In case you missed Part 1 – Part 1: Built For Scale and Agility
No it’s not Billy Gibbons, Dusty Hill, or drummer Frank Beard. It’s Zeus and Zookeeper providing the strong blues that allow the Nutanix Distributed File System to maintain it’s configuration across the entire cluster.
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May
10
Under the Covers of a Distributed Virtual Computing Platform – Part 2: ZZ Top
May
09
Under the Covers of a Distributed Virtual Computing Platform – Part 1: Built For Scale and Agility
Lots of talk in the industry about how had software defined storage first and who was using what components. I don’t want to go down that rat hole since it’s all marketing and it won’t help you at the end of the day to enable your business. I want to really get into the nitty gritty of the Nutanix Distributed Files System(NDFS). NDFS has been in production for over a year and half with good success, take read of the article on the Wall Street Journal.
Below are core services and components that make NDFS tick. There are actually over 13 services, for example our replication is distributed across all the nodes to provide speed and low impact on the system. The replication service is called Cerebro which we will get to in this series.
This isn’t some home grown science experiment, the engineers that wrote the code come from Google, Facebook, Yahoo where this components where invented. It’s important to realize that all components are replaceable or future proofed if you will. The services\libraries provide the API’s so as newest innovations happen in the community, Nutanix is positioned to take advantage.
All the services mentioned above run on multiple nodes in cluster a master-less fashion to provide availability. The nodes talk over 10 GbE and are able to scale in a linear fashion. There is no performance degradation as you add nodes. Other vendors have to use InfiniBand because they don’t share the metadata cross all of the nodes. Those vendors end up putting a full copy of the metadata on each node, this eventually will cause them to hit a performance cliff and the scaling stops. Each Nutanix node acts a storage controller allowing you to do things like have a datastore of 10,000 VM’s without any performance impact.
While the diagram can look a little daunting, rest assured the complexity has been abstracted away for the end user. It’s a radical shift in data center architecture and will be fun breaking it down.
Apr
30
Why Veeam and Nutanix? Fast, Low Impact, Results
* Nutanix is able to sense traffic patterns and can prevent flooding the high performance tier with replication
* Both offer top class Time to Value. With Nutanix’s ability to go from shrink wrapped to production in 1 hr or less paired with easy to setup replication from Veeam. Remote sites can be easily sprung up. Set and forget.
* IT teams don’t have double the time to setup DR facilities. Veeam gives the ability to provide replication from legacy storage arrays to the Nutanix Complete Cluster
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Apr
08
Nutanix in 2 Mintues
Other Game Changing Features:
Dec
03
Nutanix Provides Native Replication & Aids 3rd Party Replication\DR
Today Nutanix publicly launched our new operating system version 3.0 and new hardware. While this a big release for us I want to focus on disaster recovery and more importantly how to get there without blowing the hinges off the bank. More information on NX-3000 Series Hardware and NOS 3.0 can be found here.
Having a disaster recovery plan for most people is like being healthy. You know you should be healthy but you can keep kicking it to the curb because it’s not easy, and both cost more money than the alternatives. We usually only start eating healthy after something bad has happened to us or a loved one. The same is true for IT departments; no one wants to pay for a duplicate datacenter due to cost, staffing and the additional complexity.
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Nov
10
Stargate: A Five Star Chef
I have previously have discussed Medusa and Curator as two of the components that allow the Nutanix Complete Cluster to scale before being hired at Nutanix. After a week and half of technical training I can see why I didn’t even attempt at trying to explain Stargate until now. In training the Stargate section took over two and half hours to nail now it’s inner workings.
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Oct
16
Giving the Google Goodness to the Enterprise
Giving the Google Goodness to the Enterprise in a ultra dense solution. 4 nodes in 2U’s is meh, it’s a game changer when that includes your enterprise storage.
W. Curtis Preston interviews Sudheesh Nair, VP Sales for Nutanix, at VMWorld 2012 Barcelona. They talk about the Nutanix motto of virtualization infrastructure without SAN. SAN and NAS was never designed for virtualization in general. Three things changed recently: Flash, virtualization has become the de facto standard, and x86 has become commodity hardware. Nutanix is bringing those 3 things together and providing an infrastructure for VMWare. They discuss Nutanix’s ability to scale out.
Jun
12
Nutanix: Drop It Like It’s Hot
Nutanix is all in one solution building block for virtualization. It allows you to virtualize your workloads without requiring a SAN. This approach allows for many benefits, such as buy what you need, when you need it and a reduction in complexity around architecture and operations. I see Nutanix as perfect fit for VDI and Cloud workloads. Where there is uncertainty in the workload and large scale is needed, Nutanix can make a great fit.
Below is how their storage works inside of their 2U building blocks that contain 4 separate nodes. The Name of operating system Nutanix runs on is called HOT(Heat Optimized Tiering). The controller VM is the magic sauce of the operation. All the I\O flows through the controller VM. As data is written to the Fusion-IO card and then is serialized. When the data is cold , it will be laid out to disk in a nice clean format.
The SATA SSD is for ESXi, the Controller VM and VM Swap, nothing else gets to live here.
May
23
So Your Boss Thinks You’re Stupid – Converged Infrastructure
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
“Converged infrastructure packages multiple information technology (IT) components into a single, optimized computing solution. Components of a converged infrastructure solution include servers, data storage devices, networking equipment and software for IT infrastructure management, automation and orchestration.”
I am not a converged infrastructure hater. I agree with the value proposition that converged infrastructure brings. VBlock from VCE, FlexPod from the reference architecture of NetApp & Cisco, HP with Cloud Matrix. The afore mentioned converged infrastructure solutions are marketing machines. The big players in this space have strong relationships with their current customer base and are using converged infrastructure as a one stop shopping menu for their gear.
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