Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS and Today’s Data Growth

Managing the exponential growth of data presents a significant challenge for IT today, necessitating streamlined methods for storage, access, and protection. Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS introduces an enhanced object-based storage service called Acropolis Object Storage Service (OSS) as part of its seamless deployment process, which significantly advances these capabilities. OSS is a software-defined solution for object storage that effortlessly scales while reducing overall expenses. Featuring an S3-compatible REST API interface, it efficiently handles terabytes to petabytes of unstructured data. With native integration of erasure coding, compression, and deduplication, OSS optimizes capacity utilization. Integrated within the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS ecosystem, it minimizes the reliance on additional storage silos.

Why You Need Object Storage (and how to manage it)

The inevitability of data growth is widely recognized, with projections reaching into the realm of zettabytes. To put it into perspective, if each gigabyte in a zettabyte were a brick, you could construct 258 Great Walls of China, each made up of 3,873,000,000 bricks. According to Rohit Goyal, a Senior Product Marketing Manager at Nutanix, citing insights from IDC, it's estimated that by 2020, data volumes will reach a staggering 40 zettabytes, with approximately 63% of it being unstructured.

Object storage, known for its scalability and resilience, is tailor-made for the cloud computing landscape and the challenges of managing data at such massive scales. Particularly adept at handling unstructured data with its diverse formats and varying file sizes, object storage allows data to be stored as discrete objects rather than traditional blocks. Accessible over networks through straightforward S3-compatible HTTP REST APIs, object storage builds on the foundation laid by Amazon Web Services' S3, which has become the standard for many providers in the field.

There are eight characteristics of object storage that make it ideally suited for explosive data growth but also the emergence of HCI platforms:

• Data is stored as objects, not traditional blocks
• Objects can include backups, archives, videos, images, logs, HTML files, and more.
• It’s unstructured because there is no mandatory format to the way data is stored.
• Unlike the directory structure found in traditional file systems, it utilizes a flat list of objects stored in “buckets.”
• Objects are stored using unique IDs rather than filenames, which drastically reduces the overhead required to store data.
• Objects are stored with user-defined metadata, making it easier to find objects at scale.
• Objects can be terabytes or even a few kilobytes in size, and a single bucket can hold billions of objects.
• Application developers can easily access objects using simple S3-compatible API calls through “GET” and “PUT” requests, without complex directory structures.

How Object Storage Helps You Fully Leverage the Nutanix Cloud Environment

With an object-based cloud storage infrastructure in place, you've acquired a scalable solution capable of accommodating all incoming business data, regardless of format or size. However, ensuring the safeguarding of your data in the face of unexpected outages or routine backups presents a critical challenge. To fully leverage the capabilities of your Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform, you require a data protection solution that mirrors the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of your storage environment.

This data protection solution must offer seamless backup and recovery functionalities across all data locations, boasting rapid deployment and user-friendly operation. It should guarantee the fulfillment of your recovery point objectives (RPO) and recovery time objectives (RTO). Additionally, the ideal data protection solution should exhibit flexibility, expanding in tandem with your evolving data requirements while maintaining impeccable reliability.

How Nutanix Acropolis Object Storage Services Helps Meet Data Growth Demands

Nutanix Acropolis Object Storage Services (OSS) has many advantages, including its ability to store unstructured data such as images, video and audio files are a common area of focus for OSS. Another primary focus for OSS is for backing up files, long-term retention and archival. Where other storage types have dependencies to be attached to an operating system, object storage can be replicated across different data centers and in the cloud leveraging Nutanix native replication capabilities - all with a single user interface for access.

Another focus area for Nutanix OSS is DevOps. An application developer working with large amounts of user-generated data could use these data stores as a way to scale out to petabytes of storage. This data can then be rapidly provisioned to DevOps projects on an as-needed basis.

