What Nutanix really does

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I posted a variation of this on the premium NTNX board, but since I found out about the stock here first, I thought I’d post it here as well:

First, it’s important to understand that the appeal of Nutanix is to replace public cloud usage with Nutanix-run enterprise/private clouds. As Nutanix claims (https://www.nutanix.com/2017/10/09/single-biggest-benefit-en… ) Organizations across the globe are increasingly looking to public cloud – not to reduce infrastructure costs (analyses show cloud is expensive for the predictable workloads that comprise the bulk of applications run in most organizations), but to enhance the ability of the business to react more quickly and effectively to the increasingly dynamic marketplace.

Nutanix provides a way to make enterprise/private clouds as easy to manage as applications in the public clouds, and even be more performant. Nutanix is a software layer on top of existing available software and hardware layers. They call it HCI, which stands for HyperConverged Infrastructure.

Nutanix’s HCI software has two components, which they’ve named Acropolis and Prism. Here’s how Nutanix describes them: Acropolis is a distributed data plane with enterprise storage and virtualization services, and the ability for applications to move seamlessly across hypervisors and in the long run cloud providers. Prism is a distributed management plane that uses advanced data analytics and heuristics to simplify and streamline common workflows, eliminating the need for separate management solutions for servers, storage networks, storage and virtualization.

OK, so maybe you don’t want to play “Buzzword Bingo”. What does that all mean?

From the Acropolis piece you get Distributed Storage. This is what Starrob was attempting to describe. Nutanix replaces the NAS (Network Attached Storage) solutions provided by companies like EMC, HP, NetApp, etc. A NAS is a network that’s dedicated to data storage, independent of the common user network. All nodes on the network have access to all the data in the NAS.

Additionally, Nutanix provides data replication solutions. As the word “replication” implies, this means the data doesn’t just exist in one place, but is copied (replicated) to multiple locations (you can set the number of copies to 2 or 3). This is a safety feature in case of anything from a single drive failure to failure of an entire node. Nutanix also provides for various backup solutions (sometimes known as DR, or Disaster Recover) in which data is copied off of the cluster completely, typically to a different physical location, which may be another cluster or to a public cloud (what they call Cloud Connect. And, as is standard today, to reduce having to purchase 2 or 3 times as much storage as you need, Nutanix supports deduplication and compression technologies.

On top of replication and backup, Nutanix also provides performance advantages for data storage. In what they call Intelligent Tiering, data is placed in an SSD (flash)or HDD (physical spinning drive) tier accordingly, and automatically moves data between the tiers based on usage. I don’t know the details of their algorithm, but typically frequently and/or randomly accessed data would be placed on the faster SSD tier if possible, while large datasets and/or sequentially accessed data would be placed on HDDs.

Finally, in what they call Data Locality, Nutanix attempts to place data on the storage that’s directly attached to the node on which the application is running. This reduces the amount of data that’s transmitted over the network, so is often faster than a traditional NAS, in which all data goes over a network. This is possible because instead of isolating storage onto a separate network through which all data must pass (the NAS solution), typical hardware configurations are that storage remains directly attached to each node. Nutanix tries to have the data for an application running on a node be available directly on that node, but if not, that data is seamlessly provided over the network so the application doesn’t care. This is done by having a Nutanix Controller process (CVM) running on each node in the cluster. These Controller processes talk to each other, so if one node goes down the others step up. And remember, if a node goes down that storage also goes down but thanks to replication that data is still available on the other nodes.

There’s also Shadow Clones in which copied data is read accessible from different VMs or nodes to improve performance. This post is already too long so I won’t get into the details, but having more copies of data increases the odds of it being accessed via direct, local, storage.

This kind of Distributed Storage is nice, but Nutanix is more than just a better file system. Acropolis also contains support for Hypervisors. You may not know what that is. A Hypervisor is software that separates a computer’s Operating System (“OS”) from the underlying physical hardware. Instances of a running OS are called Virtual Machines (VMs), and many VMs can be running at once on a piece of hardware, or on a cluster of nodes (hardware). VMs do their job so convincingly that Applications running in them don’t know the hypervisor exists.

Like people living in The Matrix, an application running inside a VM thinks it’s running directly on real hardware, but it’s really running in a simulation. Yes, at some point there’s real hardware involved (just as people in The Matrix actually have bodies somewhere in the real world), but the real hardware may not look at all like the hardware the applications think it is. VMWare is one company that helps make VMs easy to setup, deploy, and manage for enterprises. They had a great business for a while, but that’s old hat today.

