Summary of the Nutanix .Next Tour in Frankfurt: Dive into Hyperconverged Infrastructure Day 2


Let me give you some information about my second day on the Nutanix .Next Tour in Frankfurt.
For everybody who missed my first post about the day before the tour you'll find it here:
https://simonscitrix.blogspot.com/2018/02/summary-of-nutanix-next-tour-in.html
This day was the actual day of the Tour. A lot of Nutanix partners had a stand in the showroom and the visitors had the possibilities to take part in hands-on labs and watching demos like from HYCU (see my first Post).
The day started with a keynote and I want to give you a short summary off the topics.

Nutanix 

Nutanix was rated by Gartner as the hyper converged infrastructure leader with a net rate of 90+. I want to say that 70+ is already very good. They have 7k customer in 130 countries, 3k+ employees, 1b+ runrate, $800m+ software.

Nutanix challenge ist o have not a single cloud. They try to offer multiple cloud solutions like public cloud (AWS, azure etc) and combine it with a private cloud for all your mission critical applications and with distributed cloud for all robo,edge and IoT applications.

They always try to improve the performance of their product. Nutanix figured out- the bottleneck is mostly  the hypervisor itself. So they will offer with version 5.5 "AHV Turbo" which removes the bottlenecks with a new type of I/O path were the hypervisor processioning will be bypassed. Let’s say the hypervisor will be taken out of the I/O Path and the media will be streamed directly to the VM.
They also improved their network latency to minimize the effects for IOPs. You have 30% lower single threaded random write latency and over 85% sequential throughput improvement now.
This means a four times performance improvement in 2017 only with Software updates.
You are now also able to protect your data at rest and against drive theft without any new hardware with encryption as a service which is delivered with any Nutanix platform you buy.

The good thing is this solution is FIPS Level 1 validated.

The next big change on core system side is a one-click data protection with a native disaster recovery which allows 0 Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and a less than 1 hour of Recovery Point Objective (RPO). This means 1 click integrated backups and lower costs of replication with a higher level of quality of the replication.

PRISM

Prism Nutanix’s centralized infrastructure management software offers a scaled out one click deployment with on demand scale out 1:1000 VM’s.

With an ease of managing private cloud installation through prism you can automatically scale up when you add nodes and automatically scale down while you remove nodes.
Your management will be made easier with a few new functions like: deploying networks in your private cloud with one click and integrated network provisioning.

One-click micro segmentation which means reconfiguring rules in software stacks and separate networks. Your VM'-s talk with each other without your interaction. No more changes on switches or network required.
More information about Prism:


X-FIT

Also a nice extra will be the machine learning of your Nutanix box. It’s a patent-pending technology called X-Fit. The question was how Nutanix can potent the machine learning in Prism and the answer was:
Automated capacity planning.
You just tell your cluster what you want to build. X-Fit will give you the feedback if you’re set up enough or if you need some more VM’-s, RAM, diskspace and so on. It predicts the hole infrastructure and eliminates inefficiencies through behaviour learning for daily tasks. This means right sized VM’-s for you without “bully” VM’-s.

Acropolis Compute Cloud (AC2)

Nutanix’s own enterprise cloud OS offers an experience similar to the public cloud.
It runs the Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV) on storage less servers forming a compute cloud which get rid of silos in datacenter and can be managed by also by Prism.
It helps you eliminating as many Silos in Datacenters as possible without the need to manage the storage on the nodes with Acropolis object storage services
https://www.nutanix.com/2017/11/08/flexibility-expanded-application-support-compute-cloud/


Nutanix also liberates NFS from Network with Acropolis file services. They have NFS support, one click operations, scale to >1b files and extend to all workload needing NFS.

The aim is to deliver all applications like file services, bare metal apps, virtual workloads, container (docker, kubernetes etc)

Changes on application layer

Great thinks are not only happening or coming on system level. Nutanix has also big plans for the application layer.

They try to make everything one-click ready. You can update your hypervisors independently from their manufacturer. Like XenServer, VMWare, AHV and all other with just one click. And not only the hypervisors. Your Applications, containers and databases shell be ready in near future for the one-click upgrade too.

Calm

With Calm Nutanix provides a application and lifecycle management for Nutanix and public clouds.

Calm allows app driven automation with blueprint on top of your infrastructure.
Calm can go down to the lowest layer of your stack and is able to manage all layers from system up to application layer with one Software stack. That makes calm unique.

It offers a self-service market place where vendors, partners and customer can publish their blueprints. With a blueprint you are able to deploy a software without knowing much about it or reading lots of implementation guide. Every blueprint contains the best practice for this software and shovels them into your environment. You just chose your blueprint and start building your environment form there. All with one click.

More than 30 Partners have already published their blueprint like: Commvault, Bitdefender, Veaam, Citrix, MongoDB just to name a few.


Now we arrived at the last part of the system when you imagine it as a pyramid:

The cloud layer

Nutanix gives you the right cloud for the right workload. It checks your workload and finds out if it is a theme for the elastic cloud (public) or the private cloud and moves the workload between these clouds.
It offers you one click testing and failover and flexible subscription plans. You can enable disaster recovery with a few clicks and create a stack which looks and handles like a public cloud but is a private cloud.

Conclusion

Let me finish now with the rest of the .Next Tour.
Nutanix putted a lot of effort in the get together. After we heard the Keynote and went to lunch we started with hands-on labs. I visited one hands on lab where you learned to deploy Blueprints on Calm which was very interesting and another lab where you learned how to deploy VM’s on Nutanix via Citrix MCS.
It is part of my actual POC so there wasn’t very much new for me and it would have been better to choose another lab.

So all in all it was a great and informative day with Nutanix. For the next time I personally would prefer the hands-on Lab on an extra day. Just one afternoon was too short for me to dive as deep into Calm as I wished I could.

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