Items Tagged: Block+Storage

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Pivot 3

The value and benefits of IP SANs are clear and unchallenged. IP SANs leverage already ubiquitous Ethernet technology as the transport for delivering storage networking to a wider class of companies and applications than previously economically possible. As a result, companies without dedicated storage administrators or expensive Fibre Channel infrastructure have a viable alternative to direct attached storage.

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LeftHand Networks

The Small Medium Enterprise (SME) market is on the cusp of a significant storage infrastructure upgrade cycle. The current local and direct attach disk paradigm cannot persist indefinitely. Many of these SME firms are grappling with the same infrastructure challenges, such as data protection, disaster recovery planning, regulatory compliance, and consolidation that have buffeted the Global 2000 enterprises over the past five years. Yet, they are finding that the solutions used by those enterprises are too complex and costly for them to deploy.

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Nutanix XCP For Demanding Enterprise Workloads: Making Infrastructure Invisible for Tier-1 Ent. Apps

Virtualization has matured and become widely adopted in the enterprise market. Approximately three in every five physical servers are deployed in a virtualized environment. After two waves of virtualization, it is safe to assume that a high percentage of business applications are running in virtualized environments. The applications last to deploy into the virtualized environment were considered the tier-1 apps. Examples of these include CRM and ERP environments running SAP NetWeaver, Oracle database and applications, and Microsoft SQL Server. In many 24X7 service industries, Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint are also considered tier-1 applications.

The initial approach to building virtualized environments that can handle these tier-1 applications was to build highly tuned infrastructure using best of breed three-tier architectures where compute, storage and networking were selected and customized for each type of workload. Newer shared storage systems have increasingly adopted virtualized all flash and hybrid architectures, which has allowed organizations to mix a few tier-1 workloads within the same traditional infrastructure and still meet stringent SLA requirements.

Enter now the new product category of enterprise-capable HyperConverged Infrastructure (HCI). With HCI, the traditional three-tier architecture has been collapsed into a single software-based system that is purpose-built for virtualization. In these solutions, the hypervisor, compute, storage, and advanced data services are integrated into an x86 industry-standard building block. These modern scale-out hyperconverged systems combine a flash-first software-defined storage architecture with VM-centric ease-of-use that far exceeds any three-tier approach on the market today. These attributes have made HCI very popular and one of the fastest growing product segments in the market today.

HCI products have been very popular with medium sized companies and specific workloads such as VDI or test and development. After a few years of hardening and maturity, are these products ready to tackle enterprise tier-1 applications?  In this paper we will take a closer look at Nutanix Xtreme Computing Platform (XCP) and explore how its capabilities stack up to tier-1 application workload requirements.

Nutanix was a pioneer in HCI and is widely considered the market and visionary leader of this rapidly growing segment. Nutanix has recently announced the next step - a vision of the product beyond HCI. With this concept they plan to make the entire virtualized infrastructure invisible to IT consumers. This will encompass all three of the popular hypervisors: VMware, Hyper-V and their own Acropolis Hypervisor. Nutanix has enabled app mobility between different hypervisors, a unique concept across the converged system and HCI alike. This Solution Profile will focus on the Nutanix XCP platform and key capabilities that make it suitable for teir-1 enterprise applications. With the most recent release, we have found compelling features appropriate for most tier-1 application workloads. Combined with the value proposition of web-scale modular architecture this provides an easy pathway to data-center transformation that businesses of all sizes should take advantage of.