August 16, 2011

Nutanix today launched the Complete Cluster appliance, which according to the company’s claims performs 10x better than traditional server and storage area network combinations.

Targeted at mid-sized businesses with IT generalists, the 2U appliance consists of four blocks, each containing eight Intel Xeon servers with a total of 48 cores. These servers contain flash-based storage from Fusion-io and connect to SATA-based Intel solid state drives and 5TBs of Seagate SATA hard disk drives. The system can be scaled by adding blocks.

The Fusion-io adapters store metadata for indexing and retrieval. Each node runs VMware ESXi and supports vMotion, High Availability and Dynamic Resource Scheduling, as well as VM cloning, backup and capacity optimization.

The Complete Cluster also includes snapshot and replication capabilities and RAID protection.

The Nutanix Complete Cluster consists of three nodes and coast $115,000. A three-node starter kit is also available and costs $75,000.

Our take: It’s about time that someone took a new look at how servers and storage are architected and introduced a converged server and storage appliance that is fast and targeted at virtualized infrastructures.

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