Nutanix Volumes
Take advantage of scale-out block storage built into AOS

Access the same simplicity Nutanix offers for virtualized workloads and file storage for your physical workloads. Nutanix Volumes bridges the physical and virtual, consolidating infrastructure into a single unified platform

Nutanix Acropolis Block Services

BRIDGING THE WORLDS OF PHYSICAL AND VIRTUAL

Despite the many benefits of virtualization, some workloads often remain on bare-metal servers because of licensing constraints, legacy application portability, or investments in existing infrastructure. In this context, storage silos for these non-virtualized workloads continue to exist. ABS eliminates these silos by delivering the same simplicity Nutanix offers for virtualized workloads and file storage for physical workloads. In so doing, ABS bridges the physical and virtual worlds, consolidating infrastructure into a single unified platform.

NOT JUST ANOTHER BLOCK DEVICE

ABS exposes storage from Nutanix through direct, block-level iSCSI access while maintaining high availability, scalability, and performance to the physical or virtual servers accessing Nutanix storage. Applications including Oracle RAC, Microsoft SQL Server, and IBM DB2 can run outside of the Nutanix cluster on either bare-metal or virtualized servers. ABS is built with web-scale technology at the core for effortless scaling, even from a small starting footprint. As a result of the consolidation, all applications can now use the same infrastructure for virtualization, file, and block services. This can significantly increase efficiency, reduce risks, and make management a breeze.

ABS for Production Three-tier Applications

ABS enables the production database tier to run on bare-metal servers, while the web and application tiers run on virtualized infrastructure.

ABS for Server Investment Protection

When IT amortization cycles are misaligned and storage is being retired but servers are not, ABS can be used as a bridge to a fully hyperconverged environment. Initially, ABS can be used to replace the storage being retired. Once the servers are also ready for retirement, it is a simple matter to move the applications onto Nutanix running as hyperconverged virtual machines. Since the application's data remains unchanged on the cluster, moving them is an easy, copy-free operation.

ABS for Development and Test

Nutanix native clones can be used to clone a production bare metal database already using ABS for its storage for more efficient workflows. This can include leveraging virtualization for development and test databases, then running staging and production databases on bare metal using ABS.

BENEFITS

• Lower Acquisition Costs -
  Eliminate Fibre Channel SANs by moving bare-metal database storage to the commodity x86-based Nutanix platform.
• Scale Capacity and Performance Together -
  ABS performance seamlessly scales with the size of the Nutanix cluster, eliminating fork-lift upgrades.
• Single Server Scalability -
  A single high performance server can take advantage of the aggregate IOPS delivered by several Nutanix nodes.
• Field Proven Reliability and Availability -
  ABS can provide five 9's or higher availability.
• Automatic Fail-over/Fail-back -
  Failover of iSCSI LUNs takes seconds and is easily tolerated by Windows Server Failover Clustering and many other applications.

ABS is available in the Acropolis Starter, Pro, and Ultimate editions. Pro or Ultimate are required when using ABS to connect to a non-Nutanix cluster.