This week we had the opportunity to attend Nutanix ANZ Technology bootcamp. The session covered the following topics:
– Web-scale Architecture and Concepts
– Nutanix Models and Use Cases
– Cluster Architecture and Configuration
– Nutanix Deployment Process
– Disaster Recovery
– Cluster Expansion and Upgrades
– Nutanix Alerts, Notifications, Dial Home and Support.
These sessions are free and are held in different cities around the world. For more information, visit the following link: Nutanix Web Site
The Nutenix Senior engineer covered each of the points mentioned in the agenda, but we would like to highlight:
Security
The Nutanix platform is certified across a broad set of certification and evaluation programs. It complies with the strictest international standards, including the SP800-53 guidelines, to assure governments worldwide that Nutanix products perform as expected and work with their existing technology.
If you have customers who want a high degree of security, Nutanix can meet those expectations.
For more information: https://www.nutanix.com/products/acropolis/security/
Nutanix Erasure Coding
Erasure coding has been traditionally implemented using RAID groups on disks; however those are commonly bottlenecked by single disk, constrained by disk geometry and generally waste space implementing hot spared. Nutanix EC is done across nodes instead of disks, optimizing availability with faster rebuilds and utilizing the entire cluster through map-reduce processes to compute block parities.
Nutanix EC is very easy to be enabled; just a click and the work will start in the background
For more information: http://nutanixbible.com/
Nutanix Self-service portal
For most of service providers this is a great opportunity to limit what users can do and gain more control of the activities in the environment. It was mentioned during the session that the next release will allow more operations, like Disaster Recovery.
For more information: http://www.nutanixpedia.com/p/nutanix-self-service-portal.html
Nutanix APIs
The Nutanix REST APIs allow you to create scripts that run system administration commands against the Nutanix cluster. The API enables the use of HTTP requests to get information about the cluster as well as make changes to the configuration. Output from the API calls are returned in JSON format
REST API explorer is great to make calls without the need of 3rd party applications and user-friendly
It was mentioned that Nutanix is working with Fortinet testing network security deployments using API calls. Hope to see this soon!
Capacity Planning
If for example you are planning to expand your environment, or identify over allocated resources, Nutanix offers a Capacity Planning Tool called Prism. Bear in mind that is not available for all licenses types.
For more information: https://www.nutanix.com/products/prism/planning/
Of course there are other topics very interesting, like the architecture and flexibility of this technology.
We encourage you to leave a us a message with your comments/thoughts and if you attended a session how was it.
Authors: Guillermo & Alicia