US federal agencies adopt SAN-free ultradense 2U data centre

Nutanix, said to be the first company to offer a radically simple compute and storage building block for virtualising data centres without the need for shared storage, has announced it has achieved record growth across US federal agencies for its Complete Cluster SAN-free data centre.

Federal agencies are said to be utilising the company’s SAN-less platform in an effort to build private cloud infrastructure at 40% lower cost than traditional on-premise approaches, without compromising strict service level and information security governance. The platform is suitable for government agencies to help combat the encroachment of public cloud platforms that fail to deliver Congress-mandated controls.

Nutanix is claimed to harness the same distributed system techniques that power Google, Amazon, Facebook and Netflix clouds and packages it into an enterprise-friendly, 2U rackmount enclosure.

The compact form factor of the Complete Cluster opens up new mobile and remote data centre possibilities for defence, education, energy and healthcare organisations that require infrastructure in proximity to their end users to improve application speed and end-user experience.

Federal government IT departments are also said to be attracted to the cost-effective model of scale for virtualising their data centres. Nutanix’s approach of cutting out costly SAN and converging compute and storage into a single tier of infrastructure is claimed to save 30-60% on equipment.