Nutanix OS 3.0 software and NX-3000 series hardware

Nutanix has announced the latest version of its software, Nutanix OS 3.0, and a hardware line, the NX-3000 series. The products assist enterprises build next-generation, software-defined data centres. In addition to VM-level disaster recovery and adaptive post-process compression, Nutanix OS 3.0 also delivers dynamic cluster expansion, rolling software upgrades and support for a second hypervisor, KVM.

The NX-3000 series highly configurable platform allows compute-heavy and storage-heavy nodes to coexist in a single heterogeneous cluster. The platform will include hardware models that are variable in the capacity and number of PCIe-SSDs, SATA SSDs, and SATA HDDs per server node. The nodes can have varying numbers of CPU cores per socket and variable memory capacities. This allows for independent scaling of compute and storage in a single system that is optimised for every use case and can scale to address evolving business requirements.

The NX-3000 is based on Intel’s Sandy Bridge architecture and delivers VM density in a 2U form factor.

Nutanix OS 3.0 includes native storage-optimised disaster recovery that enables multiway, master-master replication claimed not to be available in traditional storage arrays. Administrators can configure disaster recovery policies that specify protection domains and consistency groