Community Blog

This post was written by Derek Seaman, Customer Success Enterprise Architect, Nutanix Early on in Nutanix’s history we focused on being the best and simplest HCI solution on the market. Market share, customer response and industry analyst feedback prove that we succeeded in that vision. However, Nutanix kept innovating and our vision has evolved into private cloud, hybrid cloud, and a multi-cloud strategy. As the Nutanix product portfolio has expanded our customers and the field have asked for a concise reference architecture clearly showing how all the pieces fit together, guided by best practices. The result of this effort is the Nutanix Private Cloud Reference Architecture. Reference Architecture Contents One of the key sections in the reference architecture is the Design Objectives. All of the subsequent design decisions in the document are based on these Design Objectives. Some Design Objectives for each customer may be different than what we have defined, which in turn may al

This week on the podcast I chat with Sachin Chheda about being ‘Cloud Smart’ what is means, the concept of applications attributes, the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Index and lifecycle management. There is lot in this podcast, so with that let’s join the conversation.   Follow us on Twitter Sachin Chheda - twitter.com/StorSC Dwayne Lessner - twitter.com/dlink7 Angelo Luciani - twitter.com/AngeloLuciani Nutanix Nation - twitter.com/NutanixNation Resources Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Index Building a ‘Cloud Smart’ Strategy for your Applications: Part 1 Building a ‘Cloud Smart’ Strategy for your Applications: Part 2 Nutanix online community - bit.ly/1zJ4aAK Nutanix community blog - bit.ly/2ECb14M Nutanix Customer XTribe - bit.ly/3cMvK61 Nutanix user groups - bit.ly/NutanixUserGroup If you enjoy The Nutanix Community podcast, consider providing a rating and review in iTunes or your podcasting platform of choice. It helps people find the show easier and will help me make improvemen

This post was authored by Rebeca Kinslow, from our content marketing team Wondering what people are doing to stay engaged during quarantine? Here’s a hint: One British book retailer reported a 400% rise in online sales week on week at the end of March... and they aren’t the only ones seeing these massive book sale upticks. Reading has become a staple during social distancing restrictions. If you’re looking to join the trend, or just need a new book to add to your list, we’ve got just the thing for you. We asked our customers for their best IT-related book recommendations, and they were so good, we had to share! From boosting emotional intelligence, to the power of morning routines, lessons from baseball, and the power of introverts, these recommended IT reads have something for everyone. Check out the top 10 book recommendations from your fellow IT professionals: Has your screen time been waaaay up lately, author Cal Newport thinks so? Accept the invitation to reconsider social

In the first post in this series I compared the actual Usable Capacity between Nutanix ADSF vs VMware vSAN on the same hardware. We saw approximately 30-40% more usable capacity delivered by Nutanix. Next we compared Deduplication & Compression technologies where we learned Nutanix has outright capacity efficiency, flexibility, resiliency and performance advantages over vSAN. Then we looked at Erasure Coding where we learned the Nutanix implementation (called EC-X) is both dynamic & flexible by balancing performance and capacity efficiencies in real time. Next we switched it up and discussed how both solutions can scale capacity & we learned while vSAN has numerous constraints which make scaling less attractive, Nutanix allows customers to scale storage capacity by adding individual drives, HCI node/s or storage only nodes without manual intervention. But all these advantages Nutanix has over vSAN don’t mean a thing unless the platform is also highly resilient to failures.

This week on the podcast Dwayne chats with Mike McGhee Technical Marketing Engineer about our upcoming release of AOS 5.17 and some of the new features - like Sync support for AHV, NearSync for Support for Metro (ESXi), network segmentation for replication and much more. There is lots to get excited about in this release, enjoy this episode! I hope you and your family are safe. Lets do what we can to help those in our local communities.   Follow us on Twitter Mike McGheeDwayne LessnerAngelo LucianiNutanix Nation Resources Nutanix online communityNutanix community blogXTribeNutanix user groups If you enjoy The Nutanix Community podcast, consider providing a rating and review in iTunes or your podcasting platform of choice. It helps people find the show easier and will help me make improvements in the series by seeing what you have to say. Subscribe to the podcast using iTunes, Spotify or Google

