated via an SSD-equipped server with data indexed in a graphical UI, and it’s possible to put three units together for a single volume of 7.5PB.
That solution has gone up a notch in terms of reliability with the arrival of a HA Cluster , i.e. high availability , where the access to the disk enclosure is shared between two redundant EuroNAS servers that synchronise their contents between each other.
“Then in 2016, we were asked, ‘Could we run virtual machines?’,” said Fritz. “That was because Nutanix’s hyper-converged infrastructure, which competed with our partners, was effectively a storage system on SuperMicro servers with the capacity to run backup applications and manage data.”
“From the start, that looked easy to do,” he said. “We could use KVM, the hypervisor attached to the Linux kernel, that we used in our system. However, there were a few things we didn’t like about it, notably its incremental snapshot tools, which have the defect of having to build a synthetic snapshot at the point of restoration. Depending on the size of the VM, that could take hours. So, we developed something proprietary around KVM, notably a system of reflinks for snapshots.”
2025: Moves towards Ceph
As of 2024, eEVOS wasn’t robust enough to run the spread of VM applications that SMEs had entrusted to VMware but no longer wanted to.
“The problem wasn’t about virtualisation capacity, but elasticity,” said Fritz. “A VMware or Nutanix customer needs to be able to add servers gradually as their needs increase, and seamlessly. But, that wasn’t possible with ZFS. For that reason, we replaced it with Ceph.”
That worked so well that EuroNAS even decided to extend use of Ceph to its traditional storage earlier this year.
That new version is called eEKAS , we don’t know what the acronym means , but the product will lead EuroNAS’s charge to open up a new market for elastic storage. That could be in its established milieu of video production, where it faces competition from Dell PowerScale and Qumulo from HPE.
Currently, eEVOS and eEKAS clusters can scale to 60 nodes.
Until now, EuroNAS turned over around €5m a year. “We anticipate our next accounts will attain €20m, even €30m,” said Fritz.
“Previously, we sold one licence to one client for one or two EuroNAS servers,” he said. “From now, we’re selling licenses for entire clusters. We just signed a contract for an eEVOS configuration of 60 nodes, where the catalogue price is €900,000. Even with a discount of 50%, you can see that our revenues are going to explode.”
