Nutanix extends storage offerings to its hybrid cloud platform

Nutanix announced new hybrid cloud capabilities for its unstructured data storage offerings, Objects and Files. With these advanced features, Nutanix customers can now deploy an easy-to-use, scale out storage fabric across their different cloud environments to simplify data management and effectively manage costs – moving IT teams ever closer to a true hybrid cloud operating model.

These storage-focused enhancements build on the recent launch of Nutanix Clusters, which supports Nutanix’s hyperconverged infrastructure software running in AWS and, in the future, Microsoft Azure. The company continues to enable its technology to run in any cloud, while embracing a common operating model to streamline IT management and provide organizations the flexibility to run every application in the cloud of their choice.

“IT teams around the world are quickly moving to hybrid environments and they’re looking for technology solutions to help them facilitate this transition, to help them manage disparate technologies and simplify operations,” said Rajiv Mirani, Chief Technology Officer at Nutanix. “We recently extended our hyperconverged infrastructure software to public cloud with the launch of Nutanix Clusters to help companies do just that. Now the focus is on strengthening the overall platform, including delivering an easy-to-use, scale out storage fabric across their different cloud environments.”

Specifically, the new features offer customers the following:

• Cloud Tiering for Objects Storage: Nutanix Objects can now deliver tiering of object data to an S3-compatible object store, including cloud storage such as AWS S3. This helps enable customers to lower the cost of long-term storage and archival by taking advantage of public cloud infrastructure. This new intelligent tiering capability will also significantly improve data lifecycle management across different clouds, while still maintaining visibility and control, as metadata is retained on-premises for easier search and retrieval. Customers can use any S3-compatible target as a tier to Nutanix Objects.
• Hybrid Cloud File Storage: Nutanix Files is now generally available to run in public clouds through Nutanix Clusters. A true hybrid cloud file storage solution, Nutanix Files now delivers a unified experience, along with simplified single-pane management, across cloud deployment modes, spanning the edge, remote offices, and core data centers, and public cloud. This provides customers with the flexibility to choose the right cloud, offer easy scalability, and deliver more control over hybrid cloud file storage.
• Simplified Disaster Recovery: Nutanix Objects and Files now deliver improved recovery point objective (RPO) ensuring data is always available across datacenters and clouds in the event of a disaster. Objects now provide streaming replication, with an RPO of just a few seconds, particularly helpful for containerized workloads that can use S3 endpoints for primary storage. This allows enterprises to containerize their mission-critical stateful applications, and ensure business continuity even in the most strenuous of circumstances. Additionally, Nutanix Files now provides support for RPO of up to one minute, compared to one hour previously, which is particularly useful when running enterprise applications using NFS & SMB endpoints.

“As organizations grapple with digital transformation and the move to a true hybrid cloud, they are looking for solutions to help them on this journey. The key capabilities needed to address their challenges are simplicity and uniformity across all deployment locations and across multiple clouds,” said Eric Burgener, Research Vice President, Infrastructure Systems, Platforms and Technologies Group, IDC. “A solution that can provide a single unified experience for data access wherever it lives, like what Nutanix now delivers with Files and Objects, will be the right choice for many organizations.”

In addition to simplifying data storage across clouds, Nutanix delivered increased performance, scale and choice across its storage products. All features are currently available to customers. More information on the new features in Nutanix Files and Objects are available here.