Listen to this podcast, to learn more on how Nutanix HCI can: •Reduce the physical footprint of legacy datacenter infrastructure •Increase and leverage underutilized resources •Improve IT security posture •Modernize environments for the cloud era
Speaker 1: On behalf of Nutanix and Carahsoft, we would like to welcome you to today's podcast, focused around bringing your infrastructure together with Nutanix HCI, where Kelly Estes, systems engineer at Nutanix, will discuss how Nutanix's hyper-converged infrastructure is empowering IT organizations of all sizes.
Kelly Estes: Thank you all so much for joining today. My name is Kelly Estes. I am a systems engineer with Nutanix. Been here for, gosh, it'll be three years coming up in November. I feel like life's going by so fast. But within the time at Nutanix, we have noticed that a lot of different agencies, everybody that we work with, we all have very similar initiatives going on. The agencies are looking at a way for technology that's easy to consume like the public cloud. So whether it's a cloud initiative or a modernization project, we really just want the ability to deploy a workload with the click of a button, or do upgrades with click of a button, or even scale seamlessly in days and weeks, or not weeks or months, or months and months.
So this is where we've noticed that the public cloud, it's really become attractive because at the end of the day, we don't care about where our workload runs, just as long as it's running well, it's performing well and our users are happy at the end of the day. We have workloads everywhere. So we have our workloads in the public cloud. Of course, we still probably have workloads on prem. We might have some remote or branch offices or different data centers sprawled out. And it's just caused a lot of data sprawl. And it's become really hard to manage and keep up with and we have to be a guru in AWS or with Sands. So it's just created a lot of complexity within the data center and everywhere.
But with Nutanix Prism or Nutanix and Prism, it allows you to monitor and manage multiple workloads across all different platforms with one single pane glass view, where you can monitor, manage, create VMs and multiple data centers. So say you're sitting in Virginia, but you have a data center in New York, you can create VMs within the one single Prism central single pane glass view.
And your workloads can even move across platforms. So maybe we have a Nutanix cluster on prem, and we have also a Nutanix cluster in AWS because we did just announce Nutanix clusters, which is Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure in AWS. It allows you to really see where the individual workloads fit best along with the cost optimization tools that we have and allows you to seamlessly move them across cloud platforms for you.
So Nutanix core hyper-converged infrastructure, that's what we're covering today. Overall, Nutanix, we started out as a company back in 2009 and shipped our first appliance or box out in 2011, and our founders, we really pioneered the idea of HCI or hyperconverged infrastructure, if you will. So this just means that we've combined storage, compute and virtualization using commodity x86 servers. That is 100% software driven.
And the idea really comes from and how Googles and Facebooks of the world are able to operate, succeed, scale at the mass amounts that they are today. And it's really through the idea of web-scale engineering. Now we throw around all these terms and there are so many different ways to say something, but really what is web skill engineering. And that just means that all of the intelligence is built into the software.
So we see hardware as a commodity and it's something that is going to fail. So when it does, why not have a software layer that is so resilient, that we can go in and withstand [inaudible 00:04:05] and host failures and keep our users up and running all while the data's automatically being soft heeled in the background. We have multiple different layers. You have your storage, you have your storage fabric, your compute layer, your virtualization, and then the applications that live on top of everything, which again, at the end of the day, that's what we really need to have up and running, to support our users.
With this model, we have multiple different vendors. You have different teams within your individual agencies. Hopefully you have some help taking care of the entire environment. You have multiple different consoles, many different areas for vulnerabilities after updates happen. Of course, you have your different support renewal contracts, all of these different procurement cycles that you all have to take care of. And of course, support. If something breaks in one layer, do we have finger pointing within the different vendors for support, and you're online with all these different support vendors when something goes wrong with the entire stack there.
So really with Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure, we're just able to eliminate all of the different silos and complexities that many of you face within the data center. So you can truly focus on the applications that power your mission, all while delivering an enterprise cloud-like experience for your on and off prem.
So how does this work? We have three nodes. So we have node one and node two and node N, and node N is really just representing the scalability. [inaudible 00:05:39] node X, for example. But your node, what it is, is just an x86 server with storage compute and direct attached storage. Now, being that, Nutanix is a software vendor. You do have freedom of choice in all different layers. So you have your freedom of choice in terms of your hardware. So if you're a Dell shop, you really like Dell, or you really like HPE, you've had success with that hardware. We do have a compatibility list. So as long as they're on the compatibility lists, the specific models, we can run on that hardware.
But again, if you want one throat to choke or if we want to be nice, one hand to shake, in terms of support, then we do have our Nutanix branded appliances, which is super micro under the hood. So if something goes wrong, you just call Nutanix directly and we can take care of the entire problem there. Not only do you have your choice in terms of hardware vendor, but also hypervisor. So we do support hyper Vs, VMware, and then you'll see AHV there as well.
