In this podcast, Roger Gibson, Systems Architect and John Weidenhammer, Systems Engineer from Nutanix will discuss how Nutanix Era automates and simplifies database management.
Speaker 1: On behalf of Nutanix and Carahsoft, we would like to welcome you to today's podcast focused around one click database operations with Nutanix Era, where Roger Gibson, Systems Architect, and John Weidenhammer, Systems Engineer at Nutanix will discuss how Nutanix Era enables DBAs to provision, clone, and refresh their databases to any point in time and easily integrate with your preferred self service tools. Every operation has a unique ID and is fully visible for auditing and allows DBAs to define standards for their database provisioning needs with end state driven functionality that includes high availability database deployments for mission critical clusters.
Roger Gibson: Good morning, or actually good afternoon, everyone. I am probably one of the few that are on the West coast. I'm Roger Gibson, I'm a Systems Architect with Nutanix and today we're going to talk about Nutanix Era, which is our product to automate and simplify database management. With me is my partner in crime. John Weidenhammer. John?
John Weidenhammer: Thank you. Good morning. Good afternoon. Appreciate everyone joining in. Today, Roger and I will be giving a presentation on Era, which is our database as a service type product to really make the database experience a lot more simplified. I'm not sure what the familiarity everyone has today with Nutanix products themselves, but some of our design mentalities are all about simplifying the stack to give you time back to focus more back on the applications and this completes that story. So I look forward to talking with you here, and Roger, if you want to lead us off.
Roger Gibson: Absolutely. We'll proceed as though... We'll do a brief discussion. We had a couple of slides on Nutanix architecture and really why you would want to put a database on Nutanix. And then from there, how we've simplified that process of managing a database and really improving the daily life of a DBA. Or really anybody, not just a DBA, but even from an ops perspective and how we improve how you actually provision out a VM or a Windows VM for SQL server with the right patches and versioning and greatly simplifying that. So that's a note of our value add as a wrapper. So a new era, yeah, play on words there everyone, in database management. I'm sure it wasn't a coincidence that we named it Era. And really what we have is a product that no one else really has as a complete solution and bundled with the entire infrastructure stack. It's typically an add on if they can even do something like this. A lot of DBAs rely on custom scripts to do some of their daily tasks.
And we've put it all into an easy to consume interface that even people that are not DBAs can do. And that's provisioning and registering databases and managing the storage and copies and patches. And really, again, the word is simple simplifying, and that's a big deal. And it's not just something that we just want to throw out there as just a word. So we'll go into a little bit more detail first of how we simplified the actual environment and making a database run so well and with so little infrastructure management. That's the key first step is simplifying the architecture so that a database really runs well, it runs basically in Flash is what we do. We do caching, everything's in Flash across a software defined architecture. So we take this stuff here and we remove it. We don't do fiber channel and storage controllers and a lot of complexity in between your actual database and that storage controller way down there. There's a lot of stuff in between, and that's a lot of potential bottlenecks for a high-performing database. John, do you have anything to add there?
John Weidenhammer: So what Nutanix really started out doing was simplifying the three tier architecture stack so that we could simplify operations, simplify troubleshooting, get closer to the actual right path. We're taking that complexity of, "Okay, I need to upgrade, I need to check my compatibility matrixes, I need to go through and see what versions are compatible with this, what bugs are out there, what are the known caveats?" And it just becomes a mess to manage. You run into problems with different versions across the entire environment. So what Nutanix does as a core HCI product is simplify that stack so that, again, you can focus back on the databases, the applications, you give your admins back that time. You take all that feature rich things that you got out of an HCI environment and condense them down into an easy to use platform.
You don't need specialists in each of those areas, folks that are certified in BCP or CCNA, CCIE, CCMP. Your database administrators that are certified in Microsoft SQL or Oracle, we remove the complexity to make it that much easier so that you don't have to have someone that spends their entire day studying those things or training on those things. A lot of times in the DOD environment, you're limited in resources and the folks that you have on the ground, sometimes they rotate in and out. So the experience level can vary from person to person and they might go from one unit to the next or one project to the next where they only had Oracle experience, they didn't have SQL experience, or they only had NetApp experience, they didn't know the other things that are out there.
So with Nutanix, it really doesn't matter. We make it a simple, easy, elegant thing to use where instead of going and doing a bunch of research, we give you context specific walkthroughs on how set up things like backups, or create a database or deploy a virtual machine. Making those things super easy, where we take the guesswork out of it. We prevent you from shooting yourself in the foot. So like I said, through those upgrades, we're going to do compatibility checks to make sure that all those things you used to do, checking compatibility matrixes, is done for you and you don't have to do that anymore.
