Web scale IT - Nutanix

Editor's Notes

• #5: Purpose of the Slide: Talk about the big challenges enterprise customers face today. Establish a baseline that everyone can agree to. Key Points: - Datacenters have become increasingly complex over the years. Every part of the infrastructure lifecycle is complex, from buying and deploying to configuring, managing and scaling infrastructure. - As infrastructure became more complex, IT organizations also became more siloed. You needed storage experts to manage complex network storage and networking experts to manage enterprise network topologies. ITIL processes emerged to deal with the complexity. All this significantly slowed down the pace of IT deployment. Orgs have to trade off doing it right with doing it fast. - As demand for resources (compute, network, storage) goes up, organizations want to be able to add capacity incrementally and predictably. Scale-up (big iron) infrastructure makes it difficult to scale in small increments when needed.
• #6: Purpose: Talk about where and how web-scale IT originated, and what some of the common are between different web-scale data centers Key Points: Web companies like Google and Facebook started pushing the limits of existing infrastructure systems and processes in ways that traditional businesses did not. They needed infrastructure that could support their business requirements (rapid application development cycles, scale on demand, cost containment). They tried using existing infrastructure solutions, but quickly realized that legacy infra was a poor fit for their needs. Over time, these companies developed an alternate approach to IT that enabled them to get past limitations in infrastructure. Some common traits of web-scale IT: Infrastructure built from commodity server hardware pooled together using intelligent software. This allows customers to start small and scale one server at a time – true scale-out The software in the system is distributed across all the nodes. You don’t have central metadata servers or name nodes. You don’t see controller bottlenecks Embarrassingly parallel operations – everything in the system, including storage functions like deduplication and metadata management and system cleanup, is distributed across all nodes. There are no hotspots or bottlenecks, allowing for massive scale Compute and storage sit very close to each other. Data does not have to go back and forth between storage and compute over a network. Data has gravity, so co-locating storage and compute eliminates network bottlenecks and system slowdown Heavy automation eliminates the need for expensive, error-prone manual operations
• #7: Purpose: Summarize what web-scale IT is, its key ingredients and benefits Key Points: Web-scale IT is a new approach to designing, deploying and managing infrastructure At its core, web-scale IT is about bringing simplicity back to every aspect of deploying and managing a data center Web-scale IT has allowed companies to achieve: Greater business agility. For example, being able to quickly spin up dev-test environments to support hundreds of software updates and releases, or getting a Hadoop cluster up for data analytics Predictable scale – this is not just about large scale (e.g., petabytes of storage). It’s more about elasticity, i.e. adding resources predictably when needed Cost efficiency – all about doing more with less and achieving lower TCO with a smaller footprint and fewer admins to manage infrastructure day to day Web-scale IT encompasses changes across infrastructure strategy, organization and system design It’s important to note that web-scale IT is not just about technology. It requires a fundamental shift in the people and processes managing the infrastructure For example, the organizational culture and the lack of silos is as important as the specific tools being used
• #8: Web-scale is a set of architectural principles and technology concepts. Infrastructure built around these principles is called web-scale infrastructure.
• #9: OPTIONAL SLIDE: The green hexagons are benefits while the peripherals are attributes of web-scale infrastructure
• #10: Purpose: Web-scale is not just for web companies. Companies of all sizes can benefit from adopting the principles and technologies of web-scale infrastructure. Key Points: There’s a common misconception that web-scale is all about supporting massive amounts of data and millions of concurrent users. Those are in fact the problems that drove web companies to look for alternatives a few years ago. But at its core, web-scale IT is about simplicity. It is an architectural approach that provides a step-function decrease in costs by eliminating complexity in the data center. In recent years, this approach is becoming relevant to other businesses as they face similar challenges around business agility, unpredictable growth requirements and increasing cost pressures. It’s a fact that businesses of all sizes can benefit from the advantages that web-scale infrastructure offers Turnkey solutions can deliver the benefits of web-scale without requiring businesses to learn new skills or overhaul their IT environments. IT can run standard enterprise applications on these turnkey platforms.
• #11: Purpose: Nutanix delivers the power of web-scale infrastructure to enterprise customers as a turnkey solutions Key Points: What Nutanix does is bring the simplicity, agility and rapid scale that web-scale technologies deliver but as a turnkey enterprise solution Customers can run their diverse application workloads without having to build custom applications Customers don’t have to learn how to use Cassandra, map-reduce, etc. The Nutanix solution does all that under the hood Talk about “controlled disruption” – Nutanix is building the bridge for enterprise IT to embrace web-scale IT without completely overhauling the way they do things
• #12: Key Points: At its core, Nutanix eliminates complexity in the datacenter One of the root causes of complexity is the data storage architecture, specifically the storage network The Nutanix Virtual Computing Platform gets rid of the SAN and brings compute and storage together for virtualized environments This approach eliminates network bottlenecks and simplifies the architecture. This is particularly important with flash storage because the network can become a chokepoint for the system With a Nutanix solution, customers can easily add additional compute and storage by adding nodes on the go
• #14: Key Points: Nutanix offers versatile building blocks that customers can deploy for a wide range of applications With the software-defined approach to infrastructure, policies around resilience, data protection, etc. are late-bound in the system The systems coming out of the factory don’t have rigid restrictions and preset configurations, so customers don’t have to buy different solutions for different workloads. The Nutanix solution also natively uses read and write caches, intelligent data tiering and data locality to achieve optimal performance automatically for a variety of workloads.
• #15: Key Points: One of the biggest advantages of Nutanix’s scale-out architecture is linear predictability of scale As you add nodes to a Nutanix cluster, the number of VMs or virtual desktops that can be supported on the cluster grows in a linear, predictable way without limits This is critical because it significantly simplifies buying decisions for scaling, and allows
• #16: Key Points: The power and simplicity of the Nutanix Virtual Computing Platform extends to the control fabric as well.   Nutanix Prism is a feature-rich, yet radically simple management platform that gives administrators complete control over their clusters The graphical user interface delivers consumer-grade simplicity, while the REST API provides programmatic control over every aspect of infrastructure management. 
• #17: Simplicity
• #19: Gartner has published their first-ever Magic Quadrant report for “Integrated Systems,” with Nutanix strongly positioned as an industry visionary. As you can see, the Gartner analysts have recognized Nutanix as having the most compelling vision of all vendors in what has been calculated as a $40B market. To the side here, we have captured a few of the quotes directly from the Gartner report that highlight Nutanix’s success and product strengths. In addition to the strong position for Nutanix, this is a compelling win for web-scale architectures and how the vision of web-scale is transforming how enterprise datacenters are designed, managed and scaled. Ultimately, it continues to disrupt the overall IT vendor landscape.   Additional Note if asked about being in the lower right rather than upper right: It’s important to properly interpret this MQ. Typically, readers of Gartner MQ reports immediately focus on the “Leaders” quadrant. This makes good sense for mature markets that are focused on execution with incremental innovation. However, in dynamic segments, such as the one in which Nutanix competes, it is the company with the clearest vision who will ultimately lead in building the next-generation of datacenter infrastructure. This is why Nutanix is extremely proud of its position as the most visionary.
• #21: Incorporated in 2009 Record $172M raised from top-tier investors Core team from Google, Facebook, VMware, NetApp, Oracle, Citrix, Palo Alto Networks and Cisco 100% worldwide channel model Widely recognized as innovative and disruptive Investors include Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, SAP Ventures, Lightspeed Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Riverwood and Battery