Nutanix rolls out new OS for virtualised data centres

• New web-scale technologies to help businesses achieve scale and agility
• Admins can proactively monitor system resources end-to-end

DATA centre infrastructure solutions provider Nutanix has launched its Nutanix Operating System (NOS) 4.0, the latest release of the intelligent software powering its Virtual Computing Platform.
 
With the new OS, Nutanix said it delivers the benefits of web-scale IT to virtualised data centres as a simple turnkey solution without compromising enterprise-class functionality or requiring a radical overhaul of the environment.
 
NOS 4.0 features and improvements include end-to-end system analytics and multi-cluster management in the control fabric, along with tuneable resilience and powerful distributed data services in the data fabric, the company said in a statement.
 
“The future of simple and cost-efficient virtual data centres is now, and organisations in Malaysia are taking advantage of web-scale technologies to achieve the scale and agility their business environments demand,” said Lim Pun Kok, Nutanix managing director for Asean and India.
 
“We’re very excited to release these new capabilities and improvements to assist enterprise IT leaders looking for an alternative to the slow pace of traditional IT.
 
“NOS 4.0 will continue to reshape routine IT workflows in a fundamental way,” he claimed.
 
The new enhancements bring business agility, operational effectiveness and the ability to handle unpredictable growth to enterprise environments running business-critical applications, Nutanix said.
 
There is a common misconception that the benefits of web-scale infrastructure are limited to environments with massive amounts of data and millions of concurrent users.
 
However, according to May, 2013 Gartner research report, Use Web-Scale IT to Make Enterprise IT Competitive With the Cloud, “web-scale IT is not just for large companies or IT organisations. It also doesn’t presuppose a need for massive computing power, although that may also be a need.”
 
NOS 4.0 also features Prism Central, which enables administrators to manage multiple Nutanix clusters across many different locations from a single pane of glass. Administrators at a global retailer can now, for example, centrally manage remote IT resources in hundreds of stores – bringing efficiencies not possible with traditional infrastructure.
 
Prism Central also provides administrators with an aggregate view of health and resources across all clusters, while still allowing individual, per-cluster management.
 
Another feature is Cluster Health, a new Prism module that gives administrators comprehensive visibility of the health of a cluster.
 
Cluster Health adds to the value of converged infrastructure by giving administrators the ability to proactively monitor system resources end-to-end, and to diagnose and resolve potential issues with the intuitive visual navigation interface in a fraction of the time compared to traditional infrastructure, Nutanix claimed.
 
Finally, NOS 4.0 also enhances existing Nutanix deduplication technology with new MapReduce Deduplication, a powerful post-process deduplication capability that boosts the effective storage capacity of an entire cluster.
 
Unlike deduplication in traditional storage arrays, MapReduce Deduplication is highly distributed and automatically runs on all nodes in the cluster, allowing functionality to scale out as the cluster grows.
 
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