Back toBlog

Upgraded Business Resilience with Nutanix Witness Service and Multicloud Snapshot Technology

By Sneha Chaturvedula - PMM BCDR and Data Lens

February 6, 2025 | min

In today’s hybrid multicloud landscape, businesses demand infrastructure solutions that are cost-effective, scalable, and resilient. Nutanix is leading the way with innovations that meet these demands, including the Nutanix Witness Service and Multicloud Snapshot Technology (MST) features. These two advancements represent significant strides in simplifying deployment, optimizing costs, and enhancing resilience, enabling organizations to build robust business continuity strategies while reducing complexity.

AOS 7.0: Simplicity, Resilience, and Resource Efficiency

Witness Service and MST exemplify our commitment to providing solutions that:

  • Simplify Deployment: User-friendly configurations eliminate traditional complexities, enabling faster adoption and reducing time-to-value.
  • Enhance Resilience: Whether through robust AHV Metro deployments or flexible disaster recovery (DR), these solutions provide for business continuity in the face of growing data and compute demands.
  • Increase Resource Efficiency: By reducing infrastructure requirements, both technologies make advanced solutions more accessible to organizations of all sizes.

Witness Service: Simplifying AHV Metro Deployments

The Witness Service is a game-changer for AHV Metro environments, enabling businesses to deploy Witness Services without the traditional complexities or high costs. The Witness Service is ideal for medium to large enterprises managing hundreds to thousands of VMs or VGs, and helps to protect against data loss and while providing for low recovery times.

Key Benefits

  1. Simplified Deployment: Packaged as a VM, the Witness Service streamlines setup by removing complex port configurations, accelerating deployment, and reducing technical requirements.
  2. Cost Savings: Witness Service eliminates the need for a costly three-node cluster, allowing deployment on a single-node AHV cluster. This provides an opportunity to drastically reduce costs and makes Metro solutions accessible to businesses of all sizes.
  3. Hybrid Cloud Alignment: Fully integrated with our hybrid cloud strategy, Witness Service supports two-datacenter AHV Metro setups, enabling future scalability.
  4. Secure and Robust: Built on the stringent security policies of Nutanix Cloud Platform (NCP), Witness Service ensures reliable monitoring, supports CLI-based recovery in rare failures, and minimizes downtime.
  5. Ensures High Availability of Prism Central Across Clusters: This solution is ideal for large environments that want high availability of Prism Central instances managing business-critical applications across sites.

Data Mobility and Cost Efficiency with Multicloud Snapshot Technology

As businesses face exponential data growth, the need for scalable and flexible DR solutions has never been greater. Nutanix MST allows customers to replicate their snapshots to S3-compliant object storage to enable data mobility, optimize TCO using lower-cost storage, simplify management using same policies and plans as existing Nutanix DR workflows, and recover anywhere that the Nutanix Cloud Platform (NCP) solution runs.

With the latest release of AOS 7.0, MST now introduces the Zero-Compute Deployment model. MST DR with the Zero-Compute Deployment model eliminates the need for always-on compute nodes by storing snapshots in Amazon S3 or Nutanix Objects Storage. Snapshots can then be recovered anywhere NCP runs, significantly reducing resource expenditure.

Key Benefits

  1. Optimized Storage Efficiency: By using S3-compliant object stores for long-term retention, MST frees up primary storage for high-performance workloads. It also incorporates security features like immutable, WORM-enabled storage to help protect data from threats.
  2. Seamless Data Mobility: Snapshots can move easily between object storage and cloud, edge, or on-premises environments, promoting reliable recovery with minimal setup and procurement complexity.
  3. Cost Optimization: By leveraging cost-effective object storage and eliminating standby compute clusters, MST reduces resources required for DR while maintaining robust capabilities.
  4. Unified Management: MST integrates with Nutanix Prism, offering a familiar interface for simplified management of DR policies and recovery plans.

Read more about MST DR with Zero-Compute Deployment here.

Conclusion

Witness Service and MST represent a major leap forward in IT infrastructure. Designed to address key challenges such as cost-efficiency, complexity, and scalability, these solutions empower organizations to build resilient, future-proof architectures. For businesses seeking to optimize their hybrid multicloud environments, Witness Service and MST embody simplicity, efficiency, and reliability.

To learn more, please reach out to your Nutanix account manager today. Let us help you revolutionize your IT strategy and drive your business forward.

©2025 Nutanix, Inc. All rights reserved. Nutanix, the Nutanix logo and all Nutanix product and service names mentioned are registered trademarks or trademarks of Nutanix, Inc. in the United States and other countries. All other brand names mentioned are for identification purposes only and may be the trademarks of their respective holder(s).