The Ultimate List of Key Nutanix Benefits
One of the top priorities for most companies is reducing costs required for maintaining their infrastructure. At the same time, it is of utmost importance to ensure your company’s ability to quickly react to ever-changing market dynamics. Today’s market offers a rich choice of solutions to satisfy the needs of any business. When it comes to virtual environments, Nutanix is deserving of honorable mention. This article focuses on the primary Nutanix backup benefits and how their combination with NAKIVO Backup & Replication can transform the performance of your virtual infrastructure.
What Is Nutanix?
Nutanix is a well-known software company that focuses on cloud computing, including private, public, and distributed clouds. The company offers a variety of solutions, allowing you to modernize datacenters, optimize workloads within applications of any scale, and harmonize operations across your infrastructure’s clouds.
Nutanix claims that the key benefit of their software is the power of making your infrastructure invisible. The idea behind it is that the IT management can be so simple that the entire infrastructure works without basic users even knowing it is there. Nutanix offers a stack of technologies that basically run themselves, as they say. Let’s take a quick look at the benefits of Nutanix solutions and what exactly the company offers.
Top 5 Nutanix Benefits
Here are some of the key benefits of Nutanix that address the needs of essentially any infrastructure:
Simple to manage
You can easily monitor and manage all your applications, VMs, and other resources from a single console, no matter the size of your infrastructure. Nutanix claims that this is as easy as checking your email. The technology that lies beneath is known as Nutanix Prism. Designed to deliver one-click monitoring and automation, this management platform allows for effortless control of your environment. Also, Nutanix Prism provides a detailed view over your infrastructure and the related statistics, which makes it a great helper for analytics purposes.
Easily scalable
Nutanix provides a way to scale up your architecture without compromises that cannot be avoided in the case of most legacy solutions. When it comes to virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), deployments often fail when trying to scale beyond 200 desktops. One of the Nutanix benefits is that the company offers its own approach to handle this issue. The idea is to keep the computer right next to the storage. When needed, you can add a single node to your cluster, thus increasing your VDI by 50-100 desktops.
Highly secure
The ever-evolving nature of cyber threats has turned data security into an especially thorny issue. Conventional hypervisors cannot be said to fully comply with the security requirements as long as they interact with hardware and software from different manufacturers. In contrast, Nutanix AHV, the platform’s native hypervisor, is free of such vulnerabilities. AHV is tuned specifically for Nutanix-centered infrastructure, which significantly reduces the security area. The set of security features is quite rich, from multi-factor authentication and key administration to data-at-rest encryption and extensive certifications.
Resilient to failure
It is a common practice to utilize clients dependent upon a central management VM or even a third-party database source. Such infrastructure models are prone to single point of failure vulnerabilities, which can lead to downtime in business-critical operations. One of the key Nutanix benefits is the ability to self-heal. Nutanix claims that their product was designed with the assumption that the hardware it runs on may fail for any reason under the sun. Since Nutanix Prism is a part of every node, and the entire system continues to operate even if one of its nodes fails. At that point, the underlying issue is fixed automatically with no need for manual effort.
Data-driven
One of the main Nutanix benefits is that AHV, the hypervisor, doesn’t require an additional license to receive analytical data from its environment. Additionally, AHV does not need to send data to a separate database. Analytics come as an integral part of Prism and covers virtualization, storage, and computing purposes. In turn, this enables a complete 360-degree visibility across the entire infrastructure. The product’s customizable dashboard not only personalizes user experience, but allows you to make faster and better-informed decisions.
Nutanix Benefits Combined with NAKIVO Backup & Replication Functionality
NAKIVO Backup & Replication provides a full-fledged solution to help you protect data in your Nutanix AHV-based environment. Easy to integrate, our product provides a way to create application-aware, incremental backups of your VMs with no need for agent software.
In combination with Nutanix benefits, NAKIVO Backup & Replication makes for a perfect solution to manage, maintain, and protect your infrastructure. Here are just some of our product’s key features:
Agentless, incremental backup
Our solution relies on Changed Regions Tracking, Nutanix native change tracking technology. It provides a way to make sure that only the data blocks that have changed since the last backup cycle are copied to the backup repository. In turn, this is a way to both reduce backup time and save storage space.
Additionally, our solution is purely agentless, which means that you don’t need any additional software agent installed on the source and target hosts.
Application-aware mode
Should your infrastructure include applications or databases that require transactional consistency, it is critical to make sure that backups are performed in an application-aware mode. NAKIVO Backup & Replication utilizes the Volume Shadow Copy Service. This technology provides a way to make sure that data is properly flushed from memory and then kept frozen long enough for a snapshot to take place. Usually, the entire process takes no more than a few seconds. When it comes to data recovery, application-aware backups allow you to restore data as quickly as possible, which may be critical for business continuity.
High performance
NAKIVO Backup & Replication offers several features to speed up backup jobs and reduce backup windows. The LAN-free Data Transfer, one of them, allows you to boost backup speed and offload your network at the same time. This is achieved via two techniques: the direct SAN access and HotAdd. Another feature, Network Acceleration, speeds up data transfer by using compression and traffic reduction techniques. When enabled, this feature can help you reduce network load by up to 50%, as well as double data transfer speed rates.
Effective bandwidth usage
With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, you can set data transfer speed limits so that your backup jobs consume less LAN/WAN bandwidth. This is important not only for infrastructures with a large number of VMs, but also in case your backup jobs need to run during business hours. In this case, there is a risk of overloading your network, which can affect your daily operations. The Advanced Bandwidth Throttling addresses this issue. This functionality allows you to set both global and individual rules, thus getting data transfer speed under granular control. For further convenience, you can enable different throttling scenarios on different schedules.
Advanced reliability
It is critical to make sure that your backups are valid and available before they are actually needed. There are quite a lot of things that can affect your backups: accidental deletion, file corruption, disk failure, malicious attack, and so on. With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, you can eliminate a single point of failure. The Backup Copy feature allows you to copy backups from one repository to another without affecting your production environment. Backup copies can be sent both offsite and to the cloud. In addition, backup data is transferred via an AES 256 encrypted link, which makes the procedure entirely safe.
Final Thoughts
Nutanix solutions allow you to reduce spending without sacrificing quality and productivity. Some of the key Nutanix customer benefits include high performance, enterprise-grade scalability, and elegant simplicity. In turn, NAKIVO Backup & Replication offers a rich toolset for protecting your Nutanix AHV infrastructure. Our product is easy to integrate and use. Armed with its basic features, you can automate data protection jobs, optimize the use of your network resources, and greatly simplify data protection management. With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, you can rest assured that your backups remain valid and can be instantly accessed in case of emergency.
