Nutanix in San Jose, California offers their software-defined Enterprise Cloud as a hyper-converged infrastructure solution. The Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure solution combines the Nutanix Acropolis virtualization solution, Nutanix AHV hypervisor (though Acropolis works with other hypervisors), Prism cluster manager, Nutanix Calm and Nutanix Flow server management, and is available on the Nutanix NX series of server hardware appliances, as well as third-party OEM appliances.
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Red Hat Ceph Storage
Score 8.1 out of 10
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Red Hat Ceph Storage is a software defined storage option.
We have used, and still currently use VMWare for our hyper-visor in many respects, it is what was used entirely. While Nutanix's Acropolis is missing a few features because of it being a newer hyper-visor, none of them are deal breakers and the cost savings is absolutely …
Red Hat Ceph storage is most comparable with VMware Virtual SAN which we currently use in production. It had about the same default resiliency although we had far more customization options with Ceph albeit more difficult to configure. VMware Virtual SAN is such an expensive …
I would highly recommend using Nutanix HCI for any of your infrastructure needs. I would highly suggest saving money and using the free included AHV hypervisor. The performance is incredible, and the data reduction capabilities are on par with vSAN. I would only recommend using ESXi with Nutanix AOS if AHV does not yet support some one-off configurations or if you still want to use horizon while the frame is still growing.
Large scale data storage: Red Hat Ceph Storage is designed to be highly scalable and can handle large amounts of data. It's well suited for organizations that need to store and manage large amounts of data, such as backups, images, videos, and other types of multimedia content.Cloud-based deployments: Red Hat Ceph Storage can provide object storage services for cloud-based applications such as SaaS and PaaS offerings. It is well suited for organizations that are looking to build their own cloud storage infrastructure or to use it as a storage backend for their cloud-based applications.High-performance computing: Red Hat Ceph Storage can be used to provide storage for high-performance computing (HPC) applications, such as scientific simulations and other types of compute-intensive workloads. It's well suited for organizations that need to store
One-click upgrades; whether it's hypervisor, firmware, disk or other updates. This feature has drastically decreased complexity and administration time.
Data Locality. Not all hyperconverged technology is created equal. When I first purchased Nutanix they were the only vendor (and as far as I know, still are) that made sure the storage a VM used was on the same host that VM was running on. Given a normal operating state, the [storage] network is literally only used for replication data.
They got rid of traditional RAID. Nutanix uses software to determine where a VM's storage should be written and replicated to. This dramatically decreases I/O when changing the number of nodes in a cluster, be it on purpose or during a failure scenario. Ex. adding a new node: If one uses RAID arrays then enough space has to be set aside to create a new array that includes the new node, then all the information has to be copied over, and the old array destroyed. RAID arrays do not grow and shrink gracefully so Nutanix has designed a better solution.
The Nutanix management interface was built on HTML5. No more flash headaches!
Highly resilient, almost every time we attempted to destroy the cluster it was able to recover from a failure. It struggled to when the nodes where down to about 30%(3 replicas on 10 nodes)
The cache tiering feature of Ceph is especially nice. We attached solid state disks and assigned them as the cache tier. Our sio benchmarks beat the our Netapp when we benchmarked it years ago (no traffic, clean disks) by a very wide margin.
Ceph effectively allows the admin to control the entire stack from top to bottom instead of being tied to any one storage vendor. The cluster can be decentralized and replicated across data centers if necessary although we didn't try that feature ourselves, it gave us some ideas for a disaster recovery solution. We really liked the idea that since we control the hardware and the software, we have infinite upgradability with off the shelf parts which is exactly what it was built for.
The one downside I have working with Nutanix is the sales team. They seem to try to add in extra goodies to sales quotes or push for extras that you don't really need and you have to tell them to take them out. Don't be afraid to push back on them.
Need to analyze sizing with sales team to ensure right sizing.
AOS definitely make our dev/test virtual environment management much easier than before. And the consolidation the test/dev environment from Azure and Cisco UCS, we have less need to transfer large amount of data between different hardware platforms which was very big challenge. To expand the capacity is very easy to archive as well.
Nutanix AOS performance is light years ahead of HPE. We were nervous about using Nutanix AHV but it has been a vast improvement and saves on cost. Applications has been much improved and end users have commented. It has also freed up time for our Network Administrators and made their lives easier.
Modernizing with HCI, which creates private cloud-like data centers, is, for many organizations, the first step in their digital transformation. Companies that have kept their eye on the long game and made decisions based on a fully-developed ROI analysis have found themselves uniquely positioned to make the critical operational changes the COVID-19 situation has demanded.
IPv6 is needed for link local discovery. We do not have IPv6 configured on our network so the easiest way to get our nodes configured and discovered by foundation was to configure the IPv4 addressing within the node prior to trying to discover with foundation.
We've decided to go for both VxRail and Nutanix AOS to make sure we can get the best deals from both sides. I appreciate this may not be a path most companies can go down, but always good to have a bit of healthy competition between vendors to ensure you're getting the best pricing from both sides!
MongoDB offers better search ability compared to Red Hat Ceph Storage but it’s more optimized for large number of object while Red Hat Ceph Storage is preferred if you need to store binary data or large individual objects. To get acceptable search functionality you really need to compile Red Hat Ceph Storage with another database where the search metadata related to Red Hat Ceph Storage objects are stored.