One thing that’s nice about Nutanix’s Acropolis is that it supports not only VMWare’s hypervisor (called vSphere), but also Microsoft’s version, called Hyper-V. Or if you want, Nutanix has its own “free” hypervisor (built on top of the open source Linux KVM hypervisor), which they claim has some advantages, especially around taking advantage of their Distributed Storage solutions, described above. I imagine some customers have already standardized on VMWare or MS virtualization solutions, so it’s good that Nutanix doesn’t require them to change to get onto their platform.

Even more, Nutanix leverages VMs to enable applications and data to be migrated not only between different Nutanix clusters, but from non-Nutanix systems or to/from a public cloud (eg AWS, Azure). You can move within Nutanix systems running different hypervisor implementations as well. Even running VMs can be done “live.”

OK, that’s cool and all, but savvy companies today can piece together a solution involving smart NAS and VMs that’s probably almost as good. But, there are two additional aspects/capabilities that are really compelling.

First is that Nutanix is hardware independent. Sure, you can buy Nutanix hardware for your nodes, but you can also license the software to run on your own hardware.

Second, is how you manage a Nutanix cluster, or system of clusters. This is with their Prism software. As Nutanix says: Prism combines multiple aspects of datacenter management into a single consumer-grade product that lets IT admins manage infrastructure and virtualization, gain access to operational insights, and fix problems all with a few clicks. Just as Acropolis creates a data plane that spans the entire cluster, Prism creates a cluster-wide management plane.

OK, to translate: “consumer-grade product” means that the UI is really intuitive. Not CLIs (Command Line Interfaces), but a true graphical point and click UI with summary dashboards, alerts, and automation. Things like software upgrades are one-click operations that get deployed automatically across the network without downtime (thanks to the redundancies described above). And since it’s all Nutanix, you don’t have separate data upgrades and VM upgrades, etc. There’s some AI in there, with predictive capabilities. In addition, they provide a program called “Prism Central” that helps you manage multiple clusters.

This is big. As I pointed out earlier, Nutanix believes that people turn to AWS or Azure not for price reasons, but for ease of deployment reasons. Setting up an AWS app is easy. Scaling in AWS is easy. Apps can even scale up and down based on demand. And that’s without you buying any hardware, but also, and this is the most important reason according to Nutanix, without you needing to manage it. What Nutanix provides is an easy way to have the advantages of a private cloud (performance and security and cost), with the ease of cloud management.

Where Nutanix is going next is integration with public cloud solutions. They call this Nutanix Xi Cloud Services. Today you can’t instantly run an application on either AWS or your private cloud. You can migrate applications between your Nutanix private cloud and the public clouds, and you can backup your Nutanix cloud to the public cloud. The first available Xi Cloud Service will enable Nutanix customers to set up, manage and test a complete cloud-based DR service in just minutes. Using the same Prism management interface, Nutanix customers can instantly protect their applications and data inline with existing workflows as part of their routine IT operations, avoiding the expense and complexity of a separate DR solution. https://www.nutanix.com/press-releases/2017/06/28/nutanix-re…

Finally, I think one needs to be careful here not to overstate what Nutanix actually does today. Nutanix has some very cool stuff, but they’re promising more in the future in terms of the “hybrid cloud” than they’re actually delivering today. That may mean the company has a big runway of growth, but there’s also risk in if and when they can actually deliver.

Hope this helps explain what Nutanix actually does. You-all can discuss the financials better than I.

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Nutanix replaces the NAS (Network Attached Storage) solutions provided by companies like EMC, HP, NetApp, etc. A NAS is a network that’s dedicated to data storage, independent of the common user network. All nodes on the network have access to all the data in the NAS.

Not HP but HPE (HP Enterprise), which is a separate company split from HP on 2015. NAS is not a network, but a storage appliance shared over network. You have an ability to share, is not same as every node have access to the data.

Now most of the storage solutions, allow you to “replicate, or backup or copy to another location” and also cache data in “memory (SDD)” or move them to hard disk (HDD) based on algorithm, like how frequently used, etc. In a nutshell, these technologies exist for more than a decade and not a true differentiator.

In simpler terms what CVM does is, in a NAS the data is stored in an appliance and shared via network and nutanix improvises it by retaining the copy locally on the server and when needed can pull and push the data from and to the NAS device, this significantly reduces network traffic and reduces the time required to access the data. A further improvisation is “shadow clones”.

I am not trying to nitpick, but getting some of these facts correct is important to understand which market NTNX competes, what is their TAM, who their competitors etc.

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Not HP but HPE (HP Enterprise), which is a separate company split from HP on 2015.

True enough. I might as well similarly point out that my reference to EMC should now really be to Dell.

NAS is not a network, but a storage appliance shared over network.

