College graduates to Nutanix Recordsdata hyper-converged NAS

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The College of Discovering out had already deployed Nutanix hyper-converged infrastructure so it made sense so that you would possibly perchance well add Nutanix Recordsdata when its ageing NAS containers bit the mud

Antony Adshead

Antony Adshead,
Storage Editor

Printed: 15 Jul 2020 9: 00

The College of Discovering out has deployed Nutanix Recordsdata to interchange an ageing community-attached storage (NAS) infrastructure of NetApp filers and Gluster storage. The instrument-primarily based mostly product is an add-on to the university’s existing Nutanix hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) property, which runs to more than 0.5PB (petabytes) in ability.

The deployment has allowed it to present researchers self-carrier score entry to to a pool of storage and has minimize storage administration time to almost zero when put next with the previous setup.

The College of Discovering out has more than 50 review centres in areas that include agricultural, biological and bodily sciences, and meteorology. The university has round 5,000 college contributors and 20,000 students.

“The NetApp and Gluster had been long-established know-how with a series of considerations,” acknowledged infrastructure services manager Kevin Mortimer. “The NetApp used to be out of enhance and had a 1Gbps community card, in disclose that used to be a bottleneck. It used to be comely 10 years within the past, nonetheless as compute has improved it used to be blocked on the community level.

“With Gluster, the enhance contractor went bust, so we had to negotiate our device out of that order.”

Overall, acknowledged Mortimer, the university’s existing file score entry to storage used to be long-established, gradual and wasn’t in a characteristic to scale any further.

The establishment already had a Nutanix hyper-converged deployment and Nutanix Recordsdata – a NAS product that works from the Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV) used to be added to that.

As Mortimer described it, Nutanix Recordsdata used to be deployed on further hardware and rolled out by “a one-click on cluster join” where storage swimming pools had been assigned and data migrated from NetApp and Gluster. Nutanix Recordsdata is managed from Nutanix Prism.

The additional hardware comprised 12 nodes built round Dell XC series servers with 80TB (terabytes) of blended flash and spinning disk HDD ability in every. That’s no longer far off 1PB of NAS ability, and that’s no longer accounting for data low cost that has boosted usable storage by about 16:1 on common.

The main profit for Mortimer – except for gaining nearly a petabyte of NAS storage – is that the onerous management overhead that got right here with the ageing NetApp and Gluster legacy ambiance has all nonetheless disappeared.

“We don’t ever witness at it,” he acknowledged of the Nutanix deployment. “We don’t must actively music performance. The researchers are very demanding. They wish the quickest performance which you can presumably imagine, nonetheless they fair desire it for an hour per week and previously we frolicked gazing it for bottlenecks.

“The main advantages are round performance,” acknowledged Mortimer, who furthermore spoke about the increasing utilize of self-carrier to permit researchers to provision storage for their initiatives by Nutanix Peaceable.

The university has furthermore added Nutanix Physique desktop-as-a-carrier to create its corporate customers with score entry to to business programs staunch thru Covid-19.

Three years within the past, the College of Discovering out consolidated round 600TB of information on legacy storage to Nutanix in a deployment that value up to £400,000 on the time, nonetheless which used to be anticipated to attach £500,000 in completed without VMware costs.

Nutanix has been a pioneer of hyper-converged infrastructure, staunch thru which compute and storage are introduced collectively in nodes that would furthermore be in-built scale-out fashion into clusters.

Scream Continues Beneath