Nutanix, a San Jose, Calif.-based provider of converged IT systems, is laying claim to an industry first.
The company has taken the wraps off its new NX-9000 appliance, an all-flash scalable converged system outfitted with six solid-state drives (SSDs) for a total capacity of up to 1.6 TB. Storage optimization features include built-in compression and de-duplication.
The dual-node appliance is powered by two 3.0 GHz Intel “Ivy Bridge” Xeon processors and up to or 512 GB of RAM, enough to accommodate up to 115 virtual machines, according to Nutanix. The NX-9000 plugs into the network via two 10 GbE and two 1 GbE connections.
In addition, Nutanix announced Metro Availability, a data protection and disaster recovery feature being added to the upcoming version 4.1 of the Nutanix Operating System and will be part of the software’s Ultimate Edition.
“With [the] NOS 4.1 release coming out later this year, we are introducing a new capability called Metro Availability [that allows] Nutanix clusters [to]
be stretched across different geographical regions,” wrote Prabu Rambadran, senior product marketing manager at Nutanix, in a company blog post. A single data store can stretch up to 400 kilometers (km), claims the company.
“Data is synchronously written across different sites enabling near 100 percent uptime during an entire site failure due to an unforeseen disaster or a planned event,” continued Rambadran.
By bundling compute and speedy SSD storage into one system — a tactic that accelerates databases and online transaction processing (OLTP) by sparing data the trip to and from a storage area network — Nutanix is attempting to coax data center operators into SAN-less architectures that have helped IT giants like Google and Facebook deliver brisk Web application performance to their customers. And their efforts appear to be paying off.
In January, while announcing that Nutanix had raised $101 million in a Series D round of funding, CEO Dheeraj Pandey reported that adoption of his company’s products had “grown explosively over the last two years.” At the time, Nutanix had passed $100 million mark in lifetime sales and attracted high-paying customers including eBay, Toyota and Orange Business Services.
Today, the software startup’s “solutions are powering the most demanding applications and services in the most stringent IT environments around the globe,” said Manoj Agarwal, senior director of engineering at Nutanix, in a statement.
Nutanix’s NX-9000 all-flash converged storage appliance is available now. Prices start at $110,000 per node.