Nutanix Volumes Block Storage
Scale-Out Volumes Block Storage Built for the Acropolis OS
Nutanix Volumes Block Storage
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Volumes Block Storage bridges the physical and virtual infrastructure, combining them into one unified platform with the simplicity that enterprises have grown to rely on.
Overview:
Bridging the Worlds of Physical and Virtual
Despite the many benefits of virtualization, some workloads often remain on bare-metal servers because of licensing constraints, legacy application portability, or investments in existing infrastructure. In this context, storage silos for these non-virtualized workloads continue to exist. ABS eliminates these silos by delivering the same simplicity Nutanix offers for virtualized workloads and file storage for physical workloads. In so doing, ABS bridges the physical and virtual worlds, consolidating infrastructure into a single unified platform.
Not Just Another Block Device
ABS exposes storage from Nutanix through direct, block-level iSCSI access while maintaining high availability, scalability, and performance to the physical or virtual servers accessing Nutanix storage. Applications including Oracle RAC, Microsoft SQL Server, and IBM DB2 can run outside of the Nutanix cluster on either bare-metal or virtualized servers. ABS is built with web-scale technology at the core for effortless scaling, even from a small starting footprint. As a result of the consolidation, all applications can now use the same infrastructure for virtualization, file, and block services. This can significantly increase efficiency, reduce risks, and make management a breeze.
ABS for Production Three-tier Applications
ABS enables the production database tier to run on bare-metal servers, while the web and application tiers run on virtualized infrastructure.
ABS for Server Investment Protection
When IT amortization cycles are misaligned and storage is being retired but servers are not, ABS can be used as a bridge to a fully hyperconverged environment. Initially, ABS can be used to replace the storage being retired. Once the servers are also ready for retirement, it is a simple matter to move the applications onto Nutanix running as hyperconverged virtual machines. Since the application’s data remains unchanged on the cluster, moving them is an easy, copy-free operation.
ABS for Development and Test
Nutanix native clones can be used to clone a production bare metal database already using ABS for its storage for more efficient workflows. This can include leveraging virtualization for development and test databases, then running staging and production databases on bare metal using ABS.
Innovating on Block Storage
Nutanix manages storage allocation and assignment for ABS through Volume Groups (VG). A VG is a collection of volumes known as virtual disks (vdisks). ABS presents VGs to both VMs and physical servers as iSCSI LUNs. Once the servers are whitelisted inside the Prism management interface, the LUNs are discovered through the iSCSI discovery process over a single virtual IP called the Data Services IP. Space savings are inherent in the platform, as vdisks are thinly provisioned and deduplication, compression, and erasure coding can be set in a straight-forward manner. Because iSCSI is used as the block protocol, servers accessing ABS can utilize existing network infrastructure. One of the biggest benefits available by adopting ABS is that client-side configurations can be dramatically simplified, without requiring Multipath Input Output (MPIO) to achieve scale, load balancing, and high availability.