This post was authored by Devon Helms, Director of Product Marketing - Storage Services Simplicity is included with Nutanix Files out of the box. Sometimes that means making management and administrative tasks easier so that application and use case owners can self-manage file storage. Other times it means extending control to end users and empower self-service. In a world where more people are working remotely, self-service becomes even more important as the remote user may not have ready access to office resources. A great example of this is the self-service restore feature of Nutanix Files. Nobody is perfect, we all make mistakes. When it comes to a mistake such as damaging or deleting files accidentally, the ability to rapidly recover a known good copy of the file can prevent a minor annoyance from becoming a major problem. Typically recovering a file would require the involvement of trouble tickets, storage or backup administrators, and hours or days of wait time. But with Nutanix

This post was authored by Dwayne Lessner, Principal Technical Marketing Engineer AOS 5.17 in my mind should be officially named the “Disaster Recovery” release. This release provides many great updates for customers using Nutanix Leap: DR orchestration to keep their business running. This release gives more flexibility to protection topologies, reduces system overhead, gives users more choice and reduces recovery point objective times. Single Prism Central Support In past releases in order to perform DR orchestration between two different sites you would have to have Prism Central (PC) at each location forming an availability zone. An availability zone in Nutanix is what one PC manages as a fault domain. This makes good sense in large environments if you were to failover, you would still need a management plane to initiate the action. For smaller sites that want to utilize leap for deploying a PC VM at each site can take of a lot of resources. So now with 5.17 you can replicate between

This post was authored by Laura Jordana Technical Marketing Engineer, Nutanix We are excited to introduce Nutanix Test Drive 2.1, which now allows you to test drive Xi Leap, our easy to use, no-install, Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) solution. Nutanix Test Drive is a way for you to try out the Nutanix platform easily, through your web browser. Recently, we announced our new and improved Test Drive 2.0 running on Google Cloud Platform, which showcases 3 areas of the Nutanix portfolio - managing your virtual infrastructure with Prism and AOS, monitoring and planning with Prism Pro, and easily deploying and publishing applications with Calm. For more details, click here. With Test Drive 2.1, we have introduced a new tile, My Recovery, which allows you to explore Xi Leap. Xi Leap is natively integrated with AOS and Prism and utilizes Xi Cloud, Nutanix’s subscription-based public cloud services platform that features guaranteed SLAs. Test Drive 2.1 With DRaaS You can get started wit

This week is another quick take, and I chat with Chad Dorr, senior system administrator at a healthcare provider and also a Nutanix Technology champion and Nutanix user group champion. We talk about VDI using Citrix, challenges or surprises that the current COVID19 situation has raised and how he is generally dealing with the new distributed workforce. As I mentioned last week on the podcast, I hope you and your family are safe. Lets do what we can to help those in our local communities.   Follow us on Twitter Chad Dorr - twitter.com/thorenx Angelo Luciani - twitter.com/AngeloLuciani Nutanix Nation - twitter.com/NutanixNation Resources Nutanix online community - bit.ly/1zJ4aAK Nutanix community blog - bit.ly/2ECb14M XTribe - https://joinxtribe.influitive.com Nutanix user groups - bit.ly/NutanixUserGroup   If you enjoy The Nutanix Community podcast, consider providing a rating and review in iTunes or your podcasting platform of choice. It helps people find the show easier and will hel

This week on the podcast we have a Nutanix Technology Champion round table discussion. We have community members Mike Dent, Wouter Kursten, Rene Bigler, Dave Strum and Timon Watson. We wanted to share some thought on working from home, tips to consider, supporting customers from home, what has worked and rapidly scaling infrastructure to meet the growing work from home demand.   Follow us on Twitter Mike Dent - twitter.com/mikedent13 Wouter Kursten - twitter.com/Magneet_nl Rene Bigler - twitter.com/dready73 Dave Strum - twitter.com/Strumbelievable Timon Watson Angelo Luciani - twitter.com/AngeloLuciani Nutanix Nation - twitter.com/NutanixNation Resources Nutanix's Response to COVID-19 - is.gd/NVrZWn Nutanix online community - bit.ly/1zJ4aAK Nutanix community blog - bit.ly/2ECb14M XTribe - joinxtribe.influitive.com/ Nutanix user groups - bit.ly/NutanixUserGroup If you enjoy The Nutanix Community podcast, consider providing a rating and review in iTunes or your podcasting platform of cho