Roger Gibson: Thanks, John. Yeah, there you go. And it's playing out. So what we really do is make the infrastructure invisible, we make it about the app. In this case, we're talking about databases. So the infrastructure should not be part of the equation is really what we're getting at. It should be run, it should be high-performance, and basically in cache and Flash speeds at all times for a database. And so that is the core of simplification is first the infrastructure and a database can't run any better than the infrastructure it's laid down on. And really the last play out here is all we do as a software... Not all we do, there's a lot of magic underneath, but we're a software defined architecture across three or more server nodes, we call them nodes, with integrated compute, storage virtualization, it's all in the box.
And then these things are interconnected over top of rack switch or a core switch, however you want to do it over 10 gig. And then it's a software defined storage layer that intelligently places data. In the case of a database, we're going to write to the node that that virtual machine for the database lives on right in Flash. And if there's a read request, it's going to get right back off that same Flash drive instead of going through all these paths on the left, through a fiber channel switch, HBA, one storage controller up the backend bus to a disc and then back down, an array group and back down. So that's where we reduce complexity and we've greatly increased performance and capability there and make the infrastructure visible.
So we've simplified the infrastructure, now let's talk about how we simplify a database. And first we talk about most organizations, they don't have a single engine. Typically, you don't see just SQL server in an environment, you see Oracle, you're seeing more and more open source like PostgreSQL and MySQL databases. And they vary in size based on what they're doing. And in DOD, you don't see too much of this, but depending on what the agencies, what they're doing, you might see a lot of test dev and a lot of copies of a database so that they can run patch management, they can run test dev or QA against that database. And you get this mass amount of database copies, which turns into sprawl of how much you're consuming, where it's at, managing those patches and copies.
And then that rolls into the actual operations and how you're managing all of those parts components they're writing on PowerShell scripts. You're really leaning heavily on the DBA and hope he's not sick for a week because we don't know where his scripts are. To do the copy management. We need to do a test dev or refresh this database to this clone to what's in production so we can do a QA against it or do auditing. And here's a day in the look of said DBA. Traditionally, it's a lot of steps. There's a request for a database, we need to understand what that config is, there's configuring out the compute, there's a lot of complexity that takes hours and days. And that's just a provision of DB, we're not even talking about the request process and getting the database to the actual application owner.
This is just what the DBA does. That's a lot of steps. And on that same note, there's a lot of copied data. We've done a lot of fixing of this, even in the DOD and in some DOD agencies where they had hundreds of terabytes of copy data they didn't even realize that they were consuming. They just need more consumption. And without an intelligent copy management solution at the infrastructure level, how you're actually doing those copies, how you're actually copying a database and what type of technologies underlying, you're going to have a massive amount of sprawl a massive amount of data consumption because you have a bunch of copies running around of a database. And that is an absolute problem. So you can see here that the all independent research suggests that this is an ongoing thing and there is a problem with managing that. The other end of the coin too, is patch config.
So you have copies of databases to do QA, but what about actually patching that database and running a known good state or running a previous state or there's a new SQL patch, there's a new Oracle patch, I have to test this and run it? And before you know it, there is hundreds of distinct software configs for your patch management. So this pollution effect where you're having massive amounts of different running database offerings and you really don't know which one's which, you get this desired end state of a managed maybe six different configs for a database. Database should be a service, making the management and provisioning of a database as a service model, but internally to your cloud choice. So on the Nutanix platform, we can make databases more of a service than a workflow, if you will.
And that's the true power of taking all these different processes involved with managing databases and wrapping it into a service per service provisioning process. And it's really simple. You can do everything through API, so this can be fully automated. You can run a Python script to fully automate the provisioning of an Oracle RAC database. And what's really important too, is the intelligence behind it that understands in the case of our Nutanix architecture, when I provision a database, I'm going to make sure I have done in best practices for the platform. Balancing my SQL database across eight V disc for example is a more performance solution than one big V disc. We have this concept of a time machine where we have a source database, and in between that, we have the Era VM appliance.
This is just a first machine with our Era software and it's bundled in the architecture. It's a simple v appliance deployment. And that really talks to the source database and allows you to provision and do copies, clone snapshots, and have this clone operations where you can do the DB. I can clone out the running copy of my DB and present it to the QA team, or I can do just the VM, the windows 2019 VM, that has the DOD image with the DOD STIG on it and I can keep that as a template. And I can provision that DBVM out and let the DBA then lay down the database, how they see fit. Which in my opinion, that's just a step that's not necessary because we can do the DBVM and the DB from another clone or all based on the source database.
And this is where we have roll back and we can do patch management and we have full capability to do backups based on this time machine schedule, which I think plays out. So another important feature is being able to refresh a clone for the QA team on the source database so that they're working in real time to do QA for what's actually running. All this functionality, even though there's a lot here, is a simple process in Era to do all these things that normally take up a lot of time of a DBAs day and or scripting and we're and or few interfaces and approvals. Anything else to add there, John?
