Tag Archives: capex

Nutanix NC2 – Direct to Cloud Value – Part 1

Posted on by
Reply

Nutanix “Cloud Clusters” a.k.a “NC2” was designed to enable customers to quickly and easily migrate from on premises environments into public cloud providers such as Amazon EC2 and Microsoft Azure and benefit from these offerings long list of business, architectural and technical advantages.

Two of the advantages which stand out to me are:

  1. Well understood standard architecture
  2. Global availability

The well understood architecture of both the Amazon and Azure offerings is incredibly valuable as organisations are largely protected from the underestimated cost & impact of “tribal knowledge” being lost with inevitable employee turnover.

The standard architecture is also highly valuable as both Microsoft and Amazon have extensive training and certification programmes to ensure customers can validate skills of potential employees and enable their existing staff.

The standard architecture also reduces many of the risks & cost of bespoke or custom designed environments where it’s almost impossible for customers (and even many vendors) to match the amount of architectural and engineering rigour as large companies such as Microsoft and Amazon can invest due to their incredible scale.

Now looking at the global availability of resources from both Amazon and Azure, this is extremely attractive as it enables customers to potentially deploy anywhere in the world and in a timely manner and reduce the risk of supply chain issues delaying projects and/or restoring resiliency to production environments after hardware failure/s.

Lets switch gears and look at NC2 and where it fits in.

For a long time now, I’ve be championing Nutanix HCI as the “standard platform for all workloads” as it allows customers to benefit from a well understood architecture which simplifies the traditional datacenter. This reduces the risks & cost of bespoke or custom designed environments and Nutanix training programmes ensure existing and future staff have or can develop the required skills.

However the problem with any on premises focused product/s are they’re all constrained by commercial challenges such as CAPEX, supply chain as well as organisational challenges such as change requests/approvals/windows and ultimately all of these negatively impact the time to value no matter how simple the deployment it’s once the equipment is delivered.

However with the introduction of NC2, customers benefit from the best of all worlds being Nutanix NC2 as the standard platform for all workloads which can be spanned from new/existing on premises deployments to public clouds providers such as Amazon and Azure.

Leveraging NC2 on Amazon and Azure effectively eliminates the commercial challenges (CAPEX & supply chain) and ensures the fastest possible time to value with new NC2 environments being able to be deployed in under 60 minutes. This partnership also enables customers have a true global reach available at their fingertips.

The ability to scale resources which provide increased performance & capacity to all workloads cluster wide) in minutes is also extremely valuable.

Summary

Nutanix NC2 provides a highly complimentary offering to AWS and Azure which enables customers to enjoy a simple, standard platform for all workloads across private and leveraging multiple public cloud providers and even operate across and migrate/failover between providers.

NC2 can also deliver higher performance, increased resiliency (business continuity) with lower risk, typically a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) while providing a genuine and relatively simple public cloud provider exit strategy.

In Part 2 we will dive into a detailed cost comparison of NC2.

A TCO Analysis of Pure FlashStack & Nutanix Enterprise Cloud

Posted on by
Reply

In helping to prepare this TCO with Steve Kaplan here at Nutanix, I’ll be honest and say I was a little surprised at the results.

The Nutanix Enterprise Cloud platform is the leading solution in the HCI space and it while it is aimed to deliver great business outcomes and minimise CAPEX,OPEX and TCO, the platform is not designed to be “cheap”.

Nutanix is more like the top of the range model from a car manufacturer with different customer requirements. Nutanix has options ranging from high end business critical application deployments to lower end products for ROBO, such as Nutanix Xpress model.

Steve and I agreed that our TCO report needed to give the benefit of the doubt to Pure Storage as we do not claim to be experts in their specific storage technology. We also decided that as experts in Nutanix Enterprise Cloud platform and employees of Nutanix, that we should minimize the potential for our biases towards Nutanix to come into play.