Yeah, when I wrote A NAS is a network that’s dedicated to data storage, independent of the common user network I meant SAN, which IS a separate network just for storage (historically Fibre Channel). Since NASs provide file level storage and SANs provide block level access, NASs are easier to deploy, but SANs are more performant if you have numerous high-speed file transfers involving terabytes of data.

In simpler terms what CVM does is, in a NAS the data is stored in an appliance and shared via network and nutanix improvises it by retaining the copy locally on the server and when needed can pull and push the data from and to the NAS device, this significantly reduces network traffic and reduces the time required to access the data.

I think you mean “improves” it, not “improvises” it. I don’t know what’s typical, but the way Nutanix describes it, one doesn’t even need NAS (or SAN) storage at all. Nutanix Acropolis will make storage on every device connected to a node sharable as necessary. So, you just connect your storage “drives” to your server racks and let Nutanix construct the sharing infrastructure so that the data on node can be accessed from another node. No NAS, no SAN, you get the performance advantages of directly connected storage when needed and you get sharing to other nodes when needed. Tastes great, less filling.

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Smorgasbord1,

Excellent write up! And I even realized you meant SAN vs. NAS based on context :wink:

I evaluated Nutanix at my company a couple years ago. My big complaint with them was price. We could build our VM environment way cheaper with much better performance than they provided. We already had pretty extensive virtualized environment based around Linux KVM + NetApp NAS. It worked quite well. Had we built that with Nutanix (which we didn’t even know about at the time) it would have cost us twice as much for 1/2 the performance, and 1/3 less systems. In short, Nutanix was not financially feasible to do what we built.

We also didn’t need things like VM migration between different host systems, something which both VMWare and Nutanix excel at! Nutanix seems like a great solution for IT shops. I’m not convinced however, that they’re a great solution for “cloud” applications. The ultimate goal for cloud applications is to be entirely serverless. Meaning, there is no OS that you have to deal with. As far as I know, Nutanix is really selling just a better VM experience that really competes with VMWare, and will eventually promise migrating/deploying those VMs either on local hardware or into “the cloud” like AWS, Azure, etc.

But if you look at the leaders in cloud deployed services like Netflix, serverless is the future. This means as few VMs (instances in AWS) as possible. You want to architect your applications to use things like Lambdas, API Gateways, and CDNs for static content. Databases like Mongo, Redis, and MySQL all delivered as managed services for data storage and dynamic content, with large BLOB storage on things like S3 and/or Glacier.

In this type of architecture, there is no OS for the cloud user to deal with. No Windows, no Linux, etc. The only thing I know of for the private data center that offers this is OpenStack. It is possible that Nutanix will offer something like this eventually (unless they do already and I’m unaware). In which case, that would be awesome!

I do think Nutanix has a great product and definitely services a huge need for many companies. But I don’t think it’s accurate to compare them to cloud providers like AWS, Azure, or Google.

Thanks for the awesome write-up!

–
Paul

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What Nutanix really does

Smorgasbord, what an awesome post! I think I finally understand what Nutanix does for the first time! It was clear enough that even a non-techie like me could grasp the essence of it. Thank you from all of us!

Saul

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Just in case anyones eyes glazed over. (Mine didn’t) I want to make this real.

Two years ago the “No Name” storm in Louisiana flooded a good chunk of southern Lousianna and the AT&T Mobility Telephone Swithing Office. (MTSO) As this office had already shut down the second and third generation services it only has fourth generation (4G) and LTE operations that needed to be recovered.

These operations are software defined. Some of them were completly white box. AT&T was able to migrate the cell sites to other equipment and get the network back up in a couple of days.

This is really fast compared to losing sites in Hurricane Rita and Katrina. It is extremly slow if you are sitting in your flooded house and watching alligators and water moccasins swim by.

The newest MTSO’s are completly private cloud and the switching is Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Now imagine the same situation. The Nutanix software could have migrated the entire system seamlessly at the first sign of rising water. No text messages lost, no voice mails lost, no blocked calls.

While it is unlikely that AT&T will use an off the shelf software, the service NTNX is providing is a real one, and really needed in today’s always on, 100 percent reliable world no matter what.

Cheers
Qazulight

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I evaluated Nutanix at my company a couple years ago. My big complaint with them was price.

Two years ago, Nutanix was a hardware company. It’s only been recently (certainly less than 12 months) that Nutanix separated out the software as a separately licensable product. So that might explain the higher cost at the time.

We also didn’t need things like VM migration between different host systems…

Yeah, I think Nutanix starts making sense in a couple of cases, either where you have many distributed systems that you want to manage more simply and/or when you need a solution that combines a number of pieces of Distributed Storage, Virtualization, and Disaster Recovery.