John Weidenhammer: Yeah. So with the time machine, the database is getting registered into Era itself. You can create a profile based off of those to do all these tasks. But as part of that registration process, it deploys on the underlying OS, either Linux or Windows or Oracle, and then once it's deployed, the agent wakes up periodically and talks to the Era control plane for instructions over just plain HTTPS. That's all I had to add.
Roger Gibson: Perfect man, thank you. So this is where we roll into the actual use cases. And it can be any or all of these. What we find a lot in DOD is we've noted there's a lot of COTS or GOTS, government off the shelf, commercial off the shelf software, that are ran for the most part in DOD agencies. Not a lot of agencies are doing their own application development where they need to do a lot of QA and copies. So what Era brings to the table in those cases is an operational improvement, and it's a big one. It's where the CIS admin can provision out a new database server in a known good version to the application owners, and away they go. And it's all provisioned out in best practices for the environment.
Like I said, multiple V discs for SQL server, proven out a couple of instances. But an operational improvement is a huge deal when you're dealing with databases and multiple databases and multiple types of databases if you have a multi database environment, which I have a handful of DOD customers that do that and they see a true value for having templated and versioned capability just to provision out these database VMs. And that speaks highly to the operational improvement. The other portions here, copy data management, database protection and patching. In other environments, we've already talked about the copy problem is a problem. And so we can rationalize that with space efficient snapshots that are... When you do a clone of VM, it's instant because we're just doing a pointer system, we're doing a redirect on right, which is a more performant mapping of a block map.
And so a clone is instant and then we just maintain the blocks of of changes so that you can refresh anytime. And then protection is paramount to a DBA. They're constantly having to keep their database protected, backed up, and a lot of time, they want to be able to manage that themselves because DBAs are almost like security folks paid to be paranoid and the database is typically part of a... The entity or business, or however you want to frame it, can't run without the databases. So protecting those with a scheduled flow that's easy to understand as far as snapshots and clones of databases and then being space and time efficient and being able to easily roll back, that's a huge deal. A lot of time that's done in scripts. And then same thing for patching. Being able to patch the database and maintain version control and reduce that sprawl. All important key areas that Nutanix Era really simplifies, all in a single interface that's step-by-step.
We'd always like to do demos and show people that seeing is believing. So if anyone would like to actually see a demo, we do. It's the Nutanix website, you'll see up in the top right corner, whenever you go to www.nutanix.com or just nutanix.com, you'll see a button that says test drive, big green button. And you can actually do a guided tour of Era and it's very, very easy because it's a guided tour. It says, "Click here to do this operation, which I want to clone a database, a running SQL database." So it steps you through it. The test drive is fantastic because it's a guided tour, yet it's a running operation. You could duplicate the exact same thing that guided tour did in your own environment. So I would like to note that the test drive is on our website and it's very worth checking out and it's very quick, it'll take 30 minutes of your day.
John Weidenhammer: So just to add on to what Roger had there, we have a couple of customers today in the DOD that have deployed Nutanix Era. One of the ones that I have that has done it migrated off of legacy Solaris Spark Servers, off of Big Indian onto a x86. Using Nutanix and Nutanix Era, they got over to a more performing platform where we were doing all Flash as well as being able to manage the databases in a more efficient way, just in a virtualized environment versus a dedicated hardware device. Which it gives them better OpEx and CapEx, you can refresh the hardware a lot more frequently and not worry about the cost there. And then from a software standpoint, we could move that to any other proved hardware that Nutanix has out today.
It also saved them a ton in licensing costs because we reduced down the CPU counts by doing standalone nodes and then presenting storage down to that. So the Oracle licensing they had actually went down, we minimized the amount of licensing that we need there, and also the amount of storage because the copy data management piece that we have in there, all those zero byte clones that don't take up as much storage on a Nutanix platform just because of our built-in storage efficiencies. So it saved them quite a bit of money in hardware there for storage and Oracle licensing. But that's the types of things that we're seeing more and more nowadays, is folks getting off of that platform on to a virtualized platform or the other customer would have that wanted to get off Oracle entirely and on to a hardened version of Postgres.
So Janice is definitely open to helping everyone out with that, as well as our partner Carahsoft. We have a wide array of services and partnerships with Carahsoft. But if that was something that you guys were looking to do, do an enterprise database migration type thing, that's something we'd definitely like to talk to you about. And like Roger said, the test drive is awesome. You just put it in your email and go, it's a guided click-through tour without having any kind of hardware or software or pay anything upfront. It gives you an idea of what the software is capable of and can do. And that's for all Nutanix products, not just Era. So if you guys have any questions, feel free to reach out to us or Carahsoft here. And I appreciate your guys' time today.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening. If you'd like more information on how Carahsoft or Nutanix can assist your organization, please visit www.carahsoft.com or email us at nutanix@carahsoft.com. Thanks again for listening and have a great day.