Nutanix Unveils OS 3.0 and NX-3000 Hardware Line

Nutanix Inc. announced the latest version of its software, Nutanix OS 3.0, and a new hardware line, the NX-3000 series.

These products is helping enterprises build next-generation software-defined datacenters. In addition to VM-level DR and adaptive post-process compression, OS 3.0 also delivers dynamic cluster expansion, rolling software upgrades, and support for a second hypervisor, KVM. These software enhancements, coupled with the configurable NX-3000 series platform, enable flexibility, performance, and scalability in enterprise datacenters.

"Nutanix continues to stay ahead of the innovation curve with this release. It is critical to have a solution that can adapt to such a fast paced industry while scaling at a level of granularity that best fits the growth of my business," says Rodney Perkins, IT Director of Farmers Insurance Group Federal Credit Union.

New Hardware Platform Allows
For Independent and Customized Scaling
With the NX-3000 series, Nutanix has delivered a configurable platform in which compute-heavy and storage-heavy nodes can coexist in a single heterogeneous cluster. The platform will include hardware models that are variable in the capacity and number of PCIe-SSDs, SATA SSDs, and SATA HDDs per server node. The nodes can have varying numbers of CPU cores per socket and variable memory cacities. This allows for independent scaling of compute and storage in a single system that is optimized for every use case and can scale to address evolving business requirements.

The NX-3000 is based on Intel’s Sandy Bridge architecture and delivers VM density in a 2U form factor.

Next-Generation DR
The Nutanix team, which delivers RAID, HA, snapshots, and clones at VM-level, has implemented a differentiated VM-centric DR engine. The OS 3.0 includes native storage-optimized DR that enables multi-way, master-master replication never seen before in traditional storage arrays. Administrators can configure DR policies that specify protection domains and consistency groups in primary sites, which can then be replicated to any combination of secondary sites to ensure business resiliency and application performance. Furthermore, any cluster can serve as both a primary and secondary site simultaneously for different protection domains, thereby providing more flexibility and choice.

OS 3.0 also delivers runbook (failover and failback) automation that is hypervisor-agnostic, which means the native DR capabilities are available and consistent regardless of the underlying virtualization platform or management tools.

Adaptive Compression
One of the key pillars of the Nutanix solution is an efficient MapReduce-based framework that implements ILM in the cluster to achieve tiering, disk rebuilding, and cluster re-balancing. This massively-parallel big data architecture was the first of its kind in the storage industry. The same framework is being leveraged to deliver adaptive post-process compression of cold data as it migrates to the lower data tiers, thereby not impacting the normal IO path. By leveraging the ILM capabilities inherent in the software, the system dynamically determines which data blocks to compress based on how frequently they are being accessed by the VMs. Post-process compression is for random or batch workloads and delivers the highest possible performance. In addition, OS 3.0 supports basic in-line compression that works as the data is being written, which is better suited for archival and sequential workloads.

"While our existing storage solutions support compression in general, the granularity of Nutanix compression allows us to set policies at the VM level, ensuring maximum business value and storage utilization, without sacrificing performance," said Jon Lasley of Anthelio.

Growing Hypervisor Support
With OS 3.0, the company continues to deliver on its commitment to bring all of its enterprise features to a range of platforms. The software, which was designed to be hypervisor agnostic, will now support KVM and VMware vSphere 5.1. Regardless of the underlying virtualization platform or management framework, enterprises benefit from all of the capabilities of the software. The KVM hypervisor provides financial flexibility for enterprises and works well in workloads such as Hadoop.

Dynamic Cluster Expansion
and Rolling Software Upgrades
OS 3.0 uses a discovery-based protocol to auto-detect new nodes added to the same network as a cluster, enabling administrators to quickly and easily expand a cluster without incurring any downtime. In the background, the system will then rebalance the data across the entire storage pool, including the newly added nodes, to provide IO performance.

The software also uses software-defined networking tricks to achieve rolling software upgrades within the always-on cluster. Upgrades are delivered in a peer-to-peer framework to enable rapid software upgrades while retaining maximum cluster availability.

"The features and capabilities that we have delivered in Nutanix OS 3.0 and the NX-3000 series usher in a new era of business resiliency and datacenter optimization," said Howard Ting, VP marketing at Nutanix. "These enhancements, built on top of an already ground-breaking product foundation, underscore the company’s continued commitment to innovation and customer success with high-end enterprise workloads."

The NX-3000 series and OS 3.0 are available.