NUTANIX – SOLUTIONS TO MODERNIZING IT INFRASTRUCTURE (Part 02)

See why we at IDS choose to deploy HCI – Nutanix solutions to our customers and for our own Cloud Server – VPS – Cloudbase systems.

A. NUTANIX SOLUTIONS

1. HYPERCONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE SYSTEM PLATFORM

The Nutanix platform is a hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) solution.

The concept of Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) platform integrated with SDS (Software Defined Storage) storage/management solution has been a mainstream trend in recent years.

This is where all the equipment components such as servers, storage devices and networking devices are deployed to the customer in a single complete unit, along with virtual device monitoring software and management software.

The growth of hyperconverged infrastructure adoption is not only changing the technical specifications of IT environments, but also changing the people who manage technology.

The administrator only needs to use programmed software to control storage-related tasks, manage virtual machines, and is completely decoupled from the physical storage hardware.

This makes operational management – ​​a virtualized system, servers, storage devices, network devices… all in one device – extremely simple and effective. Investment and operational costs are super economical and more economical than traditional SAN solutions.

Nutanix uses WebScale design principles and technology from Google, Facebook, and Amazon and is suitable for any business need, from small to very large.

The Nutanix solution is radically simpler than traditional data center infrastructure.

+ Fast deployment : deployed within 30 minutes

+ Invest as much as you need , when you need more, just expand with one click to configure

+ No interruption of continuous operation

+ Easy to expand almost infinitely  (using WebScale technology similar to Facebook, Google, Amazon)

+ Built-in virtualization system  (Acropolis hypervisor) for free with full powerful features

+ Reduce costs and complexity  of storage systems by using HyperConverged Infrastructure architecture – All in one.

+  Integrated full Flash support : Integrated All Flash or Hybrid storage system provides high speed and flexibility for users

 + Meet all application needs  that require extremely fast, secure data access, easy to upgrade and expand. Applications recommended to run on the Nutanix system include Oracle, VDI (Citrix, Vmware), Splunk, ERP, SAP, backup, Email, Sharepoint…

 

+ Provides advanced technology, fast and easy scalability

Designed in blocks with a flexible expansion mechanism (scale) to help upgrade and respond faster and easier. Nutanix solutions are suitable for many different types of businesses from small-scale virtualization systems to large-scale virtualization systems, desktop virtualization (VDI), testing and developing applications, big data projects (such as Splunk, Hadoop), …

The Nutanix Virtual Computing Platform integrates high-performance servers with scalable storage in a 2U device. It eliminates the need for storage area networks (SANs) or network attached storage (NASs). With world-class scalability and performance, Nutanix solutions provide businesses with a modern and efficient infrastructure.

2. WHAT IS NUTANIX?

Nutanix servers include CPU, RAM, Network, SSD or Flash, and high-capacity HDD components. The Nutanix storage controller (CVM) is a virtual machine that runs on each server and is responsible for converting local storage into shared storage. All storage in a Nutanix system is grouped together as a single software – defined storage system .

Despite the lack of a dedicated SAN or NAS system, enterprise virtualization features such as High Availability, DRS, and Fault Tolerance still work perfectly. For maximum performance, the Nutanix storage controller allows all virtual machine data to be stored on the same server, minimizing latency and taking full advantage of the storage speed of SSD Flash.

3. GARTNER AND IDC ASSESSMENTS

Gartner Ranking:

Gartner is an organization that specializes in evaluating prestigious information technology products and solutions in the world.

Gartner’s assessment of system integration and hyperconvergence solutions in 2019 – through the chart, it can be seen that Nutanix is ​​leading in technology for hyperconverged solutions (HCI), far surpassing other formidable competitors.

IDC’s assessment of the effectiveness of investing in Nutanix solutions in the system:

 

During the survey, IDC found that companies and organizations saved more than 30% in costs when using Nutanix solutions compared to other solutions – a truly impressive return on investment.

