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tdubb123
Expert
Expert

nutanix

anyone using this? and provide some feedback? can this replace san and servers?

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mcowger
Immortal
Immortal

I have a few customers that have played with it and thought it was neat.

It can replace servers and array if you only need SAN for VMware uses.  If you have other hosts you need to provide storage too, you are SoL.

--Matt VCDX #52 blog.cowger.us
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joshobrien77
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I am a Nutanix user.  I am the CTO of Language Access Network.  Prior to taking this job I was at a Cisco Gold partner selling DC and Enterprise systems as a design and deployment engineer.  My core products for the last few years were Cisco UCS, Netapp and Nexus gear.

We are in the process of deploying multiple DC locaions accross the US with a first of it kind video call center product.  I looked at the cost of doing UCS, Nexus and Netapp as my platform and was pretty shocked at how little I got for my cash outlay.  It was around the time I was doing this that Nutanix came out of stealth and when I heard about them durring Storage Tech Field Day I called that day and asked for a quote.

Long story short for a significant reduction in cost I ended up with 20TB raw of high performance storage and 4 compute nodes.  We are in the process of spinning the product into production this month running MS SQL, Dynamics CRM, Sharepoint and multiple other products withing our VMWare enviroment on Nutanix.

What Nutanix does structurally for me that no other product did was allow me to buy one block and and build our greenfield enviroment then dynamically witha  set cost point increase both my storage and compute with 0 downtime and withouth hardware replacement.  From a TOR (Top Of Rack) switch perspective I chose Arista and I use it affectivly as a "DC Fabric"  with the VM integration features.  Its an amazing pairing.

Again we are just now getting ready to go live and expand into new DCs and I have plans to deploy another 3 to 7 of the Blocks in the next 4 months.

As the other gentleman noted this is storage for you VM/Nutanix array only.  However we have addressed this with the team at Nutanix (BTW they are amazing!  They go out of their way to make sure you succeed with their product!) and you can externally access the storage array as an iSCSI source for data transfer.  However at this time there is not VIP that allows resilliant use of the array from external systems.  I see this opeing up more over time but you should talk to one of their SEs for more details.

Any other questions?

I'm on Twitter as joshobrien77 if you want to engage me there or I will keep checking this thread.

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17outs
Contributor
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I have a good bit of experience with this product.  I was an early adopter, and really tested this system out long before I ever put it in production.  I originally looked at them because my current NetApp was so slow and took up 6 RU.  I had three 1 RU servers.  There were several copies of this in several stages of the SDLC.  I ended up replacing each one with a Nutanix block.  I went from 9RU to 2RU.  1gb to 10gb.  3k IOPS storage to 25k IOPS storage.  Great consolidation for the space/cost.

Like others said they are purpose built for VMs and the storage is optimized for that.  You can't export native NFS to guest OSs.  You would need to make a NFS server VM to do so.

I have been very pleased with this purchase and company.  I have been very impressed with support.  Nutanix is not a one size fits everything, but they can fit many of them.  I had a very high capacity requirement that it didn't make sense for, but overall I am an extremely pleased customer.

@kjolivier

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Josh26
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

In the interests of transparency...

Can you confirm that two users actually came across this query within hours of each other, and joined this forum just so your first and only posts could be to write a marketing spiel about Nutanix?

Or was it a case of Nutanix sales having a hand on this.

Anyone who shows up on Youtube talking about a product hardly sounds like an average user just sharing an experience.

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17outs
Contributor
Contributor

Hi Josh, fair point.

I didn't just join the forum.  I have many posts over the course of 4 years.  VMware consolidated my accounts with the new portal, and I haven't posted for awhile.

Nutanix did interview me about my experience at VMworld (which is on youtube) this year simply because I was an early adopting customer.

I think my comments were fair.  I didn't get on here and evangelize about how Nutanix is the best thing for virtualized infrastructures since sliced bread or anything.  Hardly a sales pitch.  I'm just an engineer who uses their product.  It's a great one, but it's not the end all be all best fit for every situation appliance in my opinion just like I mentioned above.

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mcowger
Immortal
Immortal

It seems a bit odd agreed, but I tend to give people the benefit of the doubt, especially given that the 2 accounts have wildly different creation dates.  That, and clver startup products tend to have ardent supporters!  Will ping one of the other super-mods to double check Smiley Happy

--Matt VCDX #52 blog.cowger.us
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LukasLundell
Contributor
Contributor

Hello Josh,

I do work at Nutanix (Support though, not Sales) and can confirm these statements are coming from our actual awesome (and paying) customers.  We do our best to take care of our customer base and we hope they write nice things about our product and customer support!  We need their experiences, ideas, critical feedback, and positive reinforcement to reach our true potential as a company.  Without customers a business really means nothing... and I think the best 'marketing spiel' is anything that is coming from the perspective of an actual customer, solicited or unsolicited.  A customer is the most valuable part of our company.

We have well over 150 systems shipped (http://tcrn.ch/Slzeyh) and happen to know the majority of our customers quite well (by design!).  At one point VMware and Netapp were in the same position.  They had the same passionate initial customer base to support them in their transition from being visionaries to the point in which they displaced incumbent solutions and became market standards.

For a company that is just over 1 year on the market, there is not really such a thing as an average user.  These folks were early adopters that see and appreciate the vision of a company and team proposing drastic change and creating a new market by converging two traditionally disjoint markets.

