Nutanix: Database Services With Era Enterprise Cloud Platform-as-a-Service

At its .NEXT Conference 2018, Nutanix, Inc. announced Era, a set of enterprise cloud platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offerings to streamline and automate database operations so database administrators (DBAs) can focus on business-driving initiatives.

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Era extends the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS software stack beyond core infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) capabilities for private cloud environments to platform-layer services that bring the firm’s one-click simplicity to database operations.

The initial release of Era will provide rich copy data management services to address the increasing complexity and burdensome cost of managing multiple copies of databases across organizations.

With Era, the company is targeting one of prodigious consumers of enterprise storage capacity.

According to IDC, as much as 60% of the IT storage budget goes to support copy data, and the total cost for copy data will reach $55.63 billion in 2020. ⁽¹⁾ Era will allow enterprises to reduce storage costs, simplify the management, control and security of data, while easing the complexity of database lifecycle operations.

Era’s copy data management service will initially support Oracle and Postgres database engines, with planned support for other popular databases. Building on the company’s snapshot technology, it will also incorporate time-machine capabilities, along with application-specific APIs, for creating point-in-time database copies.

This enables application developers to select the exact database copy they need, and empowers database administrators to restore or refresh any database instance with the confidence that every recorded transaction is captured. Era will later extend this technology to include full database provisioning, delivering a complete lifecycle management solution for all databases in an organization.

Key capabilities of Era will include:

One-click time machine – leveraging integrated the company’s snapshot technology, it creates space-efficient database snapshots to lower CapEx costs, and enable databases running on Nutanix to be cloned or recovered to any specific point in time – up to the last recorded transaction
One-click clone/refresh – It lowers OpEx costs with one-click clone/restore database operations that include all targeted database transactions and take just minutes to complete. Automating database cloning eliminates the complex and time-consuming process of locating a specific snapshot, finding the right database logs and then initiating a database recovery operation.

“Nutanix Era should save our organization time and money by replacing our complex and costly copy data processes, which are impacting IT productivity and slowing down our app developers,” said Mark Maplethorpe, EMEA hosting manager, Bottomline Technologies, Inc. “We are actively working with Nutanix to validate that Era will streamline the provisioning and lifecycle management of our databases, allowing our teams to devote more time to strategic IT projects.”

Era is currently being tested by selected customers, and is planned to be available in 2H18.

Pricing details will be made available closer to the general release.

⁽¹⁾ IDC Market Glance: Copy Data Management Second Quarter, 2Q18, April 2018, Doc # US43745318 ($2,500)

Resource:
Blog: Nutanix Era: Databases Made Simple by Maryam Sanglaji, Steve Kaplan and Bala Kuchibhotla