Nutanix already impressed me during last year's VMworld. They continue their development this year when they has announced NOS 3.5 recently and Prism UI – which is a HTML 5 based UI as a front-end for the NOS 3.5. The NOS 3.5 brings Elastic Deduplication Engine which accelerates an application performance with near instantaneous response times and up to 10x improvement in effective capacity for hot working data.
The Nutanix distributed file system allows linear expansion and linear performance gain when scaling up without creating a silos. This is happening when using traditional array based solutions where by adding more servers to your cluster, slowly the storage controller and the performance of your array creating a bottleneck. The drives which are in the array just cannot handle more workflow demand as their IOPS and throughput is limited.
Nutanix has solved this by using software layer which uses distributed storage. So in case you need more computer power and more storage, you just add another block. The new storage is detected automatically and the cluster resources expanded.
Nutanix executes the the VMs close to the server itself to reduce latency and write paths. Hot data uses different storage tiers starting from memory, then PCIe flash cards, SATA Flash and then only SATA spinning drives for cold data. In addition, you can specify yourself after which period the data are being considered as cold.
They use a controller VM in each host, which has the local disks attached via pass-through for direct access directly to the disks. I've met Sylvain Siou (FR) – @slysiou – and Mattias Sundling (@msundling), and shake hand to Bas Rayman (@BasRaayman). It's been a real pleasure to visit them all as they are very passionate about what do.
Then I did a quick video where Mattias shows the hardware platform, which is based on Supermicro Motherboard. He then talks about the software layer and the performance.
VMworld Barcelona 2013 coverage:
- Veeam 7.0 video from Barcelona
- Nutanix Hardware and Software Platform – Video VMworld 2013 (This post)
- Server Side Caching – PernixData at VMworld Barcelona 2013
- Auto-Optimize your virtual infrastructure with VMturbo
- Trilead VM Explorer 5.0 New Features and 2014 Roadmap
- vCloud Automation Center 6.0 (VCAC) Details Unveiled
- DR Scenarios with Simplivity – video
- My VCAP5-DCD Barcelona Experience
- vCenter Log Insight 1.5 Brings Enhanced Content Packs and More
- Ultra-compact Quad Core Xeon Server DS6100 from WD
- SanDisk Server Side caching – video VMworld Barcelona 2013
- vCOPS 5.8 – vCenter Operations Suite 5.8 Announced during VMworld 2013 Barcelona
- Hyperconvergence, server side caching and other virtualization trends during VMworld 2013 Barcelona
- OCZ Enterprise and VXL for VMware Acceleration Software
The article was published first at ESX Virtualization website. Feel free to subscribe via RSS or by e-mail to get the latest news to be delivered via weekly newsletter.