I joined the team at Nutanix just over 1 year ago.  Before that, I was a datacenter architect and consultant for large government intelligence and fortune 100 customers.  I had never worked for a product vendor before this, I was always on the consulting side.  I produced BOMs, designs, and built several $MM Tier 3 datacenters using dell/hp/netapp/cisco/junniper/emc/etc.  I never enjoyed how much %$ of those BOMs that traditional SAN/NAS storage ate up, and how rigid the scalability for traditional storage was (when CPU is saturated on your redundant filers, purchase another 250k+ system...). While doing research on alternative products and ideas, I ran into Nutanix.  I spoke with the team and was sold --- I have never ran into such an talented group of engineers with this level of ambition and work ethic.  I decided to uproot my family from the midwest to move to the valley just to join as a vendor employee and try and do something about my concerns with the storage market and the afformentioned status quo.

My (definately from a vendor) input may be biased, but it is my honest perspective and opinion at least and I hope you can appreciate that.  There are no conspiracies here... just a bunch of hardworking people delivering on a vision and a passionate and supportive customer base who has stood by us as we continue to mature, improve, and expand on our product.

We try and be champions for our customers, and in turn, some have been great champions for us.

Here are some more great customers from VMworld USA 2012: http://www.youtube.com/user/Nutanix

Cheers!

Lukas Lundell

PS: Hopefully can get a few more customers to chime in... or perhaps I will create a bunch of accounts on VMware forums and do it myself... If you see anyone with an account creation date of 10/10/2012 or later, that is actually me pretending to be a customer =)...

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joshobrien77
Contributor
Contributor

Josh,

I see your point.  First of to be fully transparent one of my contacts at Nutanix did reach out to me and ask if I was willing to respond in this forum.  However I do not work for Nutanix I am a customer.  For even more transparency please read http://www.staticnat.com/WP/2012/08/28/vmworld-2012-full-disclosure-statement/ .  I have been a VMWare customer for years but with both ESX and the desktop products but in the end I am a network engineer and have not egaged the commuity often so I don't have other posts in here.

The reality is that for years I sold Cisco products and put my name and my career on the line every time I sold another project.  Now that I am a client I am willing to put my name on the line for products that I have choosen to use in our buissiness.  If was not willing to do this then there would be something wrong with my ethics.  I have talked to multiple potential Nutanix clients and I have been honest with them and shown them the good the bad and the ugly of the product.  Nutanix themselves has no issue telling prospective clients that as an early adopter of their product I was also the first data loss for a client and how we resolved the issue.

So if this came accross as sales or PR bs then feel free to look into who I am and how I interact in the community at large.  I am part of the Tech Field day group and have been asked to be part of that group based on my independant views on technology.  But again if it is good enough for me to spend my employers money on I better be ready to defend the product in the market as well.

Please feel free to reach out to me if you have more questions about me or nutanix.

on twitter as joshobrien77

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meistermn
Expert
Expert

The nutanix platform was developed for vdi.

Why not using it as vm appliaction server farm.

At the moment we are using hp and dell server and netapp storage.

Netapp storage has sometimes  scale  problems.

what i like of nutanix is, in every node you have fusion io controller so enough Write IOps and with every added node you get more.

Allthough the nutanix solution seems to be easier to manage than a vmware /san solution.

I am very interrested in the monitoring of nutanix . If you but o monitor netapp with third party tools that is extremly expensive.

With vmware viops there must be no extra costs for local disks?

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17outs
Contributor
Contributor

I am out of the office on personal vacation with intermittent access to email. I will return 26NOV2012. Thanks.

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meistermn
Expert
Expert

Some new about version 3.0

Now Version 3.0 of nutanix is coming out.

http://www.nutanix.com/launch/

Want to see DR Solution in a video

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k845
Contributor
Contributor

We are currently looking at the product as well.  I would like to know if people have only desktops on the system or everything.  They recomend having all server needed for the enviroemnt on the system, including DB and AD server.  What type of CPU, Memeory and Disk performance numbers are you seeing.  Also did have VDI installed before looking at this product. What type of user are using the VDI desktops.

Thanks for any help.

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vango99
Contributor
Contributor

I have been lookin at Nutanix in great detail and it actually has some unique value however the marketing spin around it is too much.

So to answer your question does it replace SAN :NO. Nutanix in itself is a converged virtual SAN. Lets look at NUTANX is a little bit of detail. Each NUTANIX block has 20 SATA disks and 4 SATA SSDs. Each nutanix node runs a vm labeled "Controller". the controller is tasked to synchronize the disks across nodes and blocks. Does any of this sound familiar to anybody?

Now the way this is GOOD different in that the admin does not have to worry about doing any additional complicated provisioning around this SAN. This concept is very similar to the ONEFS filesystem in EMC ISILON

So could there be any BAD side effect to this. Well I think so. So if you think about it you are now sharing your valuable resources (Network, Memory and compute) for both SAN functions (i.e. Replication, SYnchronization, Data healing, etc.) and business functions (i.e. PCOIP, Oracle, ms SQL). To me as an architect that sounds fundamentally flawed but that can be a whole another conversation.

I am also not impressed by the hardware specification. For example each node has only one primary 10Gig connectity and two 1Gig connections for backup purposes and the memory is limited to 256GB even after expansion (expansion BTW means additional COST).

Now lets talk about bottom line. I contend that  the lower memory specification and the resource overhead imposed  by the extra layer of convergence removes NUTANIX's COST advantage if sizing is done correctly.

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