The way we tried to achieve the most unbiased view possible is to give no benefit of the doubt to the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud solution. While we both know the value that many of the Nutanix capabilities have (such as data reduction), we excluded these benefits and used configurations which could be argued at excessive/unnecessary such as vSphere or RF3 for data protection:

  1. No data reduction is assumed (Compression or Deduplication)
  2. No advantage for data locality in terms of reduced networking requirements or increased performance
  3. Only 20K IOPS @ 32K IO Size per All Flash Node
  4. Resiliency Factor 3 (RF3) for dual parity data protection which is the least capacity efficient configuration and therefore more hardware requirements.
  5. No Erasure Coding (EC-X) meaning higher overheads for data protection.
  6. The CVM is measured as an overhead with no performance advantage assumed (e.g.: Lower latency, Higher CPU efficiency from low latency, Data Locality etc)
  7. Using vSphere which means Nutanix cannot take advantage of AHV Turbo Mode for higher performance & lower overheads

On the other hand, the benefit of the doubt has been given to Pure Storage at every opportunity in this comparison including the following:

  1. 4:1 data reduction efficiency as claimed
  2. Only 2 x 10GB NICs required for VM and Storage traffic
  3. No dedicated FC switches or cables (same as Nutanix)
  4. 100% of claimed performance (IOPS capability) for M20,M50 and M70 models
  5. Zero cost for the project/change control/hands on work to swap Controllers as the solution scales
  6. IOPS based on the Pure Storage claimed average I/O size of 32K for all IO calculations

We invited DeepStorage and Vaughn Stewart of Pure Storage to discuss the TCO and help validate our assumptions, pricing, sizing and other details. Both parties declined.

Feedback/corrections regarding the Pure Storage sponsored Technical Report by DeepStorage was sent via Email, DeepStorage declined to discuss the issues and the report remains online with many factual errors and an array (pun intended) of misleading statements which I covered in detail in my Response to: DeepStorage.net Exploring the true cost of Converged vs Hyperconverged Infrastructure

It’s important to note that the Nutanix TCO report is based on the node configuration chosen by DeepStorage with only one difference: Nutanix sized for the same usable capacity, but went with an All Flash solution because comparing hybrid and all flash is apples and oranges and a pointless comparison.

With that said, the configuration DeepStorage chose does not reflect an optimally designed Nutanix solution. An optimally designed solution would likely result in fewer nodes by using 14c or 18c processors to match the high RAM configuration (512GB) and different (lower) capacity SSDs (such as 1.2TB or 1.6TB) which would deliver the same performance and still meet the capacity requirements which would result in a further advantage in both CAPEX, OPEX and TCO (Total Cost of Ownership).

The TCO shows that the CAPEX is typically in the favour of the Nutanix all flash solution. We have chosen to show the costs at different stages in scaling from 4 to 32 nodes – the same as the DeepStorage report. The FlashStack product had slightly lower CAPEX on a few occasions which is not surprising and also not something we tried to hide to make Nutanix always look cheaper.

One thing which was somewhat surprising is that even with the top of the range Pure M70 controllers and a relatively low IO per VM assumption of 250, above 24 nodes the Pure system could not support the required IOPS and an additional M20 needed to be added to the solution. What was not surprising is in the event an additional pair of controllers and SSD is added to the FlashStack solution, that the Nutanix solution had vastly lower CAPEX/OPEX and of course TCO. However, I wanted to show what the figures looked like if we assume IOPS was not a constraint for Pure FlashStack as could be the case in some customer environments as customer requirements vary.

PureVNutanixComparisonWithLowerIOPS

What we see above is the difference in CAPEX is still just 14.0863% at 28 nodes and 13.1272% difference at 32 nodes in favor of Pure FlashStack.

The TCO, however, is still in favor of Nutanix at 28 nodes by 8.88229% and 9.70447% difference at 32 nodes.

If we talk about the system performance capabilities, the Nutanix platform is never constrained by IOPS due to the scale out architecture.

Based on Pure Storage advertised performance and a conservative 20K IOPS (@ 32K) per Nutanix node, we see (below) that Nutanix IO capability is always ahead of Pure FlashStack, with the exception of a 4 node solution based on our conservative IO assumptions. In the real world, even if Nutanix was only capable of 20K IOPS per node, the platform vastly exceeds the requirements in this example (and in my experience, in real world solutions) even at 4 node scale.

PurevsNTNXIOPS

I’ve learned a lot, as well as re-validated some things I’ve previously discovered, from the exercise of contributing to this Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) analysis.

