Nutanix Releasing Nutanix OS 3.5

Nutanix
Inc. introduced the latest version of Nutanix OS 3.5.

The release highlights the company’s
commitment to bringing innovations in performance, scalability and
user experience to provide IT managers with platform for building and
operating virtual datacenters.

Throughout enterprise datacenters,
virtualization densities continue to increase, outpacing hardware
investments, compromising application performance and driving the
need for greater storage capacity. While the addition of high-speed
flash to server infrastructures has yielded incremental benefits, a
software-driven approach is now required. This delivers an
architecture that understands data access patterns to adaptively
manage storage utilization in real-time and applies inline
technologies to accelerate application performance. This
differentiated approach is applied across all storage tiers providing
unmatched resource elasticity. All customers can upgrade to 3.5,
eliminating hardware refreshes and realizing a faster time to value
than hardware-driven approaches.

"The release of Nutanix OS 3.5
represents a significant step forward in datacenter infrastructure,"
said Rajiv Mirani, VP of engineering, Nutanix. "The
combination of accelerated performance, advanced storage optimization
and consumer-like management will change long-held expectations about
what is possible with converged infrastructure technologies and
further accelerate market adoption."

Nutanix Elastic Deduplication Engine
The Elastic Deduplication Engine is a
dedupe technology that accelerates application performance and
increases storage capacity for virtual datacenters. The first dedupe
technology to span memory, flash and HDD resources simultaneously in
any storage offering or converged infrastructure platform, the engine
is built for scale-out architectures to accelerate performance while
enabling large clusters with the best economics.

It continuously analyzes read I/O
access patterns and granularly deduplicates data to deliver high
performance and to maximize effective storage capacity. For
applications with large working sets, such as VDI deployments, the
technology increases effective flash and memory resources by up to
10x and delivers nearly instantaneous application response times. The
company is also announcing plans to extend the technology to optimize
the storage of ‘cold data’ on HDDs in an upcoming 2013 release.

"We use the
Nutanix Virtual Computing Platform to build portable datacenters to
provide testing and education services in Asia and the Middle East,"
said Jean-Manuel Becker, director of IT Systems, Pearson
plc, a learning company. "Innovations
like the new Elastic Deduplication Engine will be powerful for
improving the performance of applications and optimizing storage
resources. As a software-driven capability, this technology is
available to us without having to purchase new hardware."

"Nutanix pioneered the creation
of Hyper-converged solutions that dramatically simplify IT
infrastructure, reduce costs and improve manageability,"
said Arun Taneja, founder and consulting analyst, Taneja
Group. "With NOS 3.5, Nutanix is upping the ante by
adding their Elastic Deduplication Engine, which improves the
performance of the memory and flash layers with software-driven,
inline deduplication technology. This, along with a simplified UI and
the availability of Prism API, should propel Nutanix and
Hyper-convergence into mainstream enterprise datacenters."

Enterprise IT Management
User-Centered Design with Simplicity
Enterprise IT user interfaces are often
designed with little attention given to how users actually interact
with technology. As a result, even simple management tasks become
time consuming, complex and prone to error. With the release of NOS
3.5, the company is introducing Prism – a management framework,
including an interface that simplifies user experience and a
REST-based API enabling Nutanix to be integrated into enterprise or
cloud management systems.

With Prism UI, all system and VM
information is organized and presented to facilitate consumption for
insights and actions. Touch points provide an at-a-glance view of
server, storage and network operations to eliminate searching through
multiple screens to find information and built-in analytics to
provide event correlation and make troubleshooting simple. In
addition, it is built from the ground up using HTML5 to support
nearly any device, giving managers mobility and access to core
infrastructure.

The Prism API, which includes an
explorer for sampling of individual API commands, allows all
reporting and management functionality to be programmatically
accessed in a cloud orchestration management system, such as
OpenStack and VMware vCloud Automation Center.

The release packages more than 75
additional enhancements, including the extension of compression to
the native Nutanix DR feature for capacity optimization, and the
introduction of a Storage Replication Adapter for VMware Site
Recovery Manager. The SRA allows customers to leverage their existing
investment in VMware SRM to manage Nutanix VM-centric DR policies.

It is available at no cost to all
customers with current maintenance agreements.