Nutanix Unified Storage – A New Milestone in Unstructured Data Management.

Nutanix has long pledged to provide a ‘unified storage’ platform to manage and protect customer data no matter whatever shape it takes (structured or unstructured) and wherever it lives – on-prem, in public cloud, or on the edge. With that vision in mind, we are excited to announce new capabilities in the Nutanix Unified Storage™ solution that empowers customers to simplify data management, accelerate time to value for data analytics workloads, manage exponential data growth, and protect their data against security risks. The cornerstone of this latest release is the – integration of the entire data lifecycle across two products – Nutanix Files™ and Nutanix Objects™ – to truly provide a unified storage experience for our customers.

Seamless Data Lifecycle Management

Nutanix Files 4.0 introduces SmartTier™, the capability to transparently tier data from NAS shares to a private or public cloud – including Nutanix Objects (or any S3-compatible endpoint such as Amazon S3). This new feature allows customers to reduce costs by migrating data from Nutanix Files to Nutanix Objects for the long-term storage of data while retaining access through a single pane of management. For organizations, this can lower the cost of storing aging data like digital documents, audio and video files, and active/passive archives to meet business and regulatory requirements.

Taking that one step further, a great way to even further reduce long-term costs is to move “frozen” objects to the public cloud to leverage deep archive pricing. This is possible by tiering data natively from Nutanix Objects to Azure® Blob Storage. This intelligent tiering capability will also significantly improve data lifecycle management by allowing granular policy-based data movement across different clouds, while still maintaining visibility and control.

Introducing Nutanix Data Lens

Keeping our promise to continuously deliver data centric innovation for our customers, we are excited to announce Nutanix Data Lens™, a new offering that provides deep analytics for customer’s unstructured data stored on Nutanix Unified Storage. It provides a global view of customer’s data no matter where it resides – whether on-prem or in the public cloud. Nutanix Data Lens delivers a cloud service to help customers gain intelligent insights into their data and proactively protect against security risks. It implements audit trails, anomaly detection, and data-age analytics to simplify data lifecycle management as well as facilitate configurations for monitoring to enhance protection against ransomware attacks. Custom reports produce ‘data about data’ in a format that customers can easily understand.

Advanced Data Insights Through Partnership

We want customers to have unparalleled access to data insights and to that end Nutanix Files is now integrated with Varonis System’s Data Security Platform that helps provide visibility across the datacenter and edge to give administrators a comprehensive view of data, how it’s being used and how to protect it better. In Nutanix Files version 3.7.1, Nutanix has partnered with Varonis to provide our rich metadata captured in Files to Varonis’ Data Security Platform and enable end-to-end visibility and protection for your unstructured data.

Reduce Administrative Workload With SmartDR and Self-Service Restore

Nutanix Files earlier introduced Self-Service Restore (SSR) to allow users to restore their own files without the assistance of administrators – a feature that greatly reduces the workload of files administrators, allowing them to spend time innovating instead of administering. In this latest Files 4.0 release, SSR is now integrated with SmartDR which allows users to restore their own files even on remote shares with 1min RPO, further reducing administrative overhead and empowering users to be more strategic in how they move the business forward.

Powering Big Data Workloads

Nutanix Objects now supports S3 Select to query and filter the contents of an object and retrieve just the subset of data that you need. Customers working with modern analytics applications, such as Apache Spark™, can benefit from dramatically accelerated query and large batch processing performance with S3 Select and optimized S3A support. The result is faster access to data and reduced network bandwidth without compromising the performance of the application.

Continuous Protection Against New Ransomware Threats

Nutanix Files has provided ransomware detection and protection for customers for some time and has proved invaluable to many customers. Ransomware protection has been enhanced to include more than 4,000 signatures with support for dynamic introduction of new ransomware signatures, allowing Files to rapidly adapt to new ransomware attack vectors to increase the level of protection and reduce any period of vulnerability.

Why Do We Need to Believe in UFOs?

By building closer integration between Nutanix Files and Nutanix Objects, we want customers to unleash the benefits of UFO (Unified Files and Objects) on the same platform. The Nutanix Unified Storage platform combines the best of both worlds for enterprises to address their modern data requirements and power modern applications that will enable them to innovate faster with unrivalled levels of protection. You don’t need multiple storage solutions, you just need a UFO.

SOURCE: NUTANIX – https://www.nutanix.com/blog/unified-storage