Some of the key conclusions are:

  1. In many real world scenarios, data reduction is not required to achieve a lower TCO than a competing product which leverages data reduction.
  2. Even the latest/greatest dual controller SANs still suffer the same problems of legacy storage when it comes to scaling to support capacity/IO requirements
  3. The ability to scale without rip/replace storage controllers greatly simplifies customers sizing
  4. Nutanix has a strong advantage in Power, Cooling, Rack Space and therefore helps avoid additional datacenter related costs.
  5. Even the top of the range All Flash array from arguably the top vendor in the market (Pure Storage) cannot match the performance (IOPS or throughput) of Nutanix.

The final point I would like to make is the biggest factor which dictates the cost of any platform, be it the CAPEX, OPEX or TCO is the requirements, constraints, risks and assumptions. Without these, and a detailed TCO any discussion of cost has no basis and should be disregarded.

In our TCO, we have detailed the requirements, which are in line with the DeepStorage report but go further to make a solution have context. The Nutanix TCO report covers the high level requirements and assumptions in the Use Case Descriptions.

Without further ado, here is the link to the Total Cost of Ownership comparison between Pure FlashStack and Nutanix Enterprise Cloud platform along with the analysis by Steve Kaplan.

Problem: ROBO/Dark Site Management, Solution: XCP + AHV

Posted on by
3

Problem:

Remote office / Branch Office commonly referred to as “ROBO” and dark sites (i.e.: offices without local support staff and/or network connectivity to a central datacenter) are notoriously difficult to design, deploy and manage.

Why have infrastructure at ROBO?

The reason customers have infrastructure at ROBO and/or Dark Sites is because these sites require services which cannot be provided centrally due to any number of constraints such as WAN bandwidth/latency/availability or, more frequently, security constraints.

Challenges:

Infrastructure at ROBO and/or dark sites need to be functional, highly available and performant without complexity. The problem is as the functional requirements of the ROBO/dark Sites are typically not dissimilar to the infrastructure in the datacenter/s, the complexity of these sites can be equal to the primary datacenter if not greater due to the reduced budgets for ROBOs.

This means in many cases the same management stack needs to be designed on a smaller scale, deployed and somehow managed at these remote/secure sites with minimal to no I.T presence onsite.

Alternatively, Management may be ran centrally but this can have its own challenges especially when WAN links are high latency/low bandwidth or unreliable/offline.

Typical ROBO deployment requirements.

Typical requirements are in many cases not dis-similar to those of the SMB or enterprise and include things like High Availability (HA) for VMs, so a minimum of 2 nodes and some shared storage. Customers also want to ensure ROBO sites can be centrally managed without deployment of complex tooling at each site.

ROBO and Dark Sites are also typically deployed because in the event of WAN connectivity loss, it is critical for the site to continue to function. As a result, it is also critical for the infrastructure to gracefully handle failures.

So let’s summarise typical ROBO requirements:

  • VM High Availability
  • Shared Storage
  • Be fully functional when WAN/MAN is down
  • Low/no touch from I.T
  • Backup/Recovery
  • Disaster Recovery

Solution:

Nutanix Xtreme Computing Platform (XCP) including PRISM and Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV).

Now let’s dive into with XCP + PRISM + AHV is a great solution for ROBO.

A) Native Cross Hypervisor & Cloud Backup/Recovery & DR

Backup/Recovery and DR are not easy things to achieve or manage for ROBO deployments. Luckily these capabilities are built-in to Nutanix XCP. This includes the ability to take point in time application consistent snapshots and replicate those to local/remote XCP clusters & Cloud Providers (AWS/Azure). These snapshots can be considered backups once replicated to a 2nd location (ideally offsite) as well as be kept locally on primary storage for fast recovery.

ROBO VMs replicated to remote/central XCP deployments can be restored onto either ESXi or Hyper-V via the App Mobility Fabric (AMF) so running AHV at the ROBO has no impact on the ability to recover centrally if required.

This is just another way Nutanix is ensuring customer choice and proves the hypervisor is well and truely a commodity.

In addition XCP supports integration with the market leader in data protection, Commvault.

