Nutanix, the leading provider of next-generation data centre infrastructure solutions, today announced it has been granted a patent (US 8 601 473) from the United States Patent and Trademark Office recognising the company's fundamental storage architecture for virtualised data centres, which not only obsoletes 20-year-old storage area network (SAN) technology, but also challenges the entire industry to design a next-generation storage architecture with comparable performance and scalability.
The patent provides clarity as to how software-defined storage solutions are optimally designed and implemented, while at the same time bringing the technology into mainstream enterprises around the world.
Leveraging these documented inventions, Nutanix brings simplification to enterprise data centres by delivering scale-out storage services via software running on off-the-shelf x86 servers. Data centre managers are now freed from rigid storage constructs and burdensome administrative tasks that have frustrated virtualisation teams and slowed important business initiatives. Nutanix customers benefit from advanced Web-scale technologies without sacrificing project velocity, data management or the freedom to choose the right hypervisor for their organisation.
This patent demonstrates the company's commitment to advancing the state-of-the-art in data centre technology and to simplifying how enterprise IT infrastructures are designed, built and managed. Specifically, it details how a system of distributed nodes (servers) provides high-performance shared storage to virtual machines (VMs) by utilising a "controller VM" that runs on each node. The controller VMs aggregate the local storage resources across all servers, including direct-attached flash, and deliver a shared pool of data storage that is functionally equivalent to a SAN or NAS array - but with greater scalability and higher performance. The architecture natively delivers enterprise-class storage capabilities, such as snapshots, clones, compression and deduplication, to run any production workload.
"Nutanix has pioneered a radically simpler and more scalable storage architecture for all virtualised environments," said Dr Willy Zwaenepoel, professor and former dean at Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland and former Karl Hassermann Professor of Computer Science at Rice University. "This patent recognises the company's technical vision and leadership while raising the stakes on other companies in the Web-scale market."
The Nutanix architecture also provides a unified data fabric for building hybrid clouds. Enterprise IT managers can leverage public cloud resources on-demand, while retaining the control and security of their private cloud infrastructure. This flexibility is made possible by a 100% software-driven architecture and implemented independent of any specific virtualisation technology or vendor.
In addition to publicly disclosing important intellectual property, the patent also details Nutanix's vision for how data centres will evolve in the cloud era. It is this powerful vision, captured nearly three years ago, which has driven the company's leadership in the fast-growing Web-scale and converged infrastructure markets.
Highlights include:
* The modern data centre must "...virtualise all storage hardware as one global resource pool that is high in reliability, availability and performance..." to eliminate islands of storage that are difficult to manage and nearly impossible to scale.
* Unlike traditional network-based storage, the Nutanix architecture "...permits local storage that is within or directly attached to the server and/or appliance to be managed as part of the storage pool". This enables enterprises to fully leverage server-attached flash technology, and avoid the end-to-end latency incurred when flash is added to centralised, network-based storage systems.
* Data centre scalability will be driven by a "...massively-parallel storage architecture that scales as and when hypervisor hosts are added...". Such massive scalability can only be achieved if the storage infrastructure can be scaled independent of any hypervisor constraints.
* When storage resources are virtualised, they should be able to "...used in conjunction with any hypervisor from any virtualisation vendor".
"While virtualisation has brought impressive flexibility to both applications and server infrastructures, it has also outpaced the capabilities of popular storage products that have dominated in the previous IT generation," said Brian Byrne, Principal Engineer at Nutanix. "Nutanix's research and development teams are re-imagining what storage architectures need to look like to enable the next generation of data centres."
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