Nutanix Eliminates Need for Network Storage

According to Nutanix CEO Dheeraj Pandey, the Nutanix Complete Cluster consolidates server and storage resources into a single tier, which serves to dramatically improve I/O performance when compared to a storage area network (SAN).

Pandey says that rise of 10Gb Ethernet interfaces coupled with low-cost Flash memory in the form of a solid-state drive (SSD) creates an opportunity to deliver access to shared storage resources on a server without having to add I/O overhead in the form of network latency.

The Nutanix Complete Cluster can dynamically dedicate storage resources to any virtual machine or guest operating system running on top of the virtual machine, said Pendey.

Borrowing data center design concepts pioneered by Google, the Nutanix technology comes packaged in the form of a Nutanix Complete Block, a 2U unit containing four x86 nodes. Each Complete Block contains 8 Intel Xeon processors and 192 GB RAM that can be upgraded to 768 GB to run virtual machines along with 1.3 TB of Fusion-io memory, 1.2 TB of SATA SSD and 20TB of SATA drives.

Each node in a Nutanix Complete Block runs a VMware ESXi hypervisor, and Pandey says the whole system can be deployed in about 30 minutes. Pandey adds that Nutanix Complete Cluster supports VMware’s vMotion, High Availability (HA) and Dynamic Resource Scheduling (DRS) tools, along with VM cloning, capacity optimization and converged backup for instant backup and recovery of virtual machine data without requiring external backup appliances.

List pricing for the Nutanix Complete Cluster starts at $75,000.