This blog was authored by Sachin Chheda, Rodney Fite, and Pat Heinrich This blog is a continuation of the discussion on infrastructure and cloud choices. This is the second of the two-part blog series. In the first blog of the series, we covered the approaches for IT and applications teams to align their apps and services to infrastructure/cloud choices. This second blog of the two-part series will cover how various options for infrastructure and cloud align with the different application attributes. Let’s start with a quick recap of the IT infrastructure and cloud choices. Traditional infrastructure — Servers and storage with network connectivity that may or may not leverage virtualization. However, traditional infrastructure lacks basic cloud tenets. Cloud — Infrastructure, Platform, or Software delivered ‘as-a-Service’ to end-users with a mechanism to provision, use or consume, and meter for reporting or chargeback. This includes an extensive set of APIs and other hooks for automati

This Post was authored by Fred Feirn Digital Photography and Graphic Design Teacher Serving nearly 9,000 students, the White Bear Lake Area School District is at the forefront of educational excellence. We believe technology can do more than simply improve course delivery. It can transform the way courses are taught, and how students learn, by providing access to education anytime, anywhere, on any device. One of our most successful initiatives has been our 1:1 technology program, implemented four years ago. Each student was given a Chromebook to use throughout the school year, enabling them to work on course curricula at school and away from campus. My courses of Digital Photography and Graphic Design were historically taught in a classroom with networked computers. As the popularity of social media and photography grew, more students became interested in photography techniques, and enrollment in my classes expanded. The class also met the state art standard for high school graduat

Welcome back to the podcast, this week is another Nutanix QuickTake with Danielle Tomakin and Christie Vaughan. Today we talk about Nutanix user groups and Xtribe. These are two great community programs that connect you to the broader Nutanix community.   Follow us on Twitter Christie Vaughan - twitter.com/ChristayVaughan Danielle Tomakin - twitter.com/TomakinDanielle Angelo Luciani - twitter.com/AngeloLuciani Nutanix Nation - twitter.com/NutanixNation Resources Nutanix online community - bit.ly/1zJ4aAK Nutanix community blog - bit.ly/2ECb14M Xtribe - https://customerxtribe.influitive.com/ Nutanix user groups - bit.ly/NutanixUserGroup If you enjoy The Nutanix Community podcast, consider providing a rating and review in iTunes or your podcasting platform of choice. It helps people find the show easier and will help me make improvements in the series by seeing what you have to say. Subscribe to the podcast using iTunes, Spotify or Google  

One of the ways I learn is by joining webinars. Even if its technology that might not be on my radar at the moment, I make the time to engage in discussions and learn about 'what’s new' or learn 'new ways' to do things. This month we have a number of really interesting webinars available. Join one or join them all, one thing is for sure, you will come away more knowledgeable! Check out these webinars; Simple, Affordable, No-Install Disaster Recovery: That’s Xi Leap Mar 4, 2020, 10:00 AM PT Businesses are increasingly dependent upon IT for competitive advantage while threats against IT are ever-increasing. Business-critical applications have become the lifeblood of the enterprise even though the gap is widening between this reliance on IT services and a company’s ability to protect it. The cost of building and maintaining a secondary datacenter for disaster protection is sometimes cost-prohibitive. Coddling together a patchwork of legacy technologies is often the best some companies can

In this series, we’ve learned Nutanix provides more usable Capacity along with greater capacity efficiency, flexibility, resiliency and performance when using Deduplication & Compression as well as Erasure Coding. We’ve also learned Nutanix provides far easier and superior storage scalability and greatly reduces the impact from Drive failures. We then switched gears and covered heterogeneous cluster support and learned how critical this is to an HCI platform’s ability to scale and deliver a strong ROI without rip and replace or the creation of silos. In this part of the blog series, we cover each product’s I/O Path for write operations with mirroring (a.k.a FTT1 for vSAN and RF2 for Nutanix). I will be publishing a separate detailed comparison between deploying software-defined storage “In-Kernel” vs “Controller VM”, this post will focus on how the traffic traverses and utilises the cluster. Let’s assume a brand new 4 node cluster for both vSAN and Nutanix ADSF and a single VM with

