Storage Mobility to Meet the Challenges of Hybrid Multicloud

Today’s business challenges are unprecedented. Companies are dealing with an explosion of data and applications. IT environments are complex and acquisitions of longtime vendors are having the C-suite rethink their install base.

Meanwhile, shadow IT is swiping credit cards simply to get work done which exacerbates the challenge. Lack of flexibility and choice lead business units to solve their problems the best way they can. Unfortunately, some decisions are not easy to change once applications are up and running.

Hyperconverged infrastructure on-premises fixed a lot of issues around responding to the speed of the business and now has made its way into the public cloud over the last five years. Today, a single cloud platform can address security, management and data sovereignty by deploying into the right hyperscaler, service provider or edge site where more and more processing occurs.

In terms of future planning, it can’t only be about optimizing for today. If my life in IT has taught me anything, it’s that change is the only constant. That’s why I think a key consideration for setting your business on the right path is mobility for your workloads. I’m referring to the mobility of your data and networking. The best location for your applications today will probably be different a couple of years from now.

In this blog, I will explain how Nutanix is solving storage mobility challenges while my next blog will explore networking in hybrid multicloud environments.

In your private data centers, your favorite hyperscaler with the Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) solution, along with specialized service providers, can give you a solid foundation to move workloads anywhere. Nutanix disaster recovery is the primary tool to move workloads from one place to the next.

If plans change or the economics are advantageous in a different location, you can simply run a planned failover and be up and running in your new destination quickly. Nutanix disaster recovery has policies for setting replication schedules and recovery plans to ensure that workloads come up in the right order with the needed network resources.

Figure 1: Move workloads anywhere with Nutanix disaster recovery.

If you don’t have Nutanix today and want to migrate to Nutanix, the Nutanix Move migration tool enables you to quickly and easily relocate workloads from a variety of sources and destinations without locking you into a singleplatform. Nutanix Move is a free wizard-driven tool that is simple to use. Customers can even use Nutanix Move to migrate from VMware Cloud (VMC) on AWS to NC2 on AWS.

Since Nutanix is a common platform across environments, you can reuse existing backup software and management tools to reduce the overhead of moving workloads and keep Day 2 operations running smoothly.

If your NC2 is running in AWS, you have the option to add Elastic Block Storage (EBS) to your bare-metal EC2 nodes to augment local storage and reduce licensing and hardware costs.Local storage and EBS storage are pooled together logically so consumers only have to worry about placing their data there.

Additionally, tiering between different storage types and high availability are all taken care of by Nutanix. Keep in mind with use of the Nutanix AHV hypervisor, workloads can be right-sized, which saves money compared to more restrictive t-shirt sizes and scales-up effortlessly when needed.

Figure 2: Cost-effective cloud storage.

In the above example, the three-node i4i.metal NC2 has 90 TB of local storage on three nodes plus another 90 TB total of EBS storage. If you need more storage, you can simply move a slider in the NC2 portal and add another 30 TB of storage to each node, all acting as a single pool of storage. Keep in mind guaranteed performance in the cloud is expensive. With Nutanix your workloads perform exceptionally while and many workloads are efficiently consolidated.

EBS attached with NC2 serves as another interesting use-case, such as with implementing elastic disaster recovery. By keeping your base cluster in NC2 to just a few nodes, you will have enough storage to cover all the data you need to replicate.

If you need more storage, the sliding button shown in the following diagram can make it happen quite easily. When you want to failover in case of an outage or a ransomware recovery, you can always add more nodes to cover CPU and memory requirements. Once your workloads are up and running on NC2 they have full networking access to all cloud services.

Figure 3: NC2 slider for EBS storage.

Another option that simplifies storage mobility calls for deploying the Nutanix Files Storage solution onto NC2 or with native EC2 instances. Nutanix Files Storage is a software-defined, scale-out file storage solution that lets you share files in a centralized and protected location to eliminate the requirement for a third-party file server.