DevOps can also use a single global namespace to “PUT” and “GET” objects with over the network HTTP commands. Integrate REST API calls within your programs or scripts without tracking complex directory structures. DevOps and IT Ops can simply leverage an S3-compatible interface for cross-geo, cross-team collaboration and agile development.

Using OSS for Data Protection (long-term data retention, archival and backup) allows you to protect your data with a simple, scalable and cost effective active archive solution. Moreover, it lets you utilize built-in object versioning for deeper storage protection and search your data without the hassle of tape systems.

How HYCU Complements Nutanix Acropolis Object Storage Services

By combining HYCU data protection with Nutanix OSS, data management becomes:

• Easier to deploy - Create a single globally accessible namespace that’s software-defined within seconds. It’s that quick and simple from the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS.
• Stay informed - Monitor object distribution, performance, and user access from a single intelligent management plane.
• Optimize storage tiers - Continually free up expensive storage tiers and scale from terabytes to petabytes while keeping costs in control.
• Simplified troubleshooting with expert support - Access to a global support team with an average of 10+ years of experience and multiple certifications across different technical specialties across the entire infrastructure stack

Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS and HYCU: Better Together by Design

Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS and HYCU have collaborated on data protection and plan to test a best-in-class solution with the seamless integration of HYCU data protection and Nutanix scalable, native S3 storage — all to provide a cost-effective, enterprise-class storage target for HYCU once the technical preview is available.

The data protection strategies for HYCU allow for the OSS functionality to continuously and seamless operate. OSS provides:

• WORM Buckets
• Object Versioning
• Petabyte Support
• Multi-part Upload
• Object Tagging
• Erasure Coding
• Enterprise-Grade Resiliency
• Compression

HYCU is a quick-to-deploy and an easy-to-use backup and recovery solution, purpose-built for and tightly integrated with Nutanix enterprise cloud architecture. It also preserves Nutanix hyperconvergence simplicity with a backup that has a Prism-like look and feel and a hypervisor-agnostic architecture supporting Nutanix AHV and VMware ESXi. Data protection service level objective (SLO) compliance can be easily implemented by making sure RPO & RTO for VMs and applications are always maintained.

HYCU — purpose-built backup and recovery for Nutanix — embeds simplicity into your hyperconverged data protection strategy. This lets you power applications and bring data back to life, without missing a beat. And with native Nutanix integration, even deployment is a breeze.

You can also rest easy knowing that your data is protected with the Nutanix Data at Rest Encryption. Nutanix encrypts user and application data to a level of FIPS 140-2 compliance through software or hardware-based encryption and meets HIPAA, PCI DSS, and SOX standards.

Backup that’s Easy as 4-3-2-1

HYCU provides policy-based backup while also leveraging storage-level snapshots for data protection. Discovery of applications in any VM in a Nutanix cluster is automatic, with a “single-click” configuration to start application backup, and “application-aware” restores.

The HYCU management interface provides:

• At-a-glance visibility for all VMs and applications and the percentage protected with HYCU
• Enablement of error-free recoveries with self-service application backups
• A high-level view of backup storage, jobs, and events

Advantages of HYCU Data Protection for Nutanix Cloud OS

HYCU stands out as the sole purpose-built protection solution designed specifically for Nutanix's enterprise cloud infrastructure, offering versatile deployment and configuration choices. With HYCU, deployment takes less than three minutes, all the while maintaining the familiar simplicity of Nutanix's interface and user experience, including single-click backup functionality.

Here are additional advantages for HYCU:

• Leverages Nutanix intelligent snapshots for rapid recovery
• Start small and easily expand solution with cost-efficient, non-disruptive linear node-to-node scaling options to suit needs — up to hundreds of petabytes
• A single namespace across locations eliminates management workload and complexity through a unified view of data
• Strong security encryption to protect the most sensitive data
• Native S3 compatibility for industry’s best interoperability
• Uncompromising data durability and enterprise-class reliability

Object storage has unique advantages and limitations. Understanding the use cases and costs associated with each medium will help you get the best possible usage out of your application storage profile.