In addition, Nutanix solution deployment time is 50% faster, and operation and configuration time is reduced by more than 49% compared to traditional solutions.

Therefore, when considering the efficiency of investing in Nutanix solutions compared to investing in traditional SAN solutions, servers, virtualization systems, etc., it is clear that Nutanix brings many benefits in terms of maintenance costs, operations, performance, stability as well as the ability to expand and reinvest. This brings trust and satisfaction to businesses and organizations not only in the present but also in the long-term operation period in the future.

It can be seen that Nutanix has helped save Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for a 5-year system integration project investment by more than 58%, in addition to 85% faster performance and 71% reduction in operational management time.

4. EVALUATE THE RETURN ON INVESTMENT (ROI) OF THE SOLUTION

With traditional SAN solutions, the initial investment cost for a storage infrastructure is always very high. And even up to 5 years later.

That’s just the cost of investing in SAN Storage, not including other infrastructure costs such as Server, SAN Switch…

With Nutanix, it is easy to make an initial investment for a certain number of Desktops with just one hardware configuration including servers, storage, etc. It is also easy to calculate the exact number of nodes needed to invest in Nutanix. The investment plan for each year is always followed, without any unexpected situations while still ensuring operational performance.

B. WHY NUTANIX IS THE TOP CHOICE FOR IT INFRASTRUCTURE

Compared with traditional SAN infrastructure solutions, Nutanix is ​​always the top choice for HyperConverged Infrastructure solutions with the following outstanding advantages:

 

1. HIGH PERFORMANCE

Nutanix offers an integrated architecture solution for virtualization with reasonable investment costs, extremely high performance with stability and less risk than traditional solutions.

High performance due to the use of Data Locality technology, all data is stored and read and written on each local host with All Flash storage, not through the network system or SAN Switch architecture which is inherently limited in performance and always has a bottleneck phenomenon between Storage and Server. Nutanix solves the limitations of traditional storage solutions as well as the performance problem of servers for virtualization systems.

With outstanding features such as Deduplication, Shadow Clones, Compression, Erasure Coding, and One Click Upgrade from the Prism centralized management interface… it has solved the remaining problems on the end-user side such as expansion, upgrading, and facing a series of users starting and accessing the system at the same time, upgrading/patching updates for OS, applications…

In addition, Nutanix integrates a graphics processing system that allows centralized management to support all types of VDI, HPC… as well as tasks and data systems.

2. SCALE OUT

With its block-based design, Nutanix allows businesses to start small and then scale to tens of thousands of servers. Once deployed, servers and storage systems are easily scalable with Nutanix Distributed File System  (NDFS).

In addition, the software integration solution allows businesses to easily combine different Nutanix platforms with synchronization and expansion features.

Thanks to the flexible but precise scalability, you can easily size the number of users needed to use how many resources, how much performance will be, what the cost will be… Now you can completely invest in an infrastructure with minimal initial cost, used for about 100-400 users with just 1 2U Nutanix block. Later, if you need to increase the number of users, you only need to increase each Node – this means the storage capacity is expanded, RAM, CPU are also increased…

This is something that traditional infrastructure could never predict so accurately.

3. SUPPORT AND COMPATIBILITY WITH ALL EXISTING HYPERVISORS

Nutanix supports VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, and AHV (Nutanix Acropolis Hypervisor). Administrators have the flexibility to choose the hypervisor that fits their business budget. Nutanix is ​​certified for VMware Horizon and Citrix XenDesktop & XenApp, giving users more flexible options in virtualizing VDI workstations as well as servers and applications.

