Resilient Cyber Storage Enhancements to Help Your 2025 IT Resolutions
Nutanix Unified Storage 5.1 with Nutanix Data Lens
By Alex Almeida - Sr. Product Marketing Manager
As we enter 2025, many of you carry a positive outlook on the technological advancements of the past year, along with challenges to finding solutions to already existing IT problems. While the promise and hope of AI/ML technology’s ROI can be exciting, it’s equally important to address the challenges that persist from 2024. Let’s look into some of those challenges.
As Ketan Shah says in his blog:
“Today’s enterprises must build their IT infrastructure to adapt quickly and efficiently as demands change. A key aspect of this adaptability is application mobility – the ability to move applications across the hybrid cloud to meet dynamic demands, simplify operations, and reduce costs.”
Flexibility and mobility remain essential as we move into this new year. As the requirement to adopt next generation applications continues to increase, the attractiveness of legacy tiered storage implementations will likely diminish. Will they go completely away? Probably not. Though we see many who did (and still do!) predict the “death of the mainframe,” I don’t count myself as part of that group.
That aside, as enterprises move toward software-defined, cloud-based application architectures, the benefits of software-defined infrastructure are becoming clearer given its flexibility and scalability. Just like virtualization and hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) transformed compute and networking, software-defined storage is poised to revolutionize storage architectures. This shift is driven by the need for applications to access vast amounts of data across distributed environments, which now not only include edge and core, but also public cloud.
Consider, for example, IOT data at the edge being collected and easily available to on-premises or cloud deployed data analytics and AI/ML apps. Gathering more critical data insight from operations and the business overall is the name of the game. But to optimally do this, you need to ask: Is my storage environment a true “data platform” or simply a collection of many appliances or systems (silos), each optimized for different protocols and use cases? When working in an architecture of silos, data locality required by newer applications becomes a much harder data mobility challenge.
Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) is a software-defined data services platform that consolidates management and protection of siloed block, file, and object storage into a unified platform. With robust data services—such as analytics, ransomware protection, lifecycle management, and data protection—NUS enables organizations to swiftly adapt to the dynamic needs of modern apps. By shifting focus from day-to-day data storage to strategic data management, NUS facilitates agility and innovation. For AI/ML use cases, NUS’s scalability, flexibility, simplicity, performance, data mobility, and security features support all stages of the AI/ML lifecycle, empowering IT teams to accelerate and succeed in their AI deployment journey.
Our latest release ushers in more innovation across the unified data services catalog of Block, File, and Object.
Extend File Storage to AWS
Addressing the data mobility challenges discussed earlier, NUS continues to innovate in the area of simplified data management and mobility. With support for implementation of NUS File storage in AWS, users can now easily augment their on-premises storage with storage in AWS—efficiently and flexibly.
NUS Files deployed in AWS helps customers efficiently and cost-effectively manage hybrid cloud use cases such as cloud DR, data mobility (e.g., AI/ML/Data Analytics in the cloud), and cloud native applications. Implementing a single data plane for files across on-premises and public cloud enivornments—in this case, AWS—is a major enabler for businesses looking to easily implement next-gen apps.
Global Namespace
As storage systems are deployed globally to meet growing application capacity demands, managing a simplified access method to the data across all those systems can quickly become a complex, time-consuming task.
NUS simplifies this process by providing for a single data plane across on-premises and cloud storage. This allows administrators to easily set up universal access for applications and users to data across multiple storage instances.
For files storage, NUS creates a single namespace across fileservers deployed in AWS and on-premises. With object storage, NUS extends the already existing single namespace that exists with on-premises data to object data that is stored in AWS S3.
In both file storage and object storage, this unified approach eliminates the complexity of managing multiple storage instances and enhances the user experience by providing seamless, federated access to data.
High Performance and High-Density Storage for AI/ML
AI/ML workloads are I/O-intensive and require high-performance data throughput. Many modern datasets don’t fit into CPU or system memory, necessitating data to be streamed from storage.
NUS now supports NFS over Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) when NUS Files is deployed on the ESXi hypervisor. NFS over RDMA utilizes RDMA adapters, allowing data to be copied directly between the storage system and the host system, circumventing the CPU and reducing the overhead.
NUS has taken top spots in MLPerf’s Storage Benchmark v1.0 and you can read more about it here. With innovation in this area, NUS continues to raise the bar.
Extending Nutanix Data Lens Cyber Resiliency to Amazon S3
Nutanix Data Lens (NDL), our SaaS-based cyber storage solution, has long provided robust data security and analytics for unstructured data managed on NUS. With this latest release, we are excited to extend its powerful cyber resilience and analytics capabilities to data stored natively on Amazon S3.
Organizations can now seamlessly protect and audit Amazon S3 data, reducing vulnerabilities from unauthorized access while bolstering overall risk mitigation. This new capability delivers granular data visibility, enabling improved risk analysis and minimizing the likelihood of data compromise. For NUS customers leveraging Amazon S3 for hybrid cloud storage and Amazon S3 users exploring Nutanix, this feature provides unified visibility, analytics, security, and auditing across both on-premises and public cloud environments—enabling comprehensive hybrid cloud data resilience.
Additionally, NDL’s ransomware containment window can detect and block known and potential ransomware threats on NUS Files in just minutes, further strengthening the solution’s ability to safeguard critical data against emerging threats.
The NUS 5.1 Release
These are just some of the enhancements implemented in the NUS 5.1 release. We are certainly experiencing exciting times in the IT space we live in, and the ability to gain more business insight and a better ROI from data is truly becoming more attainable.
Given the shift toward next-gen cloud applications and computing, now is the perfect time to reassess your storage architecture. By doing so, you’ll lay the foundation for the flexibility and mobility required in this increasingly hybrid cloud world.
I encourage you to find out more about what Nutanix Unified Storage and its MLPerf Benchmark winning performance can do to help your organization.
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