In this series, we’ve learned Nutanix provides more usable Capacity along with greater capacity efficiency, flexibility, resiliency and performance when using Deduplication & Compression as well as Erasure Coding. We’ve also learned Nutanix provides far easier and superior storage scalability and has greatly reduce impact from Drive failures. In this part, we cover heterogeneous cluster support as this is critical to an HCI platform's ability to scale and ensure ever changing customer requirements are being met/exceeded. Hardware capacity/performance continues to advance at a great pace if customers are forced to use uniform (homogeneous) clusters it will likely result in a higher TCO and slower ROI. That’s bad enough but it also means customers will not get to take advantage of the performance and density advantages of newer hardware without creating silos which lead to more inefficiency. After all we don’t want to be in the same position where we need to “rip and replace” hardwar

In the first post in this series, I compared the actual Usable Capacity between Nutanix ADSF vs VMware vSAN on the same hardware. We saw approximately 30-40% more usable capacity delivered by Nutanix. Next, we compared Deduplication & Compression technologies where we learned Nutanix has outright capacity efficiency, flexibility, resiliency and performance advantages over vSAN. Then we looked at Erasure Coding where we learned the Nutanix implementation (called EC-X) is both dynamic & flexible by balancing performance and capacity efficiencies in real-time. vSAN, on the other hand, has a rudimentary “All or nothing” approach which can lead to higher front end impact and does not dynamically apply Erasure Coding to the most suitable data. Now let’s learn how both platforms can scale storage capacity: Here we see from a typical “tick-box” comparison that both platforms can add individual drives or additional nodes to scale capacity. As you’ve probably gathered from my previous f

In part 1 of Deduplication & Compression Comparison – Nutanix ADSF vs VMware vSAN, we talked about data reduction/efficiency technologies which apply further storage capacity efficiencies to the usable capacity. In part 2, we’ll look deeper at how, when and where the data reduction takes place. The following table shows the storage tiers the data reduction technologies are supported for both products: vSAN data reduction technologies are NOT applied in the high performance “cache” tier whereas they are with Nutanix where in-line compression for writes is on by default and Deduplication is supported. With vSAN, Deduplication and Compression are only applied once the data is cold and de-staged to the capacity tier. Going back to the reference I made earlier that VMware has consistently been saying that they do not support data reduction on hybrid intentionally for performance reasons. It begs the question then why they do not apply these valuable technologies to their “all-flash” cac

In a recent post, I compared the actual Usable Capacity between Nutanix ADSF vs VMware vSAN on the same hardware. We saw approximately 30-40% more usable capacity delivered by Nutanix. Next up we compared Deduplication & Compression technologies where we learned Nutanix has outright capacity efficiency, flexibility, resiliency and performance advantages over vSAN. Now we’ll look into Erasure Coding which is another valuable and proven technology that can drive further capacity and potentially performance efficiencies, complimentary to Deduplication and Compression. As I’ve highlighted in the previous articles, “Tick-Box” style slides commonly lead to incorrect assumptions for critical architectural/sizing considerations such as capacity, resiliency and performance. This problem is also applicable to Erasure Coding, Let me give you a simple example: The above table shows Erasure Coding / RAID 5&6 are supported by Nutanix and VMware vSAN. With this information, customers/partners

In a recent post, I compared the actual Usable Capacity between Nutanix ADSF vs VMware vSAN on the same hardware and we saw approx 30-40% more usable capacity delivered by Nutanix. The next logical step is to compare data reduction/efficiency technologies that apply further storage capacity efficiencies to the usable capacity. In the previous post, I declared “a wash” between the two products for the sake of simplifying the usable capacity comparison. However, the reality is it’s not a wash as the Nutanix platform has the ability to deliver more usable capacity from the same HW. Combine that with a superior storage layer in the form of the Acropolis Distributed Storage Fabric (ADSF) which compliments data reduction technologies, vSAN is bringing a spoon to a gunfight. In this post, we’ll look at Deduplication and Compression. Data reduction technologies such as Compression, Deduplication are proven technologies that provide varying levels of value to customers depending on their datase

