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Nutanix Unified Storage Targets High-Performance and Data-Intensive Workloads such as Big Data Analytics, AI and Machine Learning

By Santhosh Siruvole, Sr. Product Marketing Manager - Nutanix Unified Storage

January 30, 2024 | min

We recently commissioned analysts at International Data Corporation (IDC) to evaluate the use of Nutanix Objects Storage for modern, data-intensive workloads. IDC examined the evolution of Object Storage from its roots as a data repository for backups and archives to newer high-performance applications such as analytics and AI.

The study included interviews with a government agency based in Asia and the Nutanix IT department on the use of Objects Storage for analytics-related workloads.

Software-defined storage, built on a distributed architecture and designed to span on-premises datacenters, edge sites and public clouds offers advantages over traditional SAN and NAS systems.

Part of Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS), software-defined Objects Storage prioritizes performance, scalability and cloud-native support with the addition of new capabilities and feature sets. The Nutanix object store integrates with analytics platforms and query engines at the edge, core and cloud.

Moreover, the engines can run queries within the content of interest instead of searching through the entire large object. With the capability to run queries on select partial content objects, Nutanix Objects Storage can accelerate application queries for faster insights.

Key Capabilities of Nutanix Objects Storage for Modern Workloads 

The IDC analysis found that Nutanix makes a strong case and that Objects Storage merits consideration for modern data-intensive workloads.  

As found by IDC, Nutanix Objects Storage offers the following capabilities and benefits:

  • Organizations can start with a small footprint and scale performance and capacity in a linear fashion to a maximum of 48 nodes and multi-petabytes per objects cluster, with options to federate multiple objects clusters under a single shared namespace.
  • For primary use cases, Nutanix Objects Storage is validated for use with the Vertica and Snowflake analytics platforms.
  • Snowflake customers can run queries directly against data stored in Nutanix Objects Storage on-premises without first having to copy the data set to the cloud1. 
  • Nutanix Objects Storage is designed to support any query engine that works with HDFS and S3, including open-source Apache Spark SQL, Presto and Trino.
  • For secondary storage, Nutanix Objects Storage is validated with Confluent Kafka and Splunk as a SmartStore solution2.
  • Nutanix Objects Storage supports queries on select portions of data sets to help speed up query completion.
  • Nutanix Objects Storage supports data filtering at the object storage level to dramatically reduce application CPU overhead and network traffic associated with a select query.

Based on the IDC findings, enterprises going through infrastructure modernization efforts driven by digital transformation should consider software-defined data services platforms like Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS). Check out the Nutanix-sponsored IDC white paper, The Use of Object Storage for Modern Data-Intensive Workloads Requiring High Performance for detailed insights.

Also check out the blog, Exploring the High-Performance Capabilities of Nutanix Objects for an in-depth analysis of payloads and performance improvements achieved by deploying Nutanix Objects Storage with Vertica, Hadoop/Spark with Objects (TeraGen benchmark), Kafka, and Splunk.

Additional Resources  

 

1 https://www.nutanix.com/viewer?type=pdf&path=/content/dam/nutanix/resources/solution-briefs/sb-nutanix-snowflake.pdf
2 https://www.nutanix.dev/2023/02/14/exploring-the-high-performance-capabilities-of-nutanix-objects/

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