B) Built in Highly Available, Distributed Management and Monitoring

When running AHV, all XCP, PRISM and AHV management, monitoring and even the HTML 5 GUI are built in. The management stack requires no design, sizing, installation , scaling or 3rd party backend database products such as SQL/Oracle.

For those of you familiar with the VMware stack, XCP + AHV provides capabilities provided by vCenter, vCenter Heartbeat, vRealize Operations Manager, Web Client, vSphere Data Protection, vSphere Replication. And it does this in a highly available and distributed manner.

This means, in the event of a node failure, the management layer does not go down. If the Acropolis Master node goes down, the Master roles are simply taken over by an Acropolis Slave within the cluster.

As a result, the ROBO deployment management layer is self healing which dramatically reduces the complexity and and all but removes the requirement for onsite attendance by I.T.

C) Scalability and Flexibility

XCP with AHV ensures than even when ROBO deployments need to scale to meet compute or storage requirements, the platform does not need to be re-architected, engineered or optimised.

Adding a node is as simple as plugging it in, turning it on and the cluster can be expanded not disruptively via PRISM (locally or remotely) in just a few clicks.

When the equipment becomes end of life, XCP also allows nodes to be non-disruptively removed from clusters and new nodes added, which means after the initial deployment, ongoing hardware replacements can be done without major redesign/reconfiguration of the environment.

In fact, deployment of new nodes can be done by people onsite with minimal I.T knowledge and experience.

D) Built-in One Click Maintenance, Upgrades for the entire stack.

XCP supports one-click, non-disruptive upgrades of:

  • Acropolis Base Software (NDSF layer),
  • Hypervisor (agnostic)
  • Firmware
  • BIOS

This means there is no need for onsite I.T staff to perform these upgrades and XCP eliminates potential human error by fully automating the process. All upgrades are performed one node at a time and only started if the cluster is in a resilient state to ensure maximum uptime. Once one node is upgraded, it is validated as being successful (Similar to a Power on self test or POST) before the next node proceeds. In the event an upgrade fails, the cluster will remain online as I have described in this post.

These upgrades can also be done centrally via PRISM Central.

E) Full Self Healing Capabilities

As I have already touched on, XCP + AHV is a fully self healing platform. From the Storage (NDSF) layer to the virtualization layer (AHV) through to management (PRISM) the platform can fully self heal without any intevenston from I.T admins.

With Nutanix XCP you do not need expensive hardware support contracts or to worry about potential subsequent failures, because the system self heals and does not depend on hardware replacement as I have described in hardware support contracts & why 24×7 4 hour onsite should no longer be required.

Anyone who has ever managed a multi-site environment knows how much effort hardware replacement is, as well as the fact that replacements must be done in a timely manner which can delay other critical work. This is why Nutanix XCP is designed to be distributed and self healing as we want to reduce the workload for sysadmins.

F) Ease of Deployment

All of the above features and functionality can be quickly/easily deployed from out of the box to fully operational ready to run VMs in just minutes.

The Management/Monitoring solutions do not require detailed design (sizing/configuration) as they are all built in and they scale as nodes are added.

G) Reduced Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)

When it comes down to it, ROBO deployments can be critical to the success of a company and trying to do things “cheaper” rarely ends up actually being cheaper. Nutanix XCP may not be the cheapest (CAPEX) but we will be the lowest TCO which is after all what matters.

If you’re a sysadmin and you don’t think you can get any more efficient after reading the above than what you’re doing today, its because you already run XCP + AHV 🙂

In all seriousness, sysadmin’s should be innovating and providing value back to the business. If they are instead spending any significant time “keeping the lights on” for ROBO deployments then their valuable time is not being well utilised.

Summary:

Nutanix XCP + AHV provides all the capabilities required for typical ROBO deployments while reducing the initial implementation and ongoing operational cost/complexity.

With Acropolis Operating System 4.6 and the cross hypervisor backup/recovery/DR capabilities thanks to the App Mobility Fabric (AMF), there is no need to be concerned about the underlying hypervisor as it has become a commodity.

AHV performance and availability is on par if not better than other hypervisors on the market as is clear from several points we have discussed.

Related Articles:

  1. Why Nutanix Acropolis hypervisor (AHV) is the next generation hypervisor
  2. Hardware support contracts & why 24×7 4 hour onsite should no longer be required.