Nutanix Objects helps you reduce your $$ per gigabytes . As we understood in "Nutanix Objects Data vs Metadata considerations" post, Nutanix Objects uses underlying storage resources intelligently to provide cost benefits and performance . But taking full advantages of Objects, you should consider choosing right platform for your Objects deployment.
Nutanix has quite a big hardware compatibility list, it has its own hardware platforms and also many vendors. While it supports large range of hardware, it might be bit challenging to select right platform for your Objects workload. In this article we will take a look at few important aspects that you should consider while choosing right platform.
Deep Storage Platform
- Nutanix offers storage heavy platforms, where NX-8k or DX-380 series or equivalent OEM models can provide upto 120TB storage per node and Nutanix is coming up with even denser nodes for the Objects use case.
- So higher the storage density per node, lower the cost per GB. These become ideal platforms for Objects workload to save cost, since Objects has optimized data IO path. So it knows how to efficiently use storage heavy platforms.
All Flash Platform
- Does Objects supports All Flash platform.
- Absolutely.
- Does All flash makes sense?
- All flash platforms are meant for higher performance. So if you use AF cluster for Objects, looking at all above optimization, you are going to get awesome performance.
- But should you really use it?
- While All Flash gives very good performance, but this will also increase the $$ per GB. Given the S3 usecase, typically storage consumption can grow from few Terabytes to multi Petabytes. And then cost of ownership will increase drastically.
- If you are using Objects as a primary storage tier. Then it may still be good option to consider All Flash platform for your deployment, otherwise you can avoid.
- Also if you are looking at saving cost on your storage, then All Flash is not a recommended option. But As SSD prices keep falling, at some point it may become attractive for all the use cases.
NVMe platform
- Objects doesn't support NVMe platform in its first release, so just avoid it. But even if it start supporting in near future, its may not make any sense to use this platform , for the same reason as stated above for all flash platform. Cost for NVMe platform is even higher.
What about NX3x, NX1x & other certified HCL platforms.
- You can use pretty much any platform (except NVMe) to deploy Object as far as its supported by AOS. All the platforms comes up with various compute and storage configs, and most of the platforms are meant to run VDI, Server workload which may need lower storage but higher compute Or other features.
- If you use this platform for running Objects workload, it will just run beautifully but you may not be able to get the (again) cost benefits that Objects provides you. So for your production workloads, you should consider storage heavy platforms where Objects will not only give you solid platform but also will save huge cost .
Deploying Nutanix Objects is as simple as few clicks on your Prism Central. Nutanix Objects provides you free licenses upto 2TB, so I would highly encourage that you should deploy and try Objects.
Do I need to know anything about how does Nutanix Objects handles node failures, continued..