When considering Hyper-converged (HCI) products, often vendors, partners, value-added resellers & customers compare multiple solutions which of course makes perfect sense. During these comparisons, marketing material, in many cases “Tick-Box” style slides being compared and worse still being taken on face value which can lead to incorrect assumptions for critical architectural/sizing considerations such as capacity, resiliency and performance. Let me give you a simple example: A customer chooses/needs 16 nodes to meet their requirements and they choose the most popular form factor being a 4 node per 2 rack unit (4N2U) for the density, power efficiency and high performance. The nodes are populated with 6 x 1.92TB drives (All-Flash) as the cost of flash was justified for their use case/s. So we’re left with 16 hosts * 6 drives = 96 total drives 96 x 1.92TB drives with a formatted capacity of ~ 1.78TB = 170.88TB Then the customer compares vSAN and Nutanix which both use replication as

To fully experience a conference is to get immersed in it, and one way to do this is to be a speaker. This is a great way to build your personal brand and get out of your comfort zone and share with the community the cool things you have been able to achieve. Show your passion for solving IT bottlenecks to the world! We are looking for industry go-getters to speak at our upcoming .NEXT conference in Chicago and we think you’d be the perfect fit for  one of our speakers! Take center stage and build up your brand by leading your very own session at one of the world’s leading tech conferences. If selected you will have a 30-minute session dedicated to the topic of your choice during the main event AND you will also receive: A complimentary conference pass 2 nights hotel accommodation in Chicago covered by Nutanix A session owner to guide you through the process Professional speaker coaching from our award winning coach Feedback on presentation content Professional services for Powerpoint

This post was authored by Gabe Contreras, Enterprise Architect Nutanix When discussing big data architectures, we are talking about how data is taken in, processed and consumed.  This constitutes your big data pipeline.  The architecture can vary greatly.  For instance, take one of the most common architectures with Lambda, you have a speed processing and batch processing sides.  Speed processing is more real time analytics and querying. Batch processing takes longer and is normally done at scheduled times for taking a deeper look over a longer period of time. The components to build this vary greatly, it can be a choose your own adventure book with how you build your pipeline.  Some of the components used are Kafka, Hadoop, Spark, Elasticsearch and Cassandra.  All of these systems have one main thing in common, they are highly scalable.  These components can grow in size as your needs grow to be able to handle large data flows.  This scalable nature is what also makes Nutanix Enterpri

This post was authored by Mike McGhee Technical Marketing Engineer at Nutanix The Ever-Expanding Universe of DataFrom enterprise applications to the internet of things (IoT), the number of connected devices which produce data is growing at a staggering rate. Business Insider forecasts that by 2020 more than 24 billion internet-connected devices will be installed around the globe [1]. It’s no wonder analysts from IDC predict that by 2025 the world will produce 175 zettabytes of data, a tenfold increase from what was generated in 2016 [2]. The vast majority of this data is forecast to be unstructured. While much of this unstructured data will reside within Object Storage based services, a large amount, and likely the most actively accessed, will reside in network attached storage (NAS) leveraging the SMB and NFS protocols within datacenters. Traditional systems with their inherent limits on managing unstructured data at scale will be unable to handle the coming data explosion.

This post was authored by Lauren Willard Nutanix We already know that Nutanix built hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) to solve datacenter complexity issues. But you may not be aware that we also have our own virtualization offering, AHV (it’s not an acronym, I checked). AHV was created to further reduce complexity issues around virtualization and HCI. It’s the answer to merging and converging virtualization and is a crucial part of HCI. You can either bolt on a hypervisor or choose to have it integrated and built into your HCI product to gain additional benefits without the extra cost and time it takes to add it to your infrastructure. Integrating virtualization into HCI infrastructure allows you to be more application focused making your infrastructure more service-based. What are you paying for? While you can use other virtualization solutions with our HCI, you may be paying for it unnecessarily. Nutanix includes a license to use AHV on our HCI platform at no additional cost,