So what AHV is, is that is our hypervisor that comes included with the solution. It's a KVM based hypervisor. It has all the right features that you're used to using today and your virtualization solution. And again, it comes included at no additional charge. So a lot of our customers have really seen a lot of benefits from the cost savings there.
And you'll see one other thing here, that's that blue CVM on every single node. And what that is, is we've also helped eliminate that physical x86 storage controller, where we definitely need at least two physical x86 storage controllers if you're in that traditional data center and we have to keep buying more and more hardware as we need to scale. But what Nutanix has done is we've taken that physical x86 storage controller, and we virtualized it on every single node for you.
So at the end of the day, if you think about it, it's really just a user virtual machine where our Acropolis operating system lives, all of the services take place, and they more or less all communicate together. We pull all the resources together, which create your distributed storage fabric.
And then the scalability story. If you think about it, with Nutanix, it's not a long process, or say you get a bunch of data growth and you need a storage heavy node, or maybe I have a VDI infrastructure and I need more compute. You can just add in a node at a time as your workload c:set. So say I need a storage heavy node, okay, I'll throw in a storage heavy node into my existing cluster. We would get it three IP addresses. So you give it a IPMI IP, a host IP, and a CVM IP. And just in a couple minutes, we have these newly added resources into our existing cluster there. So really nice scalability story there as well.
And then of course, not all workloads are the same. So whether you need all flash, or you want to add some NBME in there, or flash and spinning discs. No matter what you're in, no matter whether it is a all flash array or hybrid array, you still get all of the enterprise storage features and efficiencies that you would expect in a solution today. So [inaudible 00:09:20] shots, cloning, tiering, compression, deduplication, or ratio coding. You still get all of those, no matter whether it's a flash or hybrid. And it is done globally for you across your entire repository. So we can really see some nice storage savings if your data sees fit there.
With Nutanix, we don't do [raid 00:09:40] . We do something called replication factor. So, we don't have to go in and create one zone mask, nothing like that. What replication factor does is, it is another way to give you redundancy, resiliency within your cluster in case a node or drive sales. So for example, in replication factor of two, what we do is we would write one copy of the data to your local node, but then to give you that redundancy, also go ahead and chart another copy of the blocks across the other nodes in your cluster there. Now this is great. We have two copies in case anything fails. We have redundancy built into the cluster. But what happens if something fails? Or what happens during a read, for example? You are always reading and writing from your local node. So if you think about, you're getting all of the benefits of direct attached storage, but being hyper-converged infrastructure, we're able to take advantage of all of the resources throughout that cluster.
So this is something that we do call data locality that is proprietary to Nutanix. Just the fact that we're always reading and writing from your local node to give you the best performance possible. So our VM, we need to read some data, you're not having to traverse the network or anything like that.
CVM auto pathing, this is something that I like to cover because a lot of my customers have seen benefits from that. What happens is whether it's a failure or an upgrade scenario that we're going through, just any scenario that happens within that cluster where we cannot access our local controller virtual machine, that's okay, because we can still serve up the IO requests through the other controller VMs, because the way they communicate, they talk to each other.
So in this instance, you'll see, typically this far left one would turn red, acting like we can't access it. So you'll see we don't even have to move the VNs in this scenario. The VN can stay on that local host, but we can serve up the IO requests through the other controller VNs within that cluster.
Line migration or V motion, all of these features are built in for you. So say maybe there were some CPU hotspot contention or something like that and we had to move the VM, or maybe we moved five VMs. Well, we don't want to flood your network and push all of the data across all at the same time. So eventually over time, once the guest VM request reads, then we would just move the data blocks over time for you. So your data locality does improve over time there.
And then all of this, your whole entire stack, your hyperconverged infrastructure, storage compute virtualization, this is all monitored and managed through our HTML five web based console. With this console, whether it's Prism or Prism Central, within Prism Central, you can monitor and manage, like I said, multiple sites, multiple locations, but you can also monitor and manage multiple hypervisors just from this one single pane glass view. So some of our customers, they may have a ESX site cluster, but they also might have an AHV cluster maybe at their DR site. So you can go into Prism Central and you can create a VMware VM, or you can create an AHV VM or hypervisor from this one single pane glass view there.
Not only can you create VMs, your storage containers, normal, typical things like networking like you would do within the stack, but it also has a lot of rich analytical tools built in. So we can request, we're told, this VM needs 32 gigs of RAM and so many CPUs. Well, that's what they're telling us they need, but do they really need that? So if you have any over-provisioned VMs, under provision VMs, [inaudible 00:13:45] VMs, just anything that we're trending that you're not using or using too much of it, if you will, it will go in there and tell you, you don't really need to allocate that VM this many resources. Or you really need to give more. And not only does it take the guesswork out of the size of your machines, but it also will help automate the fix if you would like.
