back to article Nutanix lures cloudy bingers with Danish trilogy: HPE GreenLake deal, ServiceNow tie-up and ProLiant DX pact

Hyperconverged playa Nutanix opened its .NEXT conference in Copenhagen with a triple announcement: an HPE GreenLake deal, its software pre-installed on HPE servers, and integration with ServiceNow for automated incident-handling. Six months after it first inked a deal with HPE around a subscription-access hyperconverged box, …

  1. The Original Steve

    No thanks

    Far, far cheaper to buy some DL380's or similar and slap on either Windows or Linux to get software defined storage from the OS.

    Only familiar with MS Storage Spaces Direct which comes with the OS, has all the features of Nutanix et all but costs nothing extra. All generic x86 tin.

    Know Linux can do the same too if you prefer that. Save yourself a packet and roll your own.

    1. Androgynous Cow Herd

      Re: No thanks

      If you only know Storage Spaces...there are big spaces in your storage knowledge.

      Ever try to do SMB from a Linux server? Did you notice that SAMBA still sucks? File protocols are complicated beasts and Open Sores software is always going to be behind whatever the creators are trying to emulate from the private software world.

      Using Nutanix for storage, however, is sort of like using your snowmobile to pull your boat. In a corner case it might actually make sense but is not really a best of breed solution. Scaling into large capacity solutions gets weird fast.

      1. The Original Steve

        Re: No thanks

        Putting to one side questioning my storage knowledge simply because I advocate using native OS for storage subsystems rather than expensive appliances, I take issue with the general point you raise.

        Whilst you are right that SMB support on non-Windows devices is still (amazingly) bloody awful, if you don't mind me saying so it sounds as if you misunderstand Storage Spaces Direct (S2D). S2D is the storage subsystem, not the presentation layer. You can of course deploy scale out file servers that sit on top of your S2D to present SMB, but in this context and in the majority of deployments you use S2D as the storage subsystem for your VM's to reside on, not for the OS/apps inside of a Linux VM to connect to.

        Therefore you can quite easily and happily use what MS now call "Azure Stack HCI" (S2D + Hyper-V) and run Linux VM's on top, with the VHDX files living on a ReFS S2D volume. Linux VM's wouldn't even need to have SAMBA installed.

        I'd much, much rather use SMB 3.02 over iSCSI as it's demonstrably better performing, easier to setup and administer and better resilience. Feel free to search for references, but if you're stuck I'll point you in the right direction.

        The only time your concern would be valid in my view is if you are running a heterogeneous environment where your hypervisor is Linux based and you were running S2D as your backend storage subsystem for your VM's, which would be nuts. Might as well use the equivalent of S2D on your Linux distro of choice, either converged or hyperconverged.

        Of course let's not forget that you could use the above model (S2D storage and KVM / Xen for the hypervisor), and simply present the S2D storage via NFS which Windows Server fully supports. That might be a goer if you have separate storage and compute teams, but generally speaking if I'm using Windows or Linux for the hypervisor for ease of use I'd likely use the same OS type for the storage layer too.

        1. Androgynous Cow Herd

          Re: No thanks

          Microsoft SMB stack is the reference point and the defacto standard IMO. It's fast and stable and makes me all gushy inside. I have deployed systems similar to what you are describing, ether Direct attached or over block protocols, for a long time. Up to maybe 100 TB file system, and millions of files...it's workable if not stellar

          I was more taking exception to the statement that similar solutions for SMB exist for Linux as Open Sores software.

          But once you get into mixed mode presentation (NFS and SMB), 100s of TB or more importantly, billions of files, etc, anything that looks and acts like a gateway becomes a bottleneck to scaling and ads a lot of complexity. Truly purpose built, scale out NAS solutions exist for many very good reasons.

    2. fredesmite

      Re: No thanks

      Unfortunately -- most IT = SMB are simply too stupid to do hi-tech anymore

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