What is Nutanix storage?

Exploring Nutanix Storage: Understanding the Storage Capabilities of Nutanix.

Nutanix offers a distributed storage system as part of its hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) solution. Nutanix storage is designed to provide scalable, high-performance, and resilient storage capabilities to support various workloads. Here's an overview of Nutanix storage and its key features:

1. Software-Defined Storage: Nutanix storage follows a software-defined storage (SDS) approach, where storage functions are abstracted from the underlying hardware. This enables organizations to leverage commodity hardware and scale their storage infrastructure independently from compute resources. Nutanix software, known as the Nutanix Distributed File System (NDFS), aggregates local storage resources across multiple nodes into a single, shared storage pool.

2. Distributed Architecture: Nutanix storage operates in a distributed architecture, where data is spread across multiple nodes in a cluster. Each node contributes storage capacity, processing power, and networking capabilities. This distributed approach ensures high availability, fault tolerance, and scalability. Data redundancy techniques like replication and erasure coding are employed to protect against hardware failures and data loss.

3. Hybrid and All-Flash Storage: Nutanix supports both hybrid storage configurations, combining traditional hard disk drives (HDDs) with solid-state drives (SSDs), and all-flash storage configurations that utilize SSDs exclusively. This flexibility allows organizations to choose the storage configuration that best suits their performance and capacity requirements.

4. Data Locality and Tiering: Nutanix employs data locality techniques to optimize storage performance. Frequently accessed data is stored on local SSDs within each node, minimizing latency and maximizing throughput. Additionally, Nutanix offers intelligent data tiering, automatically moving less frequently accessed data to higher-capacity storage tiers, such as HDDs or external storage, while keeping frequently accessed data on faster SSDs.

5. Compression and Deduplication: Nutanix storage incorporates data reduction techniques like compression and deduplication. Compression reduces the size of data blocks, optimizing storage capacity utilization. Deduplication eliminates redundant data by identifying and storing only unique data blocks. These techniques help minimize storage footprint, lower costs, and improve overall efficiency.

6. Data Protection and Replication: Nutanix provides built-in data protection features. Organizations can create snapshots to capture point-in-time copies of their data, enabling fast and efficient backups and recovery. Nutanix also supports replication between Nutanix clusters, allowing organizations to replicate data to remote sites for disaster recovery purposes.

7. Integrated Management: Nutanix storage is seamlessly integrated into the Nutanix HCI platform, providing a unified management experience. The Nutanix Prism management interface allows administrators to monitor, provision, and manage storage resources through a centralized dashboard. This streamlined management simplifies storage operations and enhances overall infrastructure efficiency.

8. Integration with Virtualization: Nutanix storage integrates tightly with popular virtualization platforms such as VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, and Nutanix AHV. This integration allows for granular control and management of virtual machine storage, including features like live migration, VM-level snapshots, and cloning.

Nutanix storage offers organizations a flexible, scalable, and high-performance storage solution within their hyperconverged infrastructure. With its distributed architecture, data locality, data reduction techniques, and integrated management, Nutanix storage simplifies storage management, enhances performance, and provides the foundation for running a wide range of workloads in a virtualized environment.