Traditional IT datacentres typically require dedicated storage, compute and networking infrastructure, each managed by siloed teams of IT administrators. They’re complex to manage, costly and can’t meet the growing demands of the modern enterprise. Thus, hyperconverged solutions, such as those offered by Nutanix, were developed with the aim to eliminate traditional IT silos by integrating storage, compute, networking and virtualization resources to deliver on-premise IT services with the speed and operational efficiency of the public cloud.
To operate their hyperconverged platform, Nutanix built Acropolis, which contains a number of data services and features to deliver fast, efficient and scalable storage, virtualization and application mobility services for the next-generation enterprise computing. Among the features of Acropolis is the Acropolis Platform Services— a set of software-defined storage services that cater for every use case, supporting virtualized applications, non-virtualized applications, unstructured file data and containerized applications. Based on application requirements, the services can be turned on and off, and all workloads can be consolidated on the Nutanix platform and managed centrally. We will now look into each of the Platform Services in further detail.
VM Storage
Acropolis offers enterprise-grade VM-centric storage for virtualized applications. Gone are the complex and cumbersome storage operations that were prevalent in traditional datacentres, such as LUN provisioning, zoning and masking. Acropolis enables a much simple deployment of highly available storage and operations are optimized to function at the granularity of a single VM or vDisk.
Block Storage
Acropolis Block Services (ABS) is a native scale-out block storage solution that allows external clients, which can be physical or virtual machines, to connect to Nutanix storage and leverage the benefits of Nutanix’s hyperconverged architecture via the iSCSI protocol.
File Storage
Acropolis File Services (AFS) is a native file storage solution for unstructured data. It provides a highly available and massively scalable data repository for a wide range of deployments and applications, including large-scale home directories and user profiles. AFS removes the need for a separate Network Attached Storage (NAS) appliance.
Container Storage
Acropolis Container Services (ACS) offers enterprise-class persistent storage for containers and the ability to easily manage and deploy containerized applications on the Nutanix enterprise cloud platform. ACS features two core capabilities, persistent container volumes and the Nutanix Docker machine driver. Together, they simplify the process of building a Docker-based container environment on the Nutanix platform.
With the wide array of features and innovation that are bundled within the Acropolis Platform Services, Nutanix continues to tackle IT complexity and further improve the ease of use and operational simplicity in the IT environment.
