Complexity is one of the main challenges facing IT today. Today’s applications typically require multiple application tiers where each tier runs in a different VM and each VM has different compute and storage requirements. Managing all these different layers requires multiple skill sets as well as mastering multiple underlying technologies. In addition, there can be a lot of guesswork involved in building the infrastructure required to support today’s applications. At this year’s VMworld 2015 Suda Srinivasan, Nutanix director, product marketing shared with me that Nutanix’s vision is to make data center infrastructure invisible. Just like the plumbing in your house where you should be able to use the water without worrying about the mechanics involved, Nutanix is using their hyper-converged webscale architecture to simply the task of building and managing IT infrastructure.
In 2011 Nutanix started as a hyper-converged solution that was designed to solve the problems associated with VDI. Since that time Nutanix has taken what they’ve learned from hyper-converged storage architecture and moved into the tier one application space. Nutanix has expanded their application support to include tier one applications like Exchange, SQL Server and SharePoint. Nutanix provides a scale-out architecture that includes compute, virtualization and storage in each node. Since each node provides storage there is no need for an external SAN. Nutanix deployments have the ability to scale compute and storage independently enabling you to incrementally add capacity to meet changing businesses requirements. Nutanix clusters provide built-in high availability. They can withstand node failures with no data loss and you can upgrade cluster nodes with no downtime. This past June in their user conference in Miami, Nutanix released their new Acropolis product that provides support for virtualization compute, and storage under a single pane of glass making it easy for IT to manage and support scalable hyper-converged applications.
According to an IDC study in 2014 Nutanix has 52% of the hyper-converged market share. Gartner rates Nutanix in their Leader quadrant of Integrated Systems and they are rated first in the area of vision. You can learn more about Nutanix’s support for tier one applications at Nutranix Acropolis.
