By Mike McGhee, Director TMM – NC2, NUS, NDB
You might think Nutanix is synonymous with Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) because we replaced legacy solutions consisting of separate storage arrays, storage area networks, servers and virtualization. But did you know Nutanix provides a complete unified storage offering? The storage offering includes iSCSI based block services, SMB and NFS file sharing, and S3 compatible objects capabilities using the same distributed platform. Nutanix is the only HCI solution to provide software defined, enterprise grade unified storage, giving you simplicity, flexibility, and built-in security for your data.
What Is Nutanix Unified Storage?
Nutanix unified storage contains three core services:
File Services
Nutanix file services offer a simple and secure scale-out solution to store, manage, and scale unstructured data generated by applications and users. Common use cases include home and profile directories for VDI, video surveillance and medical imaging. File services offers a complete set of features including robust protocol support with SMB 2, SMB 3, NFS v3, NFS v4, and multiprotocol. You can apply user quotas to shares, set WORM policies, tier data to the cloud and natively replicate shares for disaster recovery.
Objects Services
Object services deliver a secure S3-compatible object store. The object service provides high performance for modern cloud-native and big data analytics workloads. It’s also commonly used for backup applications in partnership with leading data protection partners such as Commvault, HYCU, Veeam and Rubrik. The object service is feature rich with versioning controls, WORM support, S3 select capabilities and integrated real time replication for load balancing and data protection.
Block Services
Nutanix Volumes is an enterprise-class service that exposes storage resources directly to virtualized guest operating systems or physical hosts using the iSCSI protocol. Common use cases include large scale database workloads like Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server and shared storage for various needs including persistent storage for containerized applications.
What’s Unique about Nutanix Unified Storage?
Simplicity
Nutanix Cloud Platform (NCP) acts as a single platform for file, object, and block storage along with virtualized workloads. This common platform helps you eliminate storage silos and delivers consistent and simplified operations including deployment, scaling, upgrades and monitoring.
Nutanix Prism is the common interface for management helping anyone from experienced storage admins to virtualization experts easily deliver these services. It’s no wonder IDC found that Nutanix file storage led to 60% more efficient IT storage management and 82% faster deployments (1).
Flexible Consumption
Nutanix unified storage can start as small as a single node or scale to 48 nodes and PBs worth of data. Being software defined allows you to combine different storage services in the same cluster based on your needs, ideal for modern applications that can leverage multiple protocols and change over time. Clusters can be dedicated to just run storage services, or mixed to include any number of virtual machines. Either way, licensing is capacity based and portable giving flexibility to start small, apply storage services where you need and pay as you grow.
Because unified storage is software defined you can scale at any time, whether it’s scaling up compute or scaling out storage with file services, or scaling across multiple clusters leveraging the same namespace for objects. Upgrades are independent across all services. For example, upgrading the file server does not require changes to the hypervisor, or any other unified storage capability.
Security-First Design
Security is incorporated into the product development lifecycle from the start to avoid difficult trade-offs between security, performance and features. Nutanix publishes custom security baseline documents based on U.S. DoD STIGs that cover the entire infrastructure stack and prescribe steps to secure deployment in the field.
Nutanix provides options to secure data at rest using either self-encrypting drives or software-only encryption and integrated key-based access management. Protocol specific security is also integral to the solution with in-flight encryption for SMB, NFS and S3 and WORM support for both files and objects.
Data Lens
Nutanix takes security, including data visibility, a step further with Data Lens. Data Lens is a software-as-a-service offering providing analytics and ransomware defense for Nutanix Unified Storage. Data Lens gives you robust ransomware protection, full audit trails, anomaly detection, and data age analytics.
Ransomware protection includes file blocking with automatic signature updates and ransomware file access pattern detection. When ransomware events are found you can choose to block the client and user or set the entire file server to read-only. Further, a snapshot is automatically taken at the time of the attack to provide a recovery point. Recovery workflows flag all files which may have been impacted and recommend which snapshot to restore.
Why Does This Matter?
Nutanix unified storage delivers real benefits for your IT organization which include:
- Simplified operations with:
- Centralized management under a single scalable and easy to upgrade platform
- A single capacity based software SKU which can be applied to dedicated or mixed environments with any combination of storage services and protocols
- Reduced cost by:
- Eliminating storage sprawl and consolidating silos
- Right sizing by starting small and incrementally scaling from GBs to PBs of storage without compromising performance
- Reducing risk through:
- Integrated ransomware features which help you detect, protect and recover from attacks
- Management automation from independent upgrades through incremental scaling to eliminate manual and error prone processes
We invite you to take Nutanix Unified storage for a Test Drive to learn more and see for yourself what it can do! Also, learn how you can get one year of Data Lens for free now.
(1) Source Adapted From – IDC Nutanix Unified Storage Business Value Study, US49602722