We are pleased to announce that Principled Technologies has acquired Demartek.
Demartek Evaluation: Nutanix Delivers Intelligent Hyperconverged Infrastructure for Web-Scale End User Experience
August 2017
Hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) is a software architecture that manages multiple clustered nodes of tightly-integrated server, networking and storage technology together as a whole unit. HCI has matured to offer standard enterprise features, however implementation differences between vendors can affect performance, limit efficacy of enterprise features, and complicate cluster management.
Hyper-converged systems offer a unique computing environment where a VM and its data can exist on the same node, forgoing the need for the SAN and separate storage management common in traditional data center environments, while at the same time having the ability to leverage an entire cluster of nodes for data protection, continuity, and compute-heavy tasks. The system designer has to put some thought into the implementation in order to take advantage of these divergent HCI characteristics of locality and data distribution, otherwise performance will suffer as data is perpetually pulled from a node across the network, or only one node is used to rebuild data after a failure. A well-thought-out solution like Nutanix will make intelligent decisions, taking advantage of the HCI environment instead of suffering from it.
A complete HCI solution like Nutanix will implement necessary enterprise features in a new, HCI-specific way and simplify management, allowing all nodes, compute, storage, and networking to be managed from one place. Instead of trying to force legacy data center implementations that do not work onto a new, software-defined platform, deduplication and compression need to be intelligently toggled, granular control of Replication Factor (RF) needs to be given, and hardware RAID should be replaced with HCI-specific erasure coding. Simplified management structures should be Web-scale, offer easy 1-click upgrades, conversions between different hypervisors, and native backup solutions that empower a single IT staff member to manage tens of thousands of VMs.
Nutanix commissioned Demartek to perform a third-party analysis of its hyper-converged solution on Cisco UCS and HPE ProLiant compared to three competitors: HyperFlex on Cisco UCS, HPE SimpliVity, and VMware VSAN. We found that in intelligent data placement, enterprise feature implementation, and simplified management, Nutanix offered a more thought-out solution for optimal performance, feature set, and management.
