“Hibernate and Resume” Feature Now Generally Available on Nutanix Cloud Clusters for Bare Metal Instances on AWS

Nutanix is proud to announce the general availability of the “hibernate and resume” feature in the Nutanix Cloud Clusters™ (NC2) infrastructure software running on bare metal instances in the AWS® public cloud. NC2 has the unique ability to preserve customer data and metadata by backing it up to Amazon® S3 buckets while the bare metal nodes are shut down. Hibernation allows customers to save money on their bare metal costs when the cluster isn’t in use—for example, in test or development environments that aren’t used on the weekends or for disaster recovery when recovery point objectives (RPOs) are a day or more.

We made significant architecture improvements last year, and since then Nutanix Engineering has continued to improve the product for performance and resiliency, and has added new features for GA.

In this latest version, there’s a  big efficiency gain in hibernation speed due to the new architecture moving only one copy of the data to S3. There are also a number of performance gains by tweaking how data I/O flows through this system. Prior to the AOS™ 6.5.1 release, we only had one S3 client, hence it wasn't multi-threaded. The “hibernate and resume” engineering team has now added multiple clients to increase performance and has changed the traffic priority sent to the storage controllers. Typically the background task of moving internal data is rated lower, but since the hibernate feature is the only service that is moving data around it is now given a higher priority and the number of tasks have also increased. This update results in over 4X improvement in speed of hibernation compared to the original design. 

Other improvements in NC2 include pre-checks, status improvements in the NC2 portal, and an update on how failures are handled. Checking for active DR replications, making sure we are blocking clusters configured near-sync DR and sync DR, and cluster health check before hibernating leads to a much better user experience.

With these robust features and an API that can be used to hibernate and resume NC2 clusters, I look forward to seeing all of the new use cases that customers come up with for using the hibernate and resume feature.

Ready to start using NC2 on AWS? Check it out with a 30-day free trial today.

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