1. Making IT Infrastructure Invisible
Syed Mutahir Ali,
Technology Consultant – Enterprise Solutions Division
ArcPoint Technologies - Pakistan

2. The Best IT Infrastructure Is Infrastructure You Can’t See
Many of the transformative technologies in our lives are things that we don’t even think about. They just work, remove constraints and limitations and eliminate the need for guesswork and prediction. We are not even aware of them.
As technology becomes increasingly central to how a business operates, the way it stays competitive and relevant to its customers, IT infrastructure needs to become invisible as well. Applications and services need infrastructure, but you don’t want to spend all your time dealing with infrastructure issues. It is the plumbing that makes your applications run. You want it to work in a flawless way without much effort. This is what the Nutanix solution does for you.

3. Evolution of Enterprise Infrastructure
Today
Server
Virtualization
App
Server
App
Storage
Scale-Out
Technology is increasingly becoming a strategic enabler in every industry. Businesses have started depending on IT more than ever before to compete effectively and get an edge, and business leaders want information technology platforms that can enable new business models quickly. They want to be able to quickly deliver new products and services based on market demand, to get rich actionable insights about their customers and operations, and so on. But IT infrastructure today cannot deliver what business needs. So let’s talk about how we got here.
15-20 years ago, applications ran on dedicated physical servers with storage directly attached. This worked great when there were few applications that businesses relied on, but became more complex to manage as the number of apps grew. You also had resource inefficiencies because applications running on over-utilized servers couldn’t use the available capacity on free servers.
Virtualization solved this problem by decoupling applications from physical servers and making compute a scale-out resource. In order for virtualization to become enterprise-ready, you needed features like live migration or vMotion, VM high availability, DRS and load balancing and so on. This created the need for shared storage across physical servers. While the SAN wasn’t created with virtualization in mind, it was the only proven technology available at the time.
Architecturally, the SAN is a scale-up storage system. You figure out how much storage capacity and performance you’ll need in the next few years, and pick an appropriate size storage controller ahead of time. As your storage needs grow, you end up with multiple storage systems that become resource silos. The problem with this is that with virtualization, compute is a scale-out resource but it’s trying to work with storage that is a scale-up resource.
Storage Controller
Storage Controller
Storage Controller
Scale-Up

4. Complexity with Legacy Infrastructure
+ Automated operations
+ Self-service provisioning
+ Monitoring and analytics
Network
Virtualization
Compute
Storage Network
Storage
x Lifecycle complexity
x Resource silos
x Support challenges
x High costs
When businesses think about deploying clouds (or cloud-like environments) in their own datacenters, the solution looks something like this – they pick the cloud management platform, be it OpenStack, VMware vRealize or Microsoft Cloud Platform System, which gives them cloud-like capabilities such as self-service provisioning, monitoring, analytics and automation
But they still use legacy infrastructure systems behind the cloud software. They buy scale-up storage such as a SAN or a NAS, connected over a storage network to a scale-out pool of servers. They buy virtualization separately. The stack involves at least 3-4 different vendors, and they have to manage the interoperability challenge
This legacy architecture makes every step of the infrastructure lifecycle more complex, from buying and deploying, to managing, scaling and supporting. You buy storage in big increments, and need to figure out how much capacity and performance you'll need in the future. So you’re buying for the future end state, and if you didn’t predict your needs correctly, then you take on that risk. Many enterprise customers end up overprovisioning storage to mitigate some of this risk.
Deploying this infrastructure stack takes days or weeks. You have to install solutions from 5-6 different vendors. This includes the SAN itself, one or more fibre channel storage networking switches, the servers, an HBA that goes in the server and talks to storage, a data networking switch and a virtualization solution. You have to make sure that the components work together based on their interoperability matrices, configure the fibre channel network correctly and so on. Companies typically have dedicated teams of specialized IT professionals focused on each part of this infrastructure stack. As the infrastructure footprint goes, the sheer complexity of coordinating between these teams goes up.
This complexity extends into managing the infrastructure stack as well. Admins need to look at element managers from each of the different vendors in the stack, including storage, networking, servers and virtualization. They need to piece together a complete picture of what’s going on in the infrastructure stack based on these limited views. Because you have so many different disparate pieces working together, automating things end-to-end is next to impossible. Even in so-called converged infrastructure stacks that provide a single UI to manage the stack, admins often have to go back to the element managers to do anything beyond the most basic and routine of tasks.
As your needs grow, scaling servers is easy because of the scale-out architecture, but storage and the storage network are painful and take days or weeks.
Finally, if you encounter some issue, for example an application slows down or becomes unresponsive, diagnosing the root cause is again very challenging and often involves dealing with many different vendor support teams and multiple hand-offs.
All this complexity means that IT teams spend a lot of their time standing up the infrastructure stack and dealing with day to day management and firefighting rather than focusing on things that actually drive business value.

