In this podcast, Mike Cameron, System Engineer at Nutanix, discusses how to eliminate complexity with a single click deployment for state and local government and education.
Speaker 1:On behalf of Nutanix and Carahsoft, we would like to welcome you to today's podcast. Focused around Nutanix's simple, flexible, intelligent file storage for state, local, and education organizations. Where Mike Cameron, Systems Engineer at Nutanix, will discuss Nutanix Files, a software-defined scale-out file storage solution that provides a repository for unstructured data.
Mike Cameron: Thank you everybody for joining this presentation on Nutanix Files. I appreciate it. What is Nutanix Files? Nutanix Files is actually a software-defined file server with the ease and use like our clusters today. Like one-click updates for your file servers. One-click file infrastructure management monitoring, file audits with analytics page built-in. We also support SMB 2.0 2.1 3.0 with encryption now, that's important to a lot of people, NFS Version 3 and 4, ESX, AHV, and now Xi Clusters. Its enterprise-class, high availability, and native DR built-in all altogether with the file servers.
So basically we're managing everything on our staff, on your file servers. Basically, it literally takes 20 minutes to install this file server. Basically, you download the software, name the server that you want, your file server name, join it to Active Directory. What we'll do too is actually put all your DNS records in. You don't need to do anything. We'll actually put all the records in for you. So that it's fully ready to go when it's installed.
Basically, it'll install three file server VMs for you. So you'll need three IP's for the client-side. You'll need three IP's for the storage side. You'll need to check what protocols you want to use SMB, NFS, both. Then basically we'll set up a protection domain. We'll go over that in a little bit, but once you click create, it literally takes 20 minutes and it's ready to go after that.
Ease of operations, like I said, it's the ease of operations just like we do in our clusters today. It's basically one-click upgrades. When any upgrade in the file server, just click the upgrades and let it go. We have one-click data monitoring. So we'll monitor all your data within our infrastructure, our platform. One-click hardware monitoring, we'll monitor all your servers like we do today in Nutanix Clusters. Then basically scale up if you need to scale up or you have some file server VMs that are underperforming, you can add more CPU and more RAM, and plus you can add more file server VMs, if you need to for scale up.
Also, we have our Analytics Dashboard, which I'll show you here in a little bit, which is awesome. There's most people have file servers today, actually have to go out and buy an additional tool to do look inside their file server to see what they have. Our analytics does all that for you. It comes with file servers auto Scaling. So basically this thing will set to auto scale. So if we need to scale up on your file server VMs, you can scale it up easy, click, ready scale, and it'll go up. If you need add more CPU, more RAM it'll auto scale for you. Just basically set it, continue, and it'll scale up as needed.
The beauty part about this rebalance piece is, so the file server beams will handle connections coming in. So those are sent LS boxes. Those will handle the connections. If one file server beam gets overloaded, it'll actually rebalance itself and actually move a user over. So that in this instance, if Rob was on the file server VM2 and that file server VM2 was overloaded, we'll actually move you to file server VM1 to rebalance the load. So basically nobody will feel the impact when they're accessing all their files on our file server for this rebalancing optimization piece we have built-in.
There again, freedom of choice, ESX, AHV, and now Xi clusters, any platform, any hardware, just like our software today is AOS and NX, 8P, Lenovo, Dell, any brand it doesn't matter whatever you want to put it on. Any development model, All-Flash, Hybrid. We're the only ones that can do a Hybrid for files dedicated or mixed and edge or data center.
Also, it's a Pay-as-you-Go model. So if a customer today buys files and they say, "I need 15 terabytes." And down the road, they need 17 terabytes. They can buy additional two terabytes of licensing and scale up as needed. So if you know in a year that your change rate is going to be one terabyte a year, you can buy two terabytes or one terabyte at the end of the year. So scale up as needed.
So data protection, the beauty thing about this is, is how many people today look for DR for their file servers? Not a lot of people. File servers like it's the last of the thing for DR. With our file server when you install it, it actually builds in a data protection for you. So that data protection includes the file server, the file server VMs and the shares it creates, the whole snapshot. When this snapshots it's creating that one single snapshot, you can send that to a offsite DR for Nutanix or into Xi Clusters. Then when you actually restore that snapshot it will restore the file server. You don't have to have anything installed on the other side, you just do a restore, it'll restore the file server with the files VMs and the shares all for you, all one shot.
