Nutanix is within a month of launching Buckets, a hyperconverged infrastructure, S3-compatible object service, according to our sources.
The technology gives the company a full house of storage services for VM, file, block and object.
In November 2017 Nutanix said it would develop its Acropolis Object Storage Service, based on data containers called buckets. Object services would form part of an Enterprise Cloud OS (ECOS) and sit alongside Virtual Machine and Block services and File Services.
ECOS is a suite of services for Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) software that runs across on-premises servers to form private clouds, and public clouds such as Amazon, Azure and Google Cloud Platform. Example services are the Acropolis Compute Cloud, Calm, a multi-cloud application automation and orchestration offering, and various Xi Cloud Services such as Xi Leap disaster recovery.
Files has been delivered and Buckets is weeks away from launch.
Object storage
Buckets stores large unstructured datasets for use in applications such as big data analytics, archiving, compliance, database backups, data warehousing and devops. WORM (write once; read many) buckets are supported.
Billions of objects are stored in buckets which exist in a single global namespace that works across on-premises data centres (Nutanix clusters), regions within multiple public clouds, and multiple clouds. Objects can be replicated between, and tiered across clouds, and handle petabytes of data, with up to TB-sized objects.
Access is via an S3-compatible REST API. The data in the buckets is deduplicated, compressed and protected with erasure coding. It is natively scale-out in nature: add more Nutanix compute nodes or storage capacity as needed.
There is an Object Volume Manager and it handles;
- Front end adapter for the S3 interface, REST API and client endpoint,
- Object controller acting as the the data management layer to interface to AOS and coordinate with the metadata service,
- Metadata services with management layer and key-value store,
- Atlas controller for lifecycle management, audits, and background maintenance activities.
Nutanix says Buckets is operationally easy to set up and use, talking of single click simplicity via its Prism management tool. Prism is said to use machine learning to help with task automation and resource optimisation.
We understand that Buckets will be consumable in two ways, either as Nutanix hyperconverged clusters with apps in VMs running alongside or as dedicated clusters.
Check out a Nutanix video about is object storage service here and a data sheet here.
Nutanix’s object storage competitors include Caringo, Cloudian, DDN, Scality, SwiftStack, IBM, HDS and NetApp.