So with something we have called Cross-Play, you can go in and create blueprints and say, if this VM ever hits a certain threshold, then allocate two more gigs of RAM, or four more gigs of RAM, and notify me via Slack or email. So it just takes a lot of the guesswork out, and really nice in terms of the automation that you can pull in there.
Built into Prism Central as well, we have a micro-segmentation for you. So, it's not a separate install, and that's really the beauty, I think, personally, for Nutanix. You don't have to go in and download and install and just go through all these different setups and different management consoles, because everything is right within this Prism Central for you. So say you want to enable micro segmentation to help with your East West traffic. You can go in and enable flow and set up your security policies right from that Prism Central screen. So as you click a node, you can see all of your hosts details or each individual disc, how it's trending.
And then say it came for expansion time, back stack, network cable, then I can do the expansion right from within Prism as well. Security alerts. Capacity runway, this is a really nice one as well. So say in a COVID scenario where we need to scale our environment because we need more VDI users. Well, you would be able to go in there and say, "If I were to add a thousand more users with this size profile, then would they be able to fit in my existing workload or my existing cluster? Or if not, what kind of resources would I need to run them out?"
And then with Nutanix clusters, now that we have that. Say you don't want to wait the week, or you don't want to wait for hardware to come on prem, then you can burst into the cloud with Nutanix clusters as well for that even quicker scalability, if you will.
And then, actually going back to capacity runway, how many days until I run out of my CPU memory storage? Just a lot of really nice features that they've really thought about and put into the solution that helps you take the guesswork out of things, get you away from that [inaudible 00:16:37], trying to keep up the environment there.
And then the upgrade story is something that a lot of our customers are really enjoying as well. So in that Prism console, you can go in and upgrade your Acropolis operating system. You can upgrade the hypervisor, even your ESXI hypervisor, you can upgrade upgraded right from that Prism console. And a lot of our customers are actually doing that rather than the way that they're used to. But you can go in, you go into Prism, you click upgrades, you choose the version that you would like, and then it's rolling upgrades one node at a time.
So in terms of planned downtime or weekends, that's not the story with our customers because we're doing them on a rolling basis one node at a time. So you may hear the buzzword, one click. Well, what that means is when we say one click for upgrades is, we click the upgrade button and then they automatically do the upgrades one by one, one node at a time. So there's no more moving the VMs, evacuating, upgrading, and so on. So it really takes the pain out of the upgrades there as well.
And then security. This is really something that we take very seriously. Our first customer and also our largest customer, actually, is in federal. So, when you start out as a company, you can either take the bull by the horns and get going with the security story, or you can back away. And it's just with Nutanix, it's really, it's thought about from the beginning and it's baked into the code versus bolted on as an afterthought. The ALS, so the Acropolis operating system, and also the AHV hypervisor, it's STIGed out of the gate. So, if you've ever had to STIG an environment, you have this long implementation checklist and we check the box. But I almost like to think of that as any piece of furniture that you may put together from Ikea, or say a place that where you go through the instructions, we get it all together, and then at the end you do have a couple of screws leftover, nails leftover, for example.
So this just takes the guesswork out of it. It's automated for you out of the box. And if it does find that it's out of that first secure baseline, it'll go ahead and remediate self heal and roll it back to that first initial baseline for you.
We also have software, hardware encryption, local key managers. Like I mentioned, micro segmentation is something that we can help out with when [inaudible 00:19:16] in and out of the VMs or put up different firewalls between your different departments. So a really nice strong security story there.
And then lastly, what good would a product be if we had bad support, right? So I, personally, I love working with our support team. They make my job easier actually, because if I'm even ever in a pickle, I just call up this number and there's somebody who answers the phone right away, like when we were able to go onsite. But if you all have ever heard of this Net Promoter score, you should look it up. It's kind of fun to see what different companies rate or are rated.
So this scale, it goes from negative 100 to positive 100. And with Nutanix, we've had a positive 90 Net Promoter score for the last six years. So it's just something truly amazing. It's something that we're proud of. We love our customers. And if you even ever feel like your support ticket isn't getting enough love, you can always go in and escalate the case yourself as well. So definitely here to support you and have a really, really strong support team behind us to help you out there.
And with that, that was our one-on-one Nutanix core overviews. I do want to really thank you all so much for your time today. Would love to talk to you individually, get you hooked up with a rep in your area, and see how we can help you all out within your individual data centers and within your agencies. So thank you all so much for your time. Really do appreciate it.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening. If you would like more information on how Carahsoft or Nutanix can assist your government organization, please visit www.carahsoft.com or email us at nutanix@carahsoft.com. Thanks again for listening and have a great day.