But if you look at the leaders in cloud deployed services like Netflix, serverless is the future.

“Serverless” is one of those terms whose meaning is has morphed, and whose apparent definition is contradictory. First, in no case does it mean there isn’t a server (both in terms of server hardware and server software). There are servers. The term means that the team building the Applications don’t have to worry about the server software or hardware needed to run that application.

By most accounts, the first Serverless thing was AWS’s Lambda, which now includes their API Gateway. Amazon has a page with pretty good explanations here: https://aws.amazon.com/serverless/

This means as few VMs (instances in AWS) as possible.

Not quite, at least to my understanding. It means that as an Application developer/provider, you don’t care about the VMs.

You want to architect your applications to use things like Lambdas, API Gateways, and CDNs for static content. Databases like Mongo, Redis, and MySQL all delivered as managed services for data storage and dynamic content, with large BLOB storage on things like S3 and/or Glacier.

Yes. Essentially you don’t worry about infrastructure since the functionality you need to support your application is all provided as a service. That’s why “Serverless” is also sometimes described as FaaS: Functions as a Service.

In this type of architecture, there is no OS for the cloud user to deal with. No Windows, no Linux, etc. The only thing I know of for the private data center that offers this is OpenStack. It is possible that Nutanix will offer something like this eventually (unless they do already and I’m unaware). In which case, that would be awesome!

First, again, just to be clear - there IS an OS, of course, it’s just that the Application developer/deployer doesn’t have to deal with it.

Second, Nutanix supports OpenStack. They provide 3 pieces: an OpenStack Controller (OSC), an Acropolis OpenStack Driver, and Acropolis OpenStack Services VM (OVM). If you want the details, you can look at http://nutanixbible.com/ and search for “OpenStack.”

I don’t think it’s accurate to compare them to cloud providers like AWS, Azure, or Google.

True, as long as you insert the word “public” in front of “cloud providers.”

But, I’ll add that when a company wants to deploy an application they need to make a decision whether to deploy that application in the public cloud or in a private cloud. I believe that at many places applications end up in the public cloud since that’s the quickest and easiest. Nutanix claims that’s often NOT the cheapest. There are other reasons, such as security, which may influence a decision to run something on a private versus a public cloud, too. Nutanix’s goal is to make setting up and running your own private cloud as easy as possible - and if you choose the right hardware, it can be cheaper as well.

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FlixFool> This means as few VMs (instances in AWS) as possible.

Smorgasbord1> Not quite, at least to my understanding. It means that as an Application developer/provider, you don’t care about the VMs.

FlixFool> You want to architect your applications to use things like Lambdas, API Gateways, and CDNs for static content. Databases like Mongo, Redis, and MySQL all delivered as managed services for data storage and dynamic content, with large BLOB storage on things like S3 and/or Glacier.

FlixFool> Yes. Essentially you don’t worry about infrastructure since the functionality you need to support your application is all provided as a service. That’s why “Serverless” is also sometimes described as FaaS: Functions as a Service.

Sorry, I should have clarified. For the architect/developer there is no VM to worry about. Possibly one of the most time consuming tasks in application development is the configuration management of the environment in which the application runs. This means OS/server configuration management as well. But if your application is moved to a serverless framework using things like AWS’ Lambda, API Gateway, CloudFront CDN, and S3 buckets, there is virtually no “application environment” to be concerned with. This has immense implications on the time required to develop an application, and drastically speeds up the software development lifecycle!

when a company wants to deploy an application they need to make a decision whether to deploy that application in the public cloud or in a private cloud. I believe that at many places applications end up in the public cloud since that’s the quickest and easiest. Nutanix claims that’s often NOT the cheapest.

Currently, most companies equate the word “cloud” with the specific meaning of “public cloud”. There are very few companies at this point that realize they can own their own on-premises cloud. And even fewer yet realize that running their own cloud can be cheaper than paying for the “cloud-as-a-service” experience.

One of the huge advantages of the “public cloud” is the ease of geographical based deployments. Netflix could never run their own private cloud, since they require being geographically as close to the end-consumer of their data as possible. This also goes for many of the companies which are benefitting greatly from the public cloud build out. Building a private cloud is no different than running a private data center, it’s merely re-arranging the building blocks used to construct it. And the current conventional wisdom, right or wrong, is that it’s best not to have a private data center at all if you can avoid it.

However, there will always be a significant number of companies always requiring a private data center. And those are the ones Nutanix is and will be targeting! For those companies, a private cloud will be cheaper than the public cloud, though the measurement may be on the axes of things like security and control vs. pure financial costs.

–
Paul

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