Nutanix, a leading provider of hyper-efficient, massively scalable and elegantly simple datacenter infrastructure solutions, today introduced the latest version of its intelligent software, Nutanix OS (NOS) 3.5. The new release highlights the company’s commitment to bringing unmatched innovations in performance, scalability and user experience to provide IT managers with a new, more robust platform for building and operating virtual datacenters.
Throughout enterprise datacenters, virtualization densities continue to increase, outpacing hardware investments, compromising application performance and driving the need for greater storage capacity. While the addition of high-speed flash to server infrastructures has yielded incremental benefits, a completely new, software-driven approach is now required. NOS 3.5 delivers an intelligent architecture that understands data access patterns to adaptively manage storage utilization in real-time and applies inline technologies to accelerate application performance. This differentiated approach is applied across all storage tiers providing unmatched resource elasticity. All Nutanix customers can seamlessly upgrade to NOS 3.5, eliminating expensive hardware refreshes and realizing a much faster time to value than hardware-driven approaches.
“The release of Nutanix OS 3.5 represents a significant step forward in datacenter infrastructure,” said Rajiv Mirani, vice president of engineering, Nutanix. “The combination of accelerated performance, advanced storage optimization and consumer-like management will change long-held expectations about what is possible with converged infrastructure technologies and further accelerate market adoption.”
Introducing the Nutanix Elastic Deduplication Engine
NOS 3.5 includes an innovative addition — the Nutanix Elastic Deduplication Engine — ground-breaking deduplication technology that accelerates application performance and increases effective storage capacity for virtual datacenters. The industry’s first deduplication technology to span memory, flash and hard disk drive (HDD) resources simultaneously in any storage offering or converged infrastructure platform, the Nutanix Elastic Deduplication Engine is built specifically for scale-out architectures to accelerate performance while enabling large clusters with the best economics.
The Nutanix Elastic Deduplication Engine continuously analyzes read I/O access patterns and granularly deduplicates data to deliver the highest possible performance and to maximize effective storage capacity. For applications with large working sets, such as virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) deployments, the technology increases effective flash and memory resources by up to 10x and delivers nearly instantaneous application response times. Additionally, Nutanix is also announcing plans to extend the technology to optimize the storage of “cold data” on HDDs in an upcoming 2013 release.
“We use the Nutanix Virtual Computing Platform to build portable datacenters to provide testing and education services in Asia and the Middle East,” said Jean-Manuel Becker, director of IT Systems at Pearson, the world’s leading learning company. “Innovations like the new Elastic Deduplication Engine will be powerful for improving the performance of applications and optimizing storage resources. As a software-driven capability, this technology is available to us without having to purchase new hardware.”
“Nutanix pioneered the creation of Hyper-converged solutions that dramatically simplify IT infrastructure, reduce costs and improve manageability,” said Arun Taneja, founder and consulting analyst, Taneja Group. “With NOS 3.5, Nutanix is upping the ante by adding their Elastic Deduplication Engine, which improves the performance of the memory and flash layers with software-driven, inline deduplication technology. This, along with a simplified UI and the availability of Prism API, should propel Nutanix and Hyper-convergence into mainstream enterprise datacenters.”
Advanced Enterprise IT Management — User-Centered Design with Consumer-Like Simplicity
Typically, enterprise IT user interfaces are designed with little attention given to how users actually interact with technology. As a result, even simple management tasks become time consuming, complex and prone to error. With the release of NOS 3.5, Nutanix is introducing Nutanix Prism — a comprehensive management framework, including a completely new interface that simplifies user experience and a REST-based API enabling Nutanix to be easily integrated into enterprise or cloud management systems.
With the new Prism UI, all system and VM information is organized and presented to facilitate easy consumption for immediate insights and actions. Elegant touch points provide an at-a-glance view of server, storage and network operations to eliminate searching through multiple screens to find critical information and built-in analytics to provide event correlation and make troubleshooting simple. In addition, Prism UI is built from the ground up using HTML5 to support nearly any device, giving managers greater mobility and easier access to core infrastructure. The Prism API, which includes a rich explorer for simple and discrete sampling of individual API commands, allows all reporting and management functionality to be programmatically accessed in a cloud orchestration management system, such as OpenStack and VMware vCloud Automation Center.
The NOS 3.5 release packages more than 75 additional enhancements, including the extension of compression to the native Nutanix Disaster Recovery feature for unmatched capacity optimization, and the introduction of a Storage Replication Adapter (SRA) for VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM). The SRA allows customers to leverage their existing investment in VMware SRM to manage Nutanix VM-centric disaster recovery policies.
Pricing, Availability and Resources
Nutanix OS 3.5 including the Elastic Deduplication Engine is available at no cost to all Nutanix customers with current maintenance agreements. For more specifics on availability, please contact an authorized Nutanix partner or send an inquiry to [email protected].
About Nutanix
Nutanix provides datacenter infrastructure solutions that are hyper-efficient, massively scalable and elegantly simple. The award-winning Nutanix Virtual Computing Platform has disrupted the market by seamlessly and natively converging compute and storage in a single appliance. Headquartered in San Jose, Calif. with offices and authorized solution providers throughout the world, Nutanix is privately held and backed by top-tier VC firms.