SDS Solution Nutanix Files With 2,500 Customers

Nutanix, Inc. announced that its scale-out file storage solution, Nutanix Files, reached the milestone of 2,500 customers, including nearly 180 Global 2,000 companies.

Nutanix Files

The solution provides flexible enterprise file storage for the cloud era. Unlike traditional file storage solutions, it allows customers to scale and adapt to changing file storage needs across multiple locations and centrally managed from anywhere – something important in light of the Covid-19 pandemic. It also offers a native analytics engine that allows customers to gain insights into their data. It shows how the data is being used, provides use and access audit over time, and allows for anomaly detection to prevent misuse and threats from malicious actors and malware. This can eliminate the need to integrate with a third-party solution.

Nutanix Files removes the complexity of traditional datacenter architectures dependent on legacy storage systems, while providing software-defined flexibility to meet the challenges and scale of file data access and management. It is part of a suite of firm’s solutions for structured and unstructured data management, which also includes Nutanix Objects delivering S3-compatible object storage, and Nutanix Volumes for scale-out block storage. These 3 solutions deliver unified, software-defined, end-to-end storage solutions, on a single HCI platform, through a common management environment covering file, object and block storage needs.

“Nutanix has developed a reputation for simplifying infrastructure with their HCI solution,” said Eric Sheppard, research VP, infrastructure systems, platforms and technologies group, IDC Corp.  “Their file storage solution extends this simplicity to unstructured data and continues to see rapid adoption by the Nutanix customer base. This led to IDC naming Nutanix a major player in its 2019 MarketScape on Worldwide Scale-Out File-Based Storage.“

Nutanix Files is helping enterprises standardize enterprise NFS and SMB file storage from core datacenters to edge locations, addressing an increasingly common pain point for customers. It can also be deployed in minutes, updated non-disruptively with a single click, and managed via a central, easy-to-use interface.

“The storage market is very fragmented, requiring customers to manage disparate products and purchase separate licenses to support different storage needs,” said Vishal Sinha, VP engineering, Nutanix. “Our focus at is to help our customers simplify their infrastructure software stack. Delivering an easy-to-use, integrated file storage solution, with built-in key features like deep analytics, is an important part of achieving this goal. Reaching this important milestone, with 2,500 Nutanix Files customers, is a testament to the strength of this solution.“

Nutanix Files customers range from SMBs to national and international retailers, service providers, and more.

In addition to application data and file archiving, key use cases include:

• One-Click Scaling to Support Remote Work: As many companies recently experienced, enabling businesses to operate remotely overnight is a daunting task. In addition to delivering an effective VDI solution to employees, IT teams had to provide document management systems supporting the increased demand. The ability to quickly add capacity – from anywhere – to support remote working needs, along with one-click set up, delivers a solution to help customers adapt to business needs and navigate challenging situations, like the Covid-19 pandemic. “With Windows File Server, you need to set up Windows clustering in order to get a highly available fileserver,” said Lawrence Lozzano, senior DBA, Sheppard Mullin Richter & Hampton LLP. “On the other hand, setting up and managing Nutanix Files is very straightforward. Plus, the 1-click upgrade process makes it very easy to manage going forward.“
• Healthcare-Ready File Storage: For hospitals and healthcare facilities, picture archiving and communication systems (PACS) store, retrieve and manage all images produced by medical devices such as x-rays, which need to be archived. Nutanix Files is certified to support Change Healthcare, IBM Watson Health, and works with any PACS solution that supports standard NFS or SMB file storage protocols. Additionally, Files, thanks to its flexible, software-defined architecture, delivers an infrastructure and file storage system that scales dynamically to meet the needs of changing workloads. This is important as healthcare facilities prepare to respond to spikes in patients in light of the pandemic.
• Simplify High Demand File Storage for Video Surveillance: Organizations leveraging video surveillance solutions will require an efficient file storage system to archive petabytes of data, but also one that can provide the performance to access or stream video data when needed. Files scales linearly and non-disruptively to provide massive scale on an as-needed basis. By consolidating file storage onto a single flexible platform, it delivers the needed scale while reducing management overhead and operational complexity.

“The City of Plano moved the home directories shares, departmental shares, and police video data to Files in order to get rid of our physical Windows servers and all of the Windows licensing,” explained Chris Edwards, enterprise architect, City of Plano, TX. “We have over 300TB running on Nutanix Files but much more efficiently than before. Additionally, as a software-defined solution, we don’t have to maintain any servers making it much easier to manage.“