The next thing that we do when we're installing this file server was we're building in a self-service model for the end user. So today, if somebody goes in and deletes a folder, deletes a file, they have to call the backup team and say, "Hey, I deleted a folder, I deleted a file." You may wait one hour, two hour, three hour depends how much work they have to get that restore. With the file server restore mechanism we built-in is basically the user deletes it, they can actually restore it. It's based on the schedule that's set up by default. The scheduled, the setup, and you can tweak the default schedule to whatever you want. So they can actually go in and restore whatever they want, whenever they want. They don't have to call anybody and more so it's managing itself.
The last thing is we now do inline scans. We can do inline virus scanning what's ICAPs. We can actually hook that into your file server and scan it at the file level. So you don't have a Window's Server that's getting taxed because of all the reading rights and scanning all day long. We're actually scanning at the file level. So less intrusive and performances is good.
So our Analytics dashboard is phenomenal. This is an awesome tool. How many people today know what's sitting on their file servers? Normally you have to buy tools. You got to go out to SolarWinds or whatever, and buy a tool to say, "Hey, what's on my file servers? What's being used? What are people storing? How much data is out there that we can get rid of?"
With this Analytics page we can do capacity, the trends, we got data age, file size distribution. We can look at what, how much Adobe Acrobats out there, how much videos out there, how much images people are putting out there, and we can actually block and say that they can't put video clips out there, we don't allow it. So you can actually block at this level and say they can't store any video file types at all. It also gives you a trend of permission denied, people try to access like an HR folder they don't have access to, they'll click it, it'll actually write and say, "Hey, Joe tried to access this file three times as an HR file."
It'll send you an email saying it he's been trying to access it. This is a great little tool and it's free with Files. Then if let's say your manager calls and said, "Hey, you know, we we've noticed some activity going on. We need to look at Rob and maybe he's done some stuff. We're not sure what he's doing."
So we can build an audit trail just on what Rob is doing. We can say, "Hey, Rob, from his PC, tried to delete this file. How many times he tried to delete it. How many times he changed it, he closed the file, he opened it, he read it, he deleted it." We can detect that whole thing and then download it as a JSON or a CSV file and send that report to your manager and he'll have exactly the timeframe that he wanted of what happened with that user.
This is a great tool. Another thing that I really like about this is now we can detect viruses, basically. Let's say so we can set up anomaly detection. So let's say on somebody's PC a virus gets on the PC and he's trying to open a file 500 times. Well, somebody can't do that within a minute. So we know there's anomaly going on that box. This will detect that, this is going to say what PC it came from and what they're trying to access, and we can actually go look at that PC, shut it down if it's a virus and get it clean. Because this anomaly detection will actually send and report weird anomalies going on. So you can set it up based on criteria and then have it send you an email.
Since we now have Xi Clusters we can now move your file servers from on-prem to off-prem into Xi Clusters with a dashboard and we can tell you what syncing, what smart replications doing, smart file analytics basically, and we'll know where the data sits. So if we say, "Hey, we need to move us all to Xi Clusters and take it off-prem." We can move to Xi Clusters so we can move your file servers around. Today with people, how they do file servers today. I think that's almost impossible to do.
Then for the active management, this is another piece they've added in that's really good. So we can now look and see what hot data's being written, where our warm data is at and where our cold data. Let's say that that cold data it's not being, nothing's being done with it. We can actually offload that now to objects. So we can stick it to unstructured data, we can say after six months, move it over to this unstructured data. It'll still put a pointer file there for the user, but it'll actually move that data off. So we're not chewing up a bunch of storage and we can move off to an object store, which is cheap. So it'll trend it and tell you, "Hey, this is all being used as hot." And you can set the hot data for zero to three months, your warm data, three to six months and cold data, just move it out for a year.
Then Files high availability. So this is just like our clusters today. If we lost a node today, people wouldn't really know the node went down because the way our RF2s built-in the way we move data around. Same thing with Files today, Files has the same concept. If we have Files on 10, 11, and 12, and all of a sudden we have a file server, or actually a node go down that that file server lived on and that volume groups lived on would actually move that volume groups over to the second node and people wouldn't even know it went down. Just like we do today in our clusters.
So Files basically manages itself. It's ease of use, one-click upgrades, takes all the anomalies, you don't have to worry about anything. It'll monitor, manage everything you need to do. So users can go do what they need or admins can go do what they need to do and manage other things. That's what Files is all about. It's that ease of management and let it manage it for you.
Well, I want to thank everybody. Thank you guys for attending. I know it was quick and short, but Files is that easy to set up. I mean, basically move your stuff into our files, our platform, and we'll manage it for you. So again, thank you guys. I really appreciate it.
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.