Why Nutanix Adopted Web-Scale Infrastructure Concept ?

Nutanix works on milestone millionaire concept that is called “Web-scale Infrastructure concept” Nutanix was found in 2009 by Mr. Dheeraj pandey to simplify the three tier infratructure complexity (compute, storage and networking).
The huge question was how to sort out this issue ?
What kind of technology concept can resolve this issue forever ?

The answers was hidden in web-scaling over the internet, websites ever rapidly increasing and scaling out volume day by day without any disruption.
So, Nutanix developed extraordinary intelligent Acropolis operating system ( AOS ) that works on web-scale infrastructure concept along with hyper converged technology.

Nutanix Web-scale Infrastructure

What is Web-scale : Web-scale is a new architectural approach to infrastructure and computing to push the limit of expansion of infrastructure to adding nodes without any downtime as web expanding itself over the internet day by day.

There is four constructs ( Pillars ) to build up web-scale infrastructure

1. Hyper-convergence
2. Software defined intelligence
3. Distributed autonomous systems
4. Incremental and linear scale out

Hyper-convergence

Hyperconverge is the core concept to natively integrate two or more components into single unit to work together and scale out easily.
Nutanix natively integrate components (compute + storage + networking ) in single unit called node and made it hyper converged.

Benefits of Hyper convergence

• Combines the components in single unit to work together
• Minimum or no hop between components to increase transmission speed
• Easily scale out the infrastructure to adding the node(s)
• Localize I/O
• No RAID storage technology
• No Storage Area Network – SAN switch required like fiber channel
• No complexity in connectivity
• Require minimum rack space and cooling
• One click upgrade software and firmware
• Easily scale up ( compute + storage) and scale out ( infrastructure i.e adding nodes)

Software Defined Intelligence

Software defined intelligence is core logic from any normal or proprietary hardware feature(s) or function, develop in software defined to minimize the hardware dependency to do the same work. example : storage array was handled by RAID hardware card but now it is software defined to handle storage functions.
In Nutanix controller VM (CVM) is the software defined storage data plane that handles storage I/O and data management, storage performance etc.

Benefits of software defined intelligence

• No more 100 % dependency on hardware
• No more hardware failure in software defined functions
• No more firmware upgrade needed
• Minimize the hardware cost
• No downtime to upgrade the software defined programs
• Compatibility with proprietary commodity hardware
• Easily scale up the software defined programs
• Lower cost
• Get advance and new feature(s) on each upgrade
• Lifespan investment protection, no hardware depreciation on software

Distributed Autonomous Systems

Distributed autonomous system distribute the job among the nodes in the same cluster to balance the workload and system basic tasks unlike traditional concept having the single hardware unit responsible to do everything i.e production workload and system basic tasks.

Traditionally, vendors have assumed that hardware will be reliable, which, in most cases can be true.  However, core to distributed systems is the idea that hardware will eventually fail and handling that fault in an elegant and non-disruptive way is key.

Distributed systems are designed to accommodate and remediate failure, to form something that is self-healing and autonomous.  In the event of a component failure, the system will transparently handle and remediate the failure, continuing to operate as expected. Alerting will make the user aware, but rather than being a critical time-sensitive item, any remediation (e.g. replace a failed node) can be done on the admin’s schedule.  Another way to put it is fail in-place (rebuild without replace) For items where a “master” is needed, an election process is utilized. In the event this master fails a new master is elected.  To distribute the processing of tasks MapReduce concepts are leveraged.

Benefits of distributed autonomous system

• Distributing roles and responsibilities to all nodes within the system
• Utilizing concepts like MapReduce to perform distributed processing of tasks
• Using an election process in the case where a “master” is needed
• Eliminates any single points of failure (SPOF)
• Distributes workload to eliminate any bottlenecks

Incremental and linear scale out

Incremental and linear scale out relates to the ability to start with a certain set of resources and as needed scale them out while linearly increasing the performance of the system.  All of the constructs mentioned above are critical enablers in making this a reality. For example, traditionally you’d have 3-layers of components for running virtual workloads: servers, storage, and network – all of which are scaled independently.  As an example, when you scale out the number of servers you’re not scaling out your storage performance. With a hyper-converged platform like Nutanix, when you scale out with new node(s) you’re scaling out:

Benefits of Incremental and linear scale out

• The number of hypervisor / compute nodes
• The number of storage controllers
• The compute and storage performance / capacity
• The number of nodes participating in cluster wide operations
• The ability to incrementally scale storage / compute with linear increases to performance / ability
• The ability to start small and scale
• Uniform and consistent performance at any scale

Conclusion

After reading out the Web-scale infrastructure concept completely, you can understand the strength of it, that’s why i used two words ” milestone millionaire ” in beginning of the blog that made the Nutanix world’s number #1 hyperconverged leader.
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