Web-scale infrastructure at any scale –
Introducing XC Series Appliances Powered by
Nutanix Software
Suresh Jasrasaria and John Mannix
Executive summary
Web-scale infrastructure technologies deployed
by the largest internet companies like Google,
Facebook and Amazon are now available
worldwide to companies of all sizes for all
enterprise applications running on market
leading hypervisors from VMware and Microsoft.
The Dell XC Series appliance integrates Dell’s
proven x86 server platform and Nutanix webscale software to provide an uncompromisingly
simple and cost-effective out-of-the-box
solution with enterprise class performance,
scalability, availability and data management
features.
Introduction
Do you ever wonder how the largest web-scale
companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon
manage and scale their infrastructure? Does
Facebook upgrade their storage infrastructure as
their users upload more photos? Does Google
store every junk email sent to each gmail user?
How does Amazon provide such fast response
for online transactions? Are the advantages of
web-scale architecture available to mid-size
enterprises and service providers running
packaged applications from Microsoft, Oracle
and SAP? This month Dell is introducing the
XC Series web-scale converged appliance
powered by Nutanix software. Now the same
scale-out infrastructure used by web-scale
companies can also be deployed cost effectively
by any size enterprise or service provider for any
virtualized workload including desktop
virtualization, big data, private cloud
deployment, and business critical applications
such as Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SQL
Server, Oracle and SAP database applications.
Server virtualization and cloud
computing has made enterprise
data centers extremely dynamic
To improve efficiency and lower cost, today’s
enterprise data centers are virtualizing their
application workloads en masse, and they are
bursting into public clouds for their rapidly
growing data storage needs. In addition, to meet
business needs, many enterprise data centers
are deploying new initiatives like desktop
virtualization and big data, as well as social and
mobile applications. Such a highly virtualized
enterprise data center requires a high
performance infrastructure that can scale
rapidly on demand while keeping total costs
down. Traditional servers-connected-toconsolidated-storage-over-a-network
architecture is complex to scale and manage for
such a dynamic data center.
Web-scale benefits to enterprises
at any scale
Leading web-scale companies such as Google,
Amazon, and Facebook use a converged
compute and local storage platform with
distributed software technology as a building
block to create extremely dynamic data centers.
XC Series appliances powered by Nutanix
software bring the same benefits of web-scale
infrastructure to enterprises and service
providers at any scale, cost effectively.
All enterprises, large and small, can achieve the
following web-scale IT benefits by using the Dell
XC Series appliances as a building block for their
data centers:
1.
Greater business agility: XC Series is
uncompromisingly simple to install and use.
It comes pre-integrated with hypervisors
and Nutanix software. The HTML5-powered
and hypervisor agnostic Prism management
framework for XC Series provides IT teams
with a highly intuitive, easy-to-use
management console for both compute and
storage resources. For example, using Prism,
a virtualization administrator can quickly
provision multiple test-dev environments to
support multiple software updates and
releases, or the same administrator can
quickly provision a Hadoop cluster to run
data analytics.
2. Predictable rapid scaling: XC Series is not
just about large scale, such as petabytes of
storage with hundreds of servers. It is about
elasticity — starting small with a minimum of
three nodes, and growing or shrinking one
node at a time, only when needed.
3. Cost efficiency: XC Series is all about doing
more with less and achieving lower TCO.
With a building-block approach and a
highly automated management software,
fewer administrators are needed to manage
day-to-day infrastructure operations. For
example, XC Series powered by Nutanix
software provides non-disruptive rolling
upgrades, intelligent tiering, and no single
point of failure along with self-healing
during a workload surge and after replacing
failed components.
XC Series web-scale cluster
architecture
The XC Series appliance integrates the industryleading Nutanix software built on web-scale
principles with the 12th generation Dell
PowerEdge x86 servers that run the most
demanding enterprise business applications and
workloads. The XC Series web-scale cluster
architecture is built on five main tenets:
2
Converged Compute and Storage
In each XC Series appliance, compute
and storage resources are blended in an optimal
configuration creating a building-block for
scaling. Data localization is a core design
principle. It keeps data close to the VM and
allows I/O operations to be localized to each
node instead of traversing the network. Thus,
co-locating storage and compute eliminates
network bottlenecks and traditional storage and
compute silos. It also leverages multiple tiers of
storage in each node and optimally places data
on the storage tier that provides the best
application outcome.
Software defined
The XC Series appliance has no
specialized hardware controllers or operating
systems to provide enterprise storage services
like capacity management (tiering, thin
provisioning, deduplication and compression),
high availability (data path redundancy and
clustering), data protection (snapshots and
clones), and disaster recovery (asynchronous
and synchronous remote replication). All these
enterprise storage services are provided by the
Nutanix Software that powers this appliance.
This allows rapid release of features and
eliminates proprietary hardware for better
economics.
Distributed everything
All data and metadata are
distributed and replicated as necessary across
the entire cluster. All roles and responsibilities
are also distributed within the cluster. For roles
where a “master” is needed, an election process
is utilized. Thus, distributing data, metadata and
operations eliminates resource contention and
enables predictable scalability without limits.
Self-healing
API-based automation and analytics
XC Series clusters are designed to
tolerate component failures through fault
isolation and automatic recovery without
bringing down the overall system. Nutanix
software also provides automatic load balancing
among all nodes in a cluster eliminating system
slowdown. It also provides non-disruptive rolling
patches and upgrades of software eliminating
maintenance downtime.
The Nutanix software that powers the
XC Series appliances uses highly efficient
API-based algorithms and powerful analytics
for storing data and metadata as well as access
to public cloud storage like AWS for backup and
recovery. As a result, it is able to provide heavy
automation that eliminates the need for
expensive, error-prone manual operations
and it achieves unparalleled leverage and
enhanced operational efficiency, which lowers
total cost of ownership.
A Dell XC Series cluster with a Nutanix storage controller and hypervisor running on every node.
Suresh Jasrasaria is a Product Management Senior
Consultant for Software Defined Storage in the Dell
Enterprise Solutions Group. He is a VMware and Pragmatic
Marketing certified professional.
John Mannix is a product marketing manager for storage
in the Dell Enterprise Solutions Group. He has over 20
years of experience in technology and marketing, and was
previously with Cirrus Logic, Hyperformix and Gemalto.
XC Series Appliance Models
XC Series appliances come in five different
hardware models. For a full configuration of
each model please refer to the Dell website
here.
Each XC Series appliance hardware model
comes with three levels of Nutanix Software
licenses – Starter, Pro and Ultimate. For a full
list of features in each software license please
refer to the Nutanix website here.
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XC Series PowerSolutions Article_100714
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For an introduction of the XC Series Appliance
features and capabilities please watch a video
here.