Nutanix Files Storage uses a scale-out architecture that provides file services to clients through the Server Message Block (SMB) and Network File System (NFS) protocols. Nutanix Files Storage combines one or more file server VMs (FSVMs) into a logical file server instance, sometimes referred to as a files cluster.

Figure 4: NC2 architecture with Nutanix Files Storage.

The diagram above shows Nutanix Files Storage running on NC2 where there's still free compute and memory to run the file server VMS. You’ll notice VPC endpoints keep your Nutanix Files Storage and AWS environment secure by only allowing private access. Nutanix Files Storage enables you to move edge data quickly into the public cloud and start using additional cloud services.

Edge data can be migrated using Nutanix Move. It supports the migration of files from external file servers to Nutanix Files. You can create a migration plan to seed data, perform cutover, and monitor the progress of the migration of files.

Nutanix Move manages data migrations by running iterations. It runs the first iteration of a share when a migration plan (that is associated with the share) is initiated. After the first iteration is complete, changes at the source are copied to the target through subsequent iterations. These subsequent iterations are triggered automatically once every 24 hours as long as the migration plan is active.

If Nutanix Files Storage is already deployed in your environment you can also use Nutanix Smart Disaster Recovery feature to migrate data as well. Smart Disaster Recovery facilitates share-level data replication and file-server-level disaster recovery. In the event of a planned or unplanned loss of service, you can restore write access to protected shares by failing over to a recovery site file server.

With your data moved you can now spin up GPU-based EC2 instances and start processing data on Nutanix Files Storage, such as video processing, or you can run machine learning pipelines on AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) using Nutanix Files Storage as the landing zone for your persistent data.

Nutanix provides a Container Storage Interface (CSI) Volume Driver for Kubernetes^®. It uses Nutanix Volumes and Nutanix Files to provide scalable, persistent storage for stateful applications. The key here is that your data has mobility and is directly located by the compute for fast access, which reduces the time it takes for your business to get results.

If you don’t plan to run NC2, you can always deploy Nutanix Files Storage with native EC2 instances, as shown in the diagram below. Nutanix Files Storage with EC2 instances uses EBS volumes that can grow automatically to help control cost so you’re not paying for all the storage upfront.

Figure 5: Nutanix Files Storage on EC2.

Deploying Nutanix Files Storage on NC2 and using the native EC2 instances give you access to the Smart Tiering capability. You can use Smart Tiering to maximize the available file server space by moving cold data from the file server to an object store. Nutanix supports a wide range of object storage, including Nutanix Objects Storage, Microsoft Azure, Wasabi, AWS S3 and any other S3 compliant storage. When deploying on EC2, Smart Tiering is automatically set up with an aggressive tiering policy to AWS S3, which helps shrink storage costs.

In that vein of getting your data to the public cloud, Nutanix can deploy and run the Nutanix Objects Storage software-defined object store service. It is designed with an AWS S3-compatible REST API interface capable of handling petabytes of unstructured and machine-generated data.

Nutanix Objects Storage addresses storage-related use-cases for backup, long-term retention and data storage for cloud-native applications by using standard S3 APIs. Objects is packed with tons of features like write-once-read-many (WORM), immutability, versioning, and replication to AWS S3.

Nutanix Objects Storage enables you to consolidate and replicate data from multiple on-premises sources onto an AWS S3 endpoint to run analytics and AI/machine learning models. You can achieve data resiliency across a hybrid multicloud infrastructure by replicating data to a secondary offsite Nutanix Objects Storage repository, AWS S3 for a tertiary disaster recovery copy and consume cloud services if you don’t have enough compute on-premise.

This gives you a consistent and unified management approach across on-premises and cloud without the need to procure and learn new tools. Check out this short video to see how simple it is to replicate your Nutanix Objects Storage data to the cloud.

In an ever-changing world, Nutanix empowers you to move your data fluidly across environments as your needs change. Be sure to check out my next blog, where I'll discuss how the Nutanix Flow Virtual Networking solution makes the transition to hybrid multicloud easy for all customers.

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