In addition, with Nutanix you can run multiple hypervisors on the same cluster for different virtualization purposes. Such as VMware Horizon View running on vSphere, XenDesktop on vSphere or HyperV, Virtual Bridges on KVM…

4. OPTIMAL INLINE AND POST-PROCESS COMPRESSION

Nutanix with built-in deduplication technology and real-time operation for data residing on DRAM and FLASH

+DRAM:

Many people do not know that Nutanix is ​​a tier3 platform solution, and is optimized for DRAM, FLASH, and HDD. This integration provides instant data access in microseconds or microseconds instead of milliseconds when only FLASH is used. This is an outstanding and necessary feature to increase the user experience when using VDI systems.

Deduplication is designed for scalability, providing near-instant application response time. That’s why Nutanix is ​​the best platform, and this Deduplication feature works on any hypervisor or VDI solution.

Each time a disk is written, it will be marked with SHA1 during the process of creating a Desktop VM or when the user operates on VDI. And that data is saved from a single data block on DRAM or FLASH. Then the deduplication feature will operate at the highest performance. Therefore, when one or more desktops are created at the same time, it will not affect the performance and storage capacity – this is difficult to achieve with conventional Storage solutions (SAN Storage).

Nutanix uses SHA1 refined on Intel processors, thereby increasing performance and reducing CPU resource consumption on the host.

5. INLINE REAL-TIME DE-DUPLICATION

Once new data is created by the user and written to disk, Nutanix will automatically use Inline Compression and synchronize that compressed data to storage when the data is no longer used or rarely used on the Flash or DRAM layer.

Typically VDI environments have issues with Linked Clone not being implemented, which is why Linked Clone has reduced storage capacity. With Nutanix Compression, storage capacity is increased across storage tiers and there is no storage bottleneck, which affects the creation of persistent desktops.

Nutanix can save up to 75% more space on VDI user data.

6. DATA LOCALITY

Nutanix ensures that data is always synchronized across FLASH and HDD storage layers, across nodes and clusters to ensure availability. A Desktop VM can be accessed anywhere on the Nutanix Cluster, but Nutanix CVM will always ensure that at any time the data needed for that Desktop VM is always stored and ready to be accessed on the host where that Desktop VM is running. This helps to ensure the highest data access and performance for Desktop VDI.

Data Locality is a standout feature of Nutanix that delivers the highest performance for VDI solutions or any applications that require high workloads.

7. NATIVE DISASTER RECOVERY AND REPLICATION

This is also a prominent feature of Nutanix, providing the ability to synchronize and backup data from different sites and branches. Nutanix provides Data Recovery (DR) and Data Protection solutions and integrates with VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) to ensure applications operate everywhere.

Nutanix has the ability to synchronize backups at the byte-level (file level) instead of at the block level like other solutions. It offers many options for synchronously backing up VMs and data as desired. This saves time but also ensures data integrity and availability.

8. LEAF-SPINE NETWORK ARCHITECTURE

Nutanix uses a new network architecture called “leaf-spine” – this is a new model that currently responds well to virtualization systems, big data, cloud… instead of the 3-layer Clos model which is no longer flexible and difficult to expand. A “leaf-spine” architecture has 2 components: an L2 leaf and a L3 spine 40GbE. With this architecture, performance is maintained without reducing bandwidth.

The configuration below provides a scalable “leaf-spine” architecture, providing 20Gb throughput per node to the L2 Leaf and extending 80Gb throughput from each leaf to the spine switch and providing scalability from one Nutanix block to thousands of Nutanix blocks without compromising bandwidth.

9. QUICK DEPLOYMENT AND EASY MANAGEMENT

Traditional DC systems are often quite complicated to manage and deploy due to having too many separate systems such as server, storage, network, hypervisor…

Nutanix Virtual Computing Platform enables mass virtual machines to be created and deployed in just a few hours without any complex storage configuration or network integration requirements.

With a single management interface, providing a professional manager for both the server; storage system and detailed operations inside the virtualization system.

Nutanix with Software defined architecture does not take any downtime for upgrading, updating and providing an overview for administrators whether the system has a few dozen users or tens of thousands of users, all managed on a single interface.