.NEXT 2019 Nutanix today announced Nutanix Mine, a way of converging the management of secondary backup data with ordinary data management operations.
By converging primary and secondary data storage, Nutanix will compete directly with Cohesity’s hyperconverged secondary storage business.
The company is supplying a bunch of native integration with backup products made by Veeam, HYCU, Commvault, Veritas and Unitrends via the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform.
Cohesity was founded by Mohit Aron, the ex-CTO of Nutanix, and provides backup and supplies secondary data to other operations. By bringing backup data into its orbit Nutanix can do the same without competing with backup software vendors.
Subbiah Sundaram, HYCU VP products, said: “That is what Nutanix Mine with HYCU is fundamentally all about. Backup becomes an invisible service of the Nutanix platform.”
How many single panes of glass does a company need?
Customers can use the Nutanix Prism console as a single point of management for primary and secondary storage within their private clouds.
Nutanix said Mine will simplify overall deployment, on-going management, scaling and troubleshooting of the backup process. Mine scales primary and secondary storage as business growth dictates, Nutanix said.
Secondary storage silo
The company seems to be saying that dealing with primary and secondary data in the same silo is the real hyperconverged approach.
Sunil Potti, chief product and development officer, Nutanix, provided a canned quote: “Even as customers embraced HCI, the secondary storage silo persisted. With Nutanix Mine, customers will get all the benefits of collapsing this silo into a single platform – reduced management complexity, simplified operations and reduced TCO – without the requirement that they forgo the backup solution best suited for their business needs.”
It can say to customers that secondary data should not be stored and managed in a separate silo – that is not hyperconvergence. Deal with primary and secondary data in the same silo – that is hyperconvergence.
The delivered kit
Nutanix’ channel takes the Nutanix SW, adds in the customer’s backup engine of choice and supplies an X86 server, such as a Supermicro, running the resulting SW concoction. For the backup software the target storage device is the Nutanix storage hardware, not a separate deduplicating backup target appliance.
This is the equivalent a Nutanix insider said, of a combined Nutanix and Data Domain system.
Supermicro exhibited a 2U, GPU-accelerated storage server at the .NEXT event in Anaheim, a SYS-6029U-E1CRT product, which supports dual Gen 2 Xeon SP (Cascade Lake) or Xeon SP (gen 1) processors.
It can have 12 hot-swap front-mounted, 3.5-inch drive bays, either NVMe SSDs or SAS hard disk drives storing up to 144TB raw capacity (12 x 12TB). The chassis can hold up to 6TB of DDR4 memory, up to 6TB of Optane memory in memory mode, not App Direct mode. There is space for GPU cards – Tesla M0, T4 or V100s – in either side of the chassis at its rear.
This is a high-powered server/storage chassis, designed to for GPU-enhanced analysis of data.
Blocks & Files thinks Mine gives Nutanix a starting position to analyse stored secondary data – data mining, in other words. Otherwise, why call it Mine?
Availability
Nutanix Mine with Veeam and Nutanix Mine with HYCU, both with Nutanix SKUs and sold through Nutanix resellers, are expected to be available in Q3 2019. Nutanix Mine with Commvault, Veritas and Unitrends will be available in a future release.
