Multi-cluster support is new in the 2.0 release, as is support for nodes with more capacity, with the result being stronger ability to support more Big Data applications.

Nutanix has announced new scalability and new capabilities to support more Big Data workloads in Nutanix Objects 2.0, the object storage component within the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform. It both adds multi-cluster support and supports deeper high-capacity nodes to greatly increase scalability, and to further optimize Nutanix Objects’ ability to support Big Data applications. Nutanix Objects has also been formally certified by Splunk as SmartStore compliant.

“The increase in scale is the technical story being announced, but how customers will use it is what we thought about here, and that greater scale enables more Big Data and analytics use cases,” said Devon Helms, Director of Product Marketing, Storage Services at Nutanix . “Especially, with Splunk, the increases of petabytes of capacity are very significant. This is all an extension of our vision of an on-prem cloud, which positions our platform to support more and more of our customers’ workloads.”

Nutanix Objects had been in the public eye for several years under a couple of different monikers, and was formally launched in August 2019.

“In 2017, we started talking about a vision of a single storage platform with block file and object storage, and the object storage service was part of that,” Helms said. “Buckets was the development name, since a bucket is a component of object storage, but last August we went to market as Nutanix Objects, since that’s more of an industry standard term.”

When Nutanix Objects originally went to market, Big Data was not viewed as the primary use case.

“At that point, we saw backup as the first, best use case, around Nutanix Mine,” Helms stated. “Backup is still a major use case, and will also benefit from this capacity increase, but the use around something like Splunk SmartStore is more Big Data analytics.”

The new multi-cluster support, something that is differentiated in the hyperconverged world, allows the massive scale of object stores, and also lets a single namespace across these clusters be managed with much greater efficiency.

“We think this is a unique offering,” Helms said. “There’s no other HCI object store out there. We are the only ones, and there aren’t a lot of multi-clusters. It addresses an issue customers have with provisioning resources if their clusters have varying utilization. This gives them the ability to access storage resources across all the clusters, and capacities that go beyond what the limits of a cluster would be.”

This is complemented by support of deeper, high-capacity nodes with up to 240TB of storage.

“Previously 180 TB was our largest capacity, and now 240 is the largest,” Helms said.

Security has also been improved to allow customers to be able to use WORM [Write Once Read Many] to lock their content even if they can’t enable versioning for regulatory and compliance reasons.

“This lets you turn WORM on, and now it will work regardless of the application’s ability to support Version Control,” Helms indicated.

Nutanix Objects is also now certified by Splunk as SmartStore compliant, enabling joint customers to run Splunk workloads on Nutanix software, and use Nutanix Objects for built-in object storage.

“This is really top of the fold news,” Helms said. “We have customers running Big Data on Nutanix today, including Splunk, and this addresses their ability to write long term storage to S3. This is the first true certification we have had, because Splunk’s program requires that. Most partners have a self-qualify program, and we have a number of those where we are qualified.”

Nutanix Objects can be licensed as an be an add-on to an existing AOS [Acropolis Operating System] cluster, which is considerably less expensive, or can be licensed as a dedicated cluster.

“At around 100 TB, it makes sense from a performance and capacity perspective to have a dedicated object storage cluster,” Helms said.

The Objects 2.0 capabilities are available now.