5. How Should Infrastructure Be Delivered?
Agile
Simple
Provisioning in hours, not days or weeks
No specialized skills required to operate
Secure
Scale-out
Now that we’ve seen what the problem is, let’s look at what an ideal solution looks like.
Public cloud services have raised the bar for how infrastructure needs to be delivered in the enterprise data center.
Business leaders want the agility and elasticity of the cloud which allows them to tackle uncertainty. They like the fractional consumption model that lets them pay for resources when they need them. Public clouds are also incredibly simple to use, and even IT generalists can manage cloud resources easily.
At the same time, enterprise customers also want the security and control that private data center infrastructure offers. They can define SLAs to their business units and provide more assured data privacy. Datacenter infrastructure needs to deliver on all these requirements.
Privacy and control without significant overhead
Predictable capacity growth with consumption-based pricing

6. The Solution: Hyperconverged Infrastructure
Virtualization
App
Virtualization
App
Storage Controller
Server
Let’s now look at how Nutanix solved this infrastructure challenge. Nutanix pioneered the concept of hyperconverged infrastructure. Hyperconvergence natively converges compute and storage into x86 servers with attached flash and hard disk drives that are deployed as a cluster.
Customers can start with a small footprint — three nodes in as little as 2U of rack space, and can add compute and storage capacity when needed. Hyperconvergence radically simplifies how infrastructure is deployed and managed, and reduces the footprint of IT infrastructure by up to 90%.
Integrated, scale-out compute and storage

7. 90% Footprint Reduction Up to Less Power and Space Legacy
Purpose of the Slide:
This slide is about the power and space savings that hyper-convergence delivers. We’re walking through the IT lifecycle and talking about the benefits that Nutanix delivers.
Main Points:
With hyper-convergence, you can save up to 90% in power and space compared to legacy
This benefit comes from a couple of different factors –
For one, you are not buying infrastructure that you don’t need – less overprovisioning means less need for gear
By bringing compute and storage together in the same server and eliminating the need for storage networking appliances, you further save on footprint
This directly contributes to TCO savings by lowering opex
Up to
Less Power and Space

8. … … Datacenter Stack AHV Nutanix Apps Virtual Infra
VMware, MSFT, Redhat
ESX-i
Hyper-V
AHV
NetApp, EMC
Nutanix
Physical
Infra
Cisco, Brocade
Qlogic, Emulex
HP, Dell, Cisco
Cisco, Arista, Juniper
Cisco, Arista, Juniper

9. Integrated Datacenter Management
Will add stuff here, you can leave it as it is
Prism

10. Infrastructure for Private Cloud
Built for the Cloud Era …
Secure
Scale-out
Simple
Agile
Data Backup
Disaster Recovery
Seamless App Mobility
The Nutanix solution is built with the cloud in mind.
First of all, Nutanix allows you to deploy infrastructure that provides cloud-like agility, simplicity and fractional consumption with enhanced security all within your private datacenter.
In addition, Nutanix is building a number of technologies that provide a bridge to popular public cloud services such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, allowing customers to use the public cloud for data backup, disaster recovery and a destination for applications.
Infrastructure for Private Cloud

11. Predictable Economics and Growth
Key Points:
One of the biggest advantages of Nutanix’s scale-out architecture is linear predictability of scale
As you add nodes to a Nutanix cluster, the number of VMs or virtual desktops that can be supported on the cluster grows in a linear, predictable way without limits
This is critical because it significantly simplifies buying decisions for scaling, and allows

12. Scalable Distributed System Design
Tier 1 Workloads (running on all nodes)
Nutanix Controller VM (one per node)
Node 1
Node 2
Node N VM VM VM
CVM VM VM VM
CVM VM VM VM
CVM
Hypervisor
Hypervisor
Hypervisor
X86
X86
X86
Distributed Storage Fabric
Snapshots
Clones
Compression
Deduplication
Locality
Tiering
Erasure Coding
Resilience
Let’s take a look at the Nutanix architecture. The Nutanix solution is deployed as a cluster of servers or nodes — starting with at least three. Each node has CPU, memory, flash storage and hard disk drives, and has a hypervisor installed. The nodes are connected to each other over a 10 Gig Ethernet switch - any standard switch will do. The Nutanix software runs in a user-mode VM called the controller VM on each node in this cluster. The Controller VMs or CVMs talk to each other and create a single storage pool using the storage drives on all the nodes in the cluster. This is called the Distributed Storage Fabric or DSF.
DSF distributes data and metadata across all the nodes in the cluster, and provides enterprise storage features such as deduplication, compression, cloning, tiering and resilience in a truly distributed way with no single points of failure or hotspots in the cluster. This scale-out architecture allows you to grow the cluster by adding nodes when needed without limits. You get linear predictable performance and capacity increases as the cluster grows.
The Nutanix solution delivers data locality to provide the best VM and cluster performance. All I/O requests from a VM are handled by the local controller VM on that node. When a VM writes data, one copy of the data is always written to the local node. That way, read requests can be handled immediately using data on the same node without going over the network. If the VM moves to a different node, then over time the data also migrates to the remote node to restore locality.
The Nutanix solution is 100% software-defined and doesn’t rely on custom hardware for any capabilities. Current Nutanix customers can get the benefits of software innovation by installing the latest software release with a single click.

13. Infrastructure Lifecycle Benefits
BUY
DEPLOY
MANAGE
SCALE
SUPPORT
Pay as You Grow - buy only what you need, and stop expensive overprovisioning
Rapid Deployment – set up in minutes for fast time to value
Simplified Management - single pane of glass to manage all infrastructure
Incremental Scalability - scale on demand in minutes, with zero downtime
One-stop Support – expert support for complete infrastructure stack
Nutanix makes the entire infrastructure lifecycle much simpler. With the scale-out architecture and fractional consumption, you no longer need to overprovision resources or buy infrastructure ahead of when you need it — you can get just the right amount of infrastructure to meet your application needs today, and grow your footprint incrementally as your needs grow. 
The turnkey solution can be deployed in minutes — there’s on more dealing with the complexity of setting up fibre channel networks, configuring LUNs, RAID sets and so on. Because the solution is converged and works with all standard 10 Gig switches, there is no real interoperability challenge to deal with. 
Nutanix provides a single pane of glass to manage the entire infrastructure stack. This intuitive management platform provides a consistent and unified view of the full stack and allows admins to see and control their compute and storage resources. For the first time, IT generalists can manage compute and storage infrastructure in the datacenter without requiring deep domain expertise. This simplifies the IT organization significantly.
Nutanix clusters can be scaled incrementally on demand in just a few minutes. Admins can do this without bringing down the systems. As nodes are added to a cluster, capacity and performance improve in a predictable way without limits.
Finally, Nutanix world-class support stands behind the entire infrastructure solution. With an industry-leading net promoter score, Nutanix support delivers unparalleled experience to customers and dramatically reduces the time to resolve issues.

14. 7.5 Months 510% 58% 85% Faster 71% 98% Fewer Occurrences
Business Benefits
5-Year ROI
Payback Period
5-Year TCO Savings
Business Value
7.5 Months
510%
58%
Management of Nutanix Environment
Deployment of Storage
Unplanned Downtime
Key Performance Improvements
Nutanix’s approach to infrastructure offers real, tangible, material benefits to customers in terms of greater agility, faster time to value and lower Total Cost of Ownership. A study conducted by IDC to quantify the benefits of Nutanix infrastructure found that customers get over 500% Return on Investment over a 5 year period, and up to 60% lower TCO with a 7.5 month payback period. The biggest benefits are in terms of lower operational expenses – Nutanix systems reduce management time by over 70% and reduce unplanned downtime occurrences by 98%.
85% Faster
71%
Less Time
98% Fewer Occurrences

15. The Nutanix Solution Nutanix Prism Nutanix Acropolis
Comprehensive management solution that radically simplifies datacenter storage and virtualization operations
Nutanix Acropolis
Now, let’s talk about the actual products that Nutanix offers. There are two foundational products in the Nutanix solution -  Nutanix Acropolis, and Nutanix Prism. 
Acropolis is the data fabric that natively converges compute, storage and virtualization to run any application at any scale. 
Prism is the control plane that simplifies datacenter operations by providing a single pane of glass to manage compute, storage and virtualization and offering rich automation and operational insights.
Turnkey infrastructure platform that converges compute, storage and virtualization to run any application, at any scale

16. Infrastructure Resilience
Nutanix Acropolis
Enterprise Storage
Infrastructure Resilience
Virtualization
Data Protection
Security
Nutanix Acropolis
Simple
Nutanix Acropolis combines feature-rich software-defined storage, compute and built-in virtualization into a turnkey hyperconverged infrastructure solution that can run any application at any scale. 
Acropolis provides a rich set of capabilities without the need for traditional SAN and NAS solutions. 
A robust system design allows for rapid fault detection, isolation and recovery to provide always-on operation. The system provides integrated, affordable data protection and continuous availability to meet the needs of a wide range of applications.
Powerful built-in virtualization radically simplifies the infrastructure stack and eliminates the need to deploy and manage a separate virtualization solution.
Security is deeply ingrained in the Nutanix culture and product development methodology from the top down. Security hardening and validation are incorporated into the software development lifecycle right from the start, and a rich set of features make the platform ready for the most security-conscious enterprise environments.
Scalable
Secure

17. Nutanix Prism Any Runtime No Forklift Nutanix Prism No Lock-In
One-Click Infrastructure Management
One-Click Remediation
Nutanix Prism gives administrators a simple and elegant way to manage virtual environments. Prism uses powerful data analytics and heuristics to simplify and streamline common workflows within a datacenter, eliminating the need to have disparate management solutions.
With Prism, admins can centrally manage their entire infrastructure stack all the way from physical clusters and storage up to virtual machines.
Prism provides features that deliver rich insights about day-to-day operations of the datacenter. For example, customizable operations dashboards give at-a-glance summary of application and infrastructure state. Administrators can also make use of predictive analysis of capacity usage and trends based on application behavior.
One-Click Operational Insights

18. Consumer-Grade Design
Intuitive
Beautiful
Insightful

19. Nutanix: The Enterprise Cloud Company
Make datacenter infrastructure invisible, elevating IT to focus on applications and services
4,450+ customers
Over 90+ countries
6 continents
Founded in 2009
2,350+ employees