Storage
Nutanix server-storage half-bloods armed with Xeon E5s
Nutanix, which uncloaked last year peddling a virtualisation-driven all-in-one compute-and-storage appliance, is updating its server iron to keep pace with the rest of the tier-one players while also tweaking its underlying systems software. And the startup hopes to tweak its NX series of converged appliances to cope with a …
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Really? Wow!.... so what?
it's an x86 server. I fail to see any innovation worth mentioning. They package a hypervisor with some flash and claim massive over-committed VMs, which I'm calling Raspberries on.
With hyper-threading turned on that's 32 HW threads - or simple arithmetic shows 1 VM: 0.08 HW threads (or 0.04 without).
Memory: (256GB - ~24 Hypervisor overhead) / 400 = 580MB avg.. Tell me what modern OS or app can run in that?
Storage? Presuming 100% raw space available (5.7TB) which would be absolute lunacy to run JBOD, that's ~14GB per VM on average.
So what's the innovation here, and why should we care? You could get a jr. admin to put this together.
Re: Really? Wow!.... so what?
let me help you ..
they don't claim there is anything special about the hardware - just the opposite, that it's standard commodity x86 gear... however....
assuming you are talking about their claim of 400 VM's per 2U cluster ( which contains 4 nodes )
4 nodes, each with 16 cores is 64 cores in total plus hyperthreading is 128 threads - so 400/128 = 3.125 - slightly heavy maybe but for knowledge worker desktops not unreasonable
256GB of memory in each node - which is 1TB of memory - divide this by 400 and you get 2.5GB of memory per VM - seems ok to me
Storage again 4 nodes each of 5TB raw gives 20TB RAW - lets assume mirroring so 10TB protected storage - divide that by 400 ( assuming there is no de-dupe of templates etc .. which there is ) would be 25GB per VM - again not unreasonable. With de-dupe of the base images this number would rise dramatically.
The clever part being they take jbod in each node - and form a fully protected clustered filesystem across all nodes - with data replicated across the cluster for protection
The innovation is a cluster that scales linearly in small increments, that provides a single global namespace that looks just like a SAN ( data protection/snapshots/replication/compression all built in ) from local storage - whilst providing the performance of flash storage through the use of automatically tiered data.
If you know a junior sys admin who could build this - he/she shouldn't be a junior sys admin, but running their own company ....
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