Nutanix Complete Cluster Brings SAN-Free Virtualization to Hadoop

Nutanix, Inc., provider of SAN-Free data center solutions for VMware virtualized workloads, announces a platform that employs VMware, Inc.‘s core virtualization technology and Fusion-io, Inc.’s flash for cost effective virtualized Hadoop deployments that demand high IO performance and capacity expansion without the need for a SAN or NAS.

This news follows the Series C Funding announcement of 8/21/12.

Elastic Provisioning meets Elastic Infrastructure.
Nutanix’s Complete Cluster collapses the conventional two-tiered datacenter design – compute and storage – into one scalable tier of infrastructure. Inside each appliance, Nutanix software runs on top of VMware vSphere, transforming local storage devices into a distributed virtualized cluster. The software-based approach to storage provided by Nutanix Complete Cluster is for running virtualized scale-out workloads such as Hadoop.

Its use of server-attached Fusion-io flash memory and 10GbE network speeds, delivers low-latency and performance at any scale. Clusters start at four nodes, but can dynamically expand to several hundred. This combination of commodity hardware, flash and software-based scale out storage offers a solution for big data deployments that demand high-end Hadoop performance optimized for virtualized datacenters.

"In order for Hadoop to thrive in the private cloud, it must borrow from the scale-out converged architectures prevalent in the public cloud – virtualized, elastic, and with multi-tiered storage. To succeed, vendors must address this problem for the mass market with a software-defined approach delivered on off-the-shelf hardware," said Merv Adrian, a senior analyst VP at Gartner.

"Nutanix Complete Cluster software-based storage capabilities enable a flexible deployment model ideal for running Hadoop workloads on VMware vSphere virtualized workloads," said Parag Patel, VP, Global Strategic Alliances, VMware.

Software based scale-out storage
delivers massively parallel performance
Rack-busting performance,
enterprise-grade data management
Nutanix’s network-less NFS delivers up to 2,000MB/s of sequential throughput in a 2U 4-node cluster for Hadoop workloads. A Terasort benchmark yields 250MB/s in the same 2U cluster providing more than 200% better performance density than the nearest bare-metal rival. Throughput scales linearly by stacking more blocks.

Nutanix has built a general purpose distributed file system that can bring enterprise features to Hadoop and general purpose VMs, including snapshots, cloning, DR, data tiering, low-latency flash memory performance from Fusion-io, advanced HTML5 UI, and high-density x86 hardware for maximum rack utilization.

"In virtualized Hadoop environments, low-latency access to data is the key to successful deployment, and the Nutanix Complete Cluster successfully leverages the power of VMware and Fusion ioMemory to realize highly scalable compute performance, while also offering significant value through savings on capital and operational expenditures associated with the rapid scale-out of traditional storage arrays," said Tyler Smith, VP of Alliances, Fusion-io.

Accelerate Hadoop projects
with Nutanix’s scale-out appliance.
Encapsulate Hadoop for more cost effective
and agile infrastructure
Bare metal implementations re-introduce operational challenges of having to deal with the expense, downtime, and underutilized CPU consequences of physical servers. Virtualizing Hadoop is the answer, but such architectures have had to rely on SAN/NAS arrays that constrict HDFS performance. Nutanix offers the best of both worlds; a performance turnkey SAN-Free server platform for virtualized Hadoop workloads. Nutanix solutions reduce complexity and speed time-to-value for Hadoop projects. It also allows IT to benefit from the value of centralized VM management and provisioning (VMware vCenter, VMware vCloud and Project Serengeti) while taking advantage of performance server-side flash.

"By unifying commodity x86 servers, VMware vSphere, and a scale-out software based storage layer, Nutanix provides an optimized environment for virtualized Hadoop workloads," said Dr. Mohit Aron, co-founder and CTO of Nutanix.

Harmonize all workloads
onto a single tier of infrastructure.
Balancing Hadoop, End-User Computing, and Server Virtualization Workloads onto Nutanix’s general purpose virtualization platform avoids the pitfalls of having to size and tailor infrastructure gear for every application and use case, allowing IT lower costs by avoid heterogeneous hardware silos that only serve a single purpose.

Designed and fine-tuned to deliver local bus-speed storage performance with distributed redundancy, Nutanix allows customers to deploy homogeneous infrastructure for a diverse set of workloads. Hadoop specifically, designed for local storage, makes virtualizing it on centralized storage a challenge – Nutanix’s Distributed File System (NDFS) resolves this dilemma by presenting high speed local server-attached flash to all vSphere hosts using intelligent data tiering and decentralized replication services to safeguard data.