Simple, Scalable, and Secure Data Management with Nutanix Objects 2.0

Amid the pandemic, it has become imperative that government organizations have reliable, well architected solutions that are easy to deploy, completely secure, and scalable. With the incredible adversities everyone has faced this year, such as increased cybersecurity risks, these critical solutions must be able to operate in emergencies to decrease fear, uncertainty, and doubt. To combat these challenges, Nutanix built Objects 2.0—a simple solution that amplifies security with Splunk SmartStore and Write Once, Read Many (WORM) implementation while remaining scalable from as small as 1 TiB to many PBs—all while remaining cost efficient.

While some in the IT industry excelled in their leadership by stepping up and displaying exceptional preservation of their technologies in the communications, internet services and collaborative platform fields, others have fallen short due to insufficient architecture from the beginning. Frequent problems include:

• Organizations being unable to adjust to full work-from-home status
• Lack of infrastructure scalability within data centers to handle higher workloads
• Weaknesses among the platform in this global emergency

To manage these roadblocks, well architected solutions are designed to succeed and adapt in complicated circumstances, something federal agencies need to ensure continuity in today’s rapidly changing environment. When considering an increase in cybersecurity invasions, such as ransomware attacks, many organizations use Splunk—the industry’s leading software platform for analyzing and organizing machine-generated data—to resist intrusions.

From tracking security events to automating IT operations, all while their employees began accessing data from home, agencies needed to be able to quickly scale and broaden their Splunk environments to address a necessity for additional capacity. That’s why Nutanix designed Objects 2.0 to be a well architected solution that supports Splunk and allows organizations to simply add nodes and blocks to their existing systems and easily increase storage to account for higher data ingestion.

From the start, Objects 2.0 has been intended to simplify unstructured data management with peak performance capability and a focus on security while remaining scalable and efficient. Nutanix’s customers have found that with the ease it takes to upgrade their current Objects service, they’re able to avoid navigating data migration and doing other time consuming, long term organizational tasks. With these expansive features, Nutanix is able to further address necessary demands for Splunk users.

Smooth Scaling: Over time, current clusters can become too full to process and house any more data. To alleviate tedious planning and effort to move the excess workloads from one cluster to another, Objects 2.0 enables a 1-click solution to contain the increasing unstructured data sets by allowing an existing cluster to consume capacity from others within a data center. For example, when one Objects cluster reaches capacity and another Objects cluster elsewhere has available storage, you can virtually add the second cluster to the first to allow Objects to consume its free capacity. To eliminate overconsumption of the second clusters’ unused storage, limits can be placed on how much capacity Objects is allowed to consume. This is advantageous because it allows for an extra option for building upon your Objects clusters in addition to adding nodes, and combining existing available capacity efficiently.

Simple Performance: With Objects 2.0, it’s possible to get high performance quality without the expensive price tag using new 240TB nodes, which contain 20 HHDs and 4 SSDs. Performance is mainly driven by how many HDD spindles exist in a hybrid node, and therefore a 24 drive in 2U form factor makes sense because it addresses that performance and keeps it cost effective. Customers can efficiently contain an abundance of data with drivers that are 12TB LFF HDDs, while an SSD tier with 20 HDDs per node improves performance.

Vital Security: Splunk is often utilized by IT organizations to store copious amounts of information to meet compliance requirements, but it can be challenging to find a low-cost, scalable option for this expanding data. So, Splunk created Smartstore—an S3-compatible capability that provides object storage for the excess data. Nutanix Objects 2.0 is prepared to operate Splunk Smartstore within the solution, enabling further connectivity. Moreover, Objects 2.0 can now go beyond supporting baseline AWS S3 compliant WORM implementation on buckets. A consequence of S3 compliance is that versioning must constantly be authorized. Previously, WORM implementation—a time period in which data cannot be altered in any way or by any one—could only apply to versioned buckets. Objects 2.0 now allows WORM implementation on non-versioned buckets as well.

With the ability to utilize these upgrades, Objects 2.0 creates a simple, secure and scalable object store solution for practical price. Current customers can take advantage of Objects 2.0 by applying it to their existing environments with available capacity. All AOS clusters are permitted to 2TiB of Objects license free, and with multiple AOS clusters, you can pool these licenses for additional free storage.