IBM and Nutanix Deliver Hyperconverged Infrastructure on Power Systems.

ibm nutanix hyperconverged

On-premises private clouds offer enterprises an extra measure of control and security, together with most of the advantages of public cloud services. One factor which sometimes stands in the way is ease of operation. With the hyperconverged infrastructure from Nutanix, running on IBM Power Systems, the private cloud approach is as easy to manage as a public cloud system. The first release was announced in July 2017 and has already gained broad acceptance.

Nutanix has been considered a niche vendor, but its partnership with IBM promises bigger things. The company adds its extensive experience with HCI to IBM's vast history in hardware and operating systems. Gartner has named Nutanix a leader in its 2018 Magic Quadrant for Hyperconverged Infrastructure. A Leader is considered to rank high in both vision and execution.

The benefits of an AIX-based cloud

AIX offers significant advantages to the enterprise over Linux. While Linux has grown to be a serious operating system for business, its roots are in experimentation, and it aims at the broadest possible range of uses. AIX is a Unix system designed specifically for business. While it keeps up with the state of the art, it prioritizes performance and reliability over innovation.

A cloud infrastructure built on AIX offers a better cost-performance ratio than a comparable x86 architecture, especially when uptime is a major consideration. Businesses that are familiar with the value of AIX on Power Systems will readily understand how these benefits extend into cloud environments.

Nutanix and AIX

The Nutanix Enterprise Cloud uses AIX and the Nutanix Acropolis hypervisor as the basis for a centrally managed hyperconverged infrastructure. The Prism management software from Nutanix lets administrators handle the entire cloud environment from a single console. Many administrative operations are one-click actions.

In the past, virtualization usually left storage management behind. The SAN (storage area network) was a separate piece needing its own hardware and management. The hyperconverged infrastructure includes distributed file services, and Nutanix optimizes storage management to keep data physically near the machines that use it the most. At the same time, storage control logic that traditionally has been based on discrete hardware volumes and physical controllers has moved to software. The result is better performance and more flexible allocation than a separate storage network.

The architecture is highly flexible. Virtual servers can be allocated as necessary, and additional Power Systems can be added with little effort to increase the available processing power and memory.

Some software is available only on Linux, so a pure AIX environment isn't always feasible. The Acropolis architecture can include Linux virtual servers, and Prism manages these together with the AIX systems. Everything runs under the same console.

Emphasis on reliability and scaling

IBM Power Systems are well known throughout the industry for their reliability. The Live Update feature, introduced with AIX 7.2, allows installation of kernel updates without a restart, so there's no loss of time. Nutanix adds the scalability of a fully virtualized cloud architecture.

The architecture lends itself well to large data stores, and Nutanix stresses the performance it delivers with MongoDB. Indexing takes advantage of local data access, and data is automatically placed in the location that delivers the best performance based on access patterns. If a node fails, workloads are automatically restarted, limiting downtime to a few seconds at most. The MongoDB Ops Manager is integrated with Prism for ease of management. Relational databases, including EDB Postgres and MariaDB, are also supported.

The infrastructure is invisible to the users, including the administrators, of the applications and individual virtual servers. They simply deal with AIX and the software that runs on it, and there's no separate storage network to worry about.

The HCI architecture from IBM and Nutanix is a very attractive option for enterprises that need a powerful private or hybrid cloud infrastructure that will work reliably and be easy to manage.

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