As a System Administrator, your life is full of exciting and interesting challenges, right? While that may have been why we originally embarked on a career of IT work, the reality is that most of our work is repetitive and not very exciting. One good example of this is file servers. While system administrators generally deal with block storage for virtualization or Database workloads, they also have the responsibility to serve users’ need for file sharing. In the past that would require setting up some sort of file server, carving storage up on the backend, and then making it highly available and resilient to loss. These tasks often fell into the “repetitive and boring” category for most administrators. But what if there was an easier way?
There are a number of things you want to build into your file servers.
- Simple. Simple infrastructure comes with many benefits. Easy to understand, easy to protect, less likely to fail, and if it does, easy to fix.
- Scalable. This is necessary because you don’t want to have to re-engineer your infrastructure because you have a need for more space.
- Easy to Protect. You want to be able to protect your files, preferably with the platform you are already using. You want to do it quickly, efficiently, and simply. Something Rubrik can help with- more on this in a bit.
- Available. What good is a file server if it is not doing its job, serving files? You want your files to be available to your users or services with as little downtime as possible.
Rubrik’s CDM solution (Cloud Data Management) was built with an API-first approach so it is easy to automate basic tasks. But if you do decide to do things with a more hands on approach, Rubrik’s UI is based on HTML5 and is extremely simple and intuitive to use. So how does it work with Nutanix Files? Simple.
I won’t go into how to create the Nutanix Files share here, but you can see the share I have created “SMBTest” in the screenshot below. This is just an SMB share, although Nutanix Files also supports NFS shares and shares that are both protocols. One of the things I appreciate with Nutanix Files is the small details, such as telling me the mount path to use for this share.
To protect this share with Rubrik, all we need to do is add a Network Attached Storage (NAS) Host.
You would then assign an SLA Policy just like any other object in Rubrik. If you aren’t already familiar with SLA Policies, they are just one of the reasons why Rubrik is a great solution. Instead of being bogged down with the “how”, Rubrik allows you to concentrate on the “what”. You select what you want Rubrik to protect and how often, and if you want to replicate or archive. Rubrik then does all the background, busy work and makes it happen.
I selected the “Bronze” policy to protect my share, in the screenshot shown.
Using our simple dashboard below, you can see the Rubrik Cluster’s backups of the Nutanix Files share (shown by the blue dots on the dates). You can also see how many snapshots are currently available and the last date a snapshot was taken.
All normal Rubrik features apply here. You can search for individual files in the backup, and archive the backup fileset to Amazon Web Services, Azure, or Google Cloud Platform. Recovery is just as simple. You can download the files to your own machine or to the original location. In the near future we have even closer integration and better efficiency planned with Nutanix’s solutions. To find additional information, please visit us at Rubrik’s Website and see how simple protecting your Nutanix Environment can be.
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