Nutanix touts SAN-free cloud computing performance boost
May 25, 2012
Datacentre infrastructure firm Nutanix has set up a European presence to bring its SAN-less datacentre platform to enterprise customers across Europe, promising to provide better performance in cloud computing and virtualised environments at a reduced cost.
The Nutanix Complete Cluster platform is based around the notion of simplifying storage by using direct attached storage (DAS) connected to each server node in a datacentre, rather than connecting servers to a centralised pool via a storage area network (SAN).
The company is relatively new, coming out of stealth mode only last year, but has now gained a European presence, plus pan-European distribution via SDG, and Kelway as an enterprise reseller in the UK…
While SANs were developed in the days of siloed applications, the modern trend towards virtualisation and cloud computing requires a different approach to storage, according to Nutanix chief executive Dheeraj Pandey.
"Compute logic needs to sit as close to the data as possible, especially so with virtual desktops and big data applications," he told V3.
The Complete Cluster platform is based on commodity x86 server hardware and VMware’s vSphere 5 hypervisor, with a Nutanix software layer called Scale-out Converged Storage (Socs) that manages all the local storage attached to each server as one large storage pool.
However, as well as ensuring that the data for each virtual machine is stored on the host where it is running, the Socs management layer also provides the capabilities that customers would expect from enterprise storage, such as thin provisioning, reliability and high availability.
This architecture provides for performance equal to or better than a SAN installation, at 40 per cent to 60 per cent of the cost, according to Nutanix.
The basic Complete Cluster configuration is a block with just three or four server nodes, each of which is configured with tiered storage internally. This consists of high-speed Fusion-io solid-state storage connected via PCI Express, with standard SSDs and rotating disks forming the lower tiers.
To scale out, customers just add another block, which gives them more compute power, but also expands the available storage pool.
"What we’re saying is, you can start off with just three nodes, and scale out from there as large as you want. You just buy another block as and when you need it," said Pandey.
Blocks are interconnected using standard Ethernet cabling, creating a converged network without the need for technologies such as Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), according to Nutanix.
Currently, Nutanix is providing VMware vSphere as the virtualisation layer, but Pandey said the platform is designed to be hypervisor-agnostic, and will support other options in future, especially Microsoft’s Hyper-V.