Converged storage and server maker Nutanix has announced upgraded hardware and a new operating system (OS) version with support for Red Hat's KVM hypervisor in addition to existing VMware support.
Nutanix debuted in 2011 with its NX-2000 Complete Cluster storage stack aimed at server and desktop virtualisation use cases. This comprised 2U blocks with Intel Westmere processors, plus PCIe and SATA flash drives and hard disk drives (HDD) with the VMware hypervisor built in. Marketed as a "datacentre in a box", the product could be scaled by adding compute and storage capacity.
Nutanix has now added the NX-3000 hardware format, which sees processing power boosted with an upgrade to 8-core Intel Sandy Bridge chips, increased memory and two instead of one 10 Gbps Ethernet ports per node.
The OS upgrade to version 3.0 includes replication to other Nutanix instances and disaster recovery policy configuration that includes the ability to specify data protection domains with combinations of primary and secondary sites.
There is also high-availability failover and failback functionality, support for another hypervisor – Red Hat's KVM – and compression of blocks of data according to usage patterns.
Red Hat KVM is a hosted hypervisor, which means it is more efficient than the likes of VMware and Microsoft's Hyper-V. KVM has a tiny share of the virtualisation market at present, but is reportedly used by some big cloud users, including Google, IBM and Rackspace. Nutanix cites Hadoop as a use case for its KVM variant arrays.
The latest Nutanix OS also has auto-detection of new Nutanix nodes, which means they can be added without downtime and the OS will auto-balance data across the newly expanded pool.
