Nutanix Entering Into All-Flash Hyper-Converged Appliance With 6 SSDs and Metro Availability

Nutanix, Inc. announced two additions to its Virtual Computing Platform, taking aim at the demanding applications and critical infrastructure requirements in the datacenter.

The NX-9000 appliance is an all-flash hyper-converged platform, delivering scale-out storage for applications that demand fast performance.

With Metro Availability, Nutanix a hyper-converged infrastructure vendor delivering CDP across multiple datacenters.

These innovations are in direct response to customer demands for flexible hyper-converged solutions to power any workload at high performance, and for deployment into any enterprise infrastructure. The Nutanix web-scale architecture enables such technology without hard-to-maintain investments in proprietary hardware or deep integration into virtualization stacks that limit customer choice.

“Nutanix hyper-converged solutions are powering the most demanding applications and services in the most stringent IT environments around the globe,” said Manoj Agrawal, senior director of engineering, Nutanix. “Our introduction of an all-flash converged platform and new Metro Availability further establishes Nutanix as the clear leader in one of the fastest growing segments in enterprise IT.”

All-Flash NX-9000 Appliance
The appliance continues the company’s commitment to high-performance flash technology, which has been incorporated into every Nutanix solution. It is built to run applications with large working sets, such as databases supporting OLTP. These applications need fast storage performance, but also demand predictable and consistent l/O latency that flash can deliver flash capacity is optimized using Nutanix’s scale-out compression and de-duplication technologies that leverage unused compute resources across all nodes in the cluster, avoiding performance bottlenecks common in both traditional storage and all-flash arrays that depend on dual-controller designs.

Unlike all-flash arrays, the NX-9000 delivers efficient storage resources and lowers operational complexities and costs.

Specifically, Nutanix provides:

• Scale-Out Storage – Customers increase storage capacity and overall storageperformance by adding nodes, one-at-a-time, non-disruptively. A single datastore can be scaled linearly with no upper limits, eliminating any risk of insufficient storage capacity.
• More Efficient Performance – With the Nutanix hyper-converged architecture, data is localized for each application so that read requests are handled directly by server-attached flash, avoiding read-heavy traffic and network latency inherent in the deployment of all-flash arrays.
• Greater Application Support – Unlike popular  all-flash arrays, Nutanix platforms deliver high performance for all applications and all I/O sizes, eliminating uncertainty when provisioning storage for different workload types.

The NX-9000 demonstrates the flexibility of the company’s web-scale architecture by delivering the right hardware resources for any workload, including different levels of compute and storage capacity, as well as the storage technology and networking configuration for every deployment. And unlike other hyper-converged solutions, Nutanix does not force customers to accept a ‘one size fits all’ solution.

Introducing Metro Availability
Business-critical applications demand continuous data availability. This means that access to applications and data must be preserved even during a datacenter outage or planned maintenance event. Many IT teams use metro area networks to maintain connectivity between datacenters so that if one site goes down the other location can run all applications and services with minimal disruption. To keep the applications running, however, requires immediate access to all data.

Nutanix’s hyper-converged infrastructure delivers CDP across multiple datacenters. Using synchronous mirroring, Metro Availability stretches datastores for VM clusters across two or more sites located up to 400km apart. All functionality is natively integrated into Nutanix software, and supported across all Nutanix platforms with no hardware changes. Enterprise IT teams benefit from improved business operations by maintaining application availability during planned and unplanned site downtime.

Virtualization teams can now non-disruptively migrate VMs between sites during planned maintenance events, providing CDP with zero RPO and a near zero RTO. Metro Availability is deployed within minutes and managed directly from Nutanix Prism UI, eliminating need for additional management consoles.

Metro Availability delivers:

• More Flexibility – Nutanix enables customers to deploy different configurations for primary and secondary sites, and support one-to-many and many-to-one topologies. Customers are no longer forced to have identical platforms and hardware configurations at each site.
• VM Awareness – Individual VMs can be mirrored across sites using Metro Availability, giving administrators flexibility in configuring multi-site deployments and improving system efficiency.
• 2x Greater Distances Between Sites – Metro Availability supports single datastores stretched up to 400km – twice what current systems support.

Metro Availability enhances and extends the set of integrated data protection and HA capabilities in the Nutanix solution, catering to the diverse needs of enterprise customers.

The NX-9000 all-flash hyper-converged system has been deployed in production environments. It is available with list prices beginning at $110,000 per node. Metro Availability will be available in the upcoming 4.1 version of the Nutanix OS and will be included in Ultimate Edition.