Hyperconvergence on Ryan Orban

Data Center Upstarts Take On Hewlett-Packard and EMC

me@ryanorban.com (Ryan Orban) — Fri, 06 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Summary

This Businessweek piece from December 2013 covered the emerging hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) wave, led by Nutanix and other startups taking market share from incumbents HP and EMC in enterprise data centers.

Nutanix Adds Memory and Flash De-duplication

me@ryanorban.com (Ryan Orban) — Tue, 20 Aug 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Summary

The Register reported on Nutanix OS updates adding deduplication at both the memory (RAM) and flash tiers of their hyper-converged infrastructure platform. Memory-tier deduplication is particularly valuable in VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) environments: when hundreds of VMs run the same operating system, identical memory pages can share physical RAM rather than being duplicated per-VM. Flash deduplication reduces write amplification and extends SSD lifespan.

Nutanix OS 3.5: Performance and Style

me@ryanorban.com (Ryan Orban) — Tue, 20 Aug 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Summary

Nutanix released NOS (Nutanix Operating System) 3.5 in August 2013, a significant update to their hyper-converged infrastructure platform that added data deduplication, compression, and performance improvements across their virtualization and storage stack. The release was accompanied by updates to the Prism management UI, making cluster management more accessible to operators used to traditional SAN tools.

Simple Explanation of How Nutanix Works

me@ryanorban.com (Ryan Orban) — Wed, 22 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Summary

This YouTube video provides an accessible explanation of Nutanix’s distributed file system — the Nutanix Distributed File System (NDFS) that underlies their hyper-converged infrastructure platform. The explanation covers how Nutanix collocates compute and storage in each node, how data is replicated across the cluster, and how the Curator distributed metadata service manages data placement.

Not Just for a Rainy Day: The True Meaning of Converged

me@ryanorban.com (Ryan Orban) — Sun, 01 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Summary

This 2012 Nutanix blog post makes the case for converged infrastructure — or more specifically, hyperconvergence (a term that would solidify around 2013). The traditional enterprise data center model separated compute (servers), storage (SAN/NAS), and networking into distinct hardware silos, each with its own management stack, procurement cycle, and specialist team. Nutanix was built on the proposition that this separation was operationally expensive and architecturally unnecessary — that all three could be combined in software running on commodity x86 hardware, managed through a single interface.