Nutanix web-scale infrastructure ‘poised to conquer’ enterprise IT challenges

Nutanix has announced a new release of the intelligent software powering its Virtual Computing Platform. Nutanix delivers the benefits of web-scale IT to virtualised datacentres as a simple turnkey solution without compromising enterprise-class functionality or requiring a radical overhaul of the environment. Nutanix® Operating System (NOS) 4.0 packs a host of new features and improvements, including end-to-end system analytics and multi-cluster management in the control fabric, along with tunable resilience and powerful distributed data services in the data fabric. These enhancements bring business agility, operational effectiveness and the ability to handle unpredictable growth to enterprise environments running business-critical applications.

There is a common misconception that the benefits of web-scale infrastructure are limited to environments with massive amounts of data and millions of concurrent users. However, according to Gartner May 15, 2013 research report, Use Web-Scale IT to Make Enterprise IT Competitive With the Cloud, “web-scale IT is not just for large companies or IT organisations. It also doesn’t presuppose a need for massive computing power, although that may also be a need.”

The Nutanix Virtual Computing Platform brings web-scale IT to mainstream datacentres, delivering simplicity and agility at any scale. "Nutanix has proven they can deliver cutting-edge web-scale technologies in a turnkey platform that greatly simplifies our datacentre. Even as a mid-size enterprise, we’re seeing the value that web-scale infrastructure offers,” said Charlie Kavaloski, director of information technology at Bauer Built Inc. “We’re excited about the powerful end-to-end monitoring and proactive health features in the upcoming software release, which will greatly improve the operational efficiency of our environment.”

Management and Analytics
NOS 4.0 features a powerful addition – Prism Central – a groundbreaking product enabling administrators to manage multiple Nutanix clusters across many different locations from a single pane of glass. Administrators at a global retailer can now, for example, centrally manage remote IT resources in hundreds of stores – bringing efficiencies not possible with traditional infrastructure. Prism Central also provides administrators with an aggregate view of health and resources across all clusters, while still allowing individual, per-cluster management.

Another powerful capability is Cluster Health, a new Prism module that gives administrators comprehensive visibility of the health of a cluster. Cluster Health adds to the value of converged infrastructure by giving administrators the ability to proactively monitor system resources end-to-end, and to diagnose and resolve potential issues with the intuitive visual navigation interface in a fraction of the time compared to traditional infrastructure.

Enterprise Data Services
The NOS 4.0 release also enhances existing Nutanix deduplication technology with new MapReduce Deduplication, a powerful post-process deduplication capability that boosts the effective storage capacity of an entire cluster. Unlike deduplication in traditional storage arrays, MapReduce Deduplication is highly distributed and automatically runs on all nodes in the cluster, allowing functionality to scale out as the cluster grows. MapReduce Deduplication, together with real-time performance deduplication already available in the system, makes the Virtual Computing Platform ideal for persistent virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) deployments, virtualised server workload environments and backup/archiving environments.

Further enhancements include Tunable Redundancy, a suite of features enabling administrators to configure different degrees of fault tolerance for applications. By allowing different redundancy levels for applications in the same cluster, NOS 4.0 eliminates the need to create multiple clusters while maintaining management simplicity. True to the underlying principle of software-defined infrastructure, system policies that define which applications get what level of redundancy are late-bound and applied dynamically to achieve different levels of resilience and fault tolerance.

In addition to these capabilities, NOS 4.0 packs several additional enhancements, including zero-touch upgrade of the operating system in clusters of any size with zero downtime, integrated backup and disaster recovery from a single pane of glass, and Windows® PowerShell Cmdlets based on the Nutanix REST API that allow Windows users to programmatically manage their Nutanix clusters.

“The future of simple and cost-efficient virtual datacentres is now, and enterprises are taking advantage of web-scale technologies to achieve the scale and agility their business environments demand,” said Rajiv Mirani, vice president of engineering at Nutanix. “We’re very excited to release these new capabilities and improvements to assist enterprise IT leaders looking for an alternative to the slow pace of traditional IT. NOS 4.0 will continue to reshape routine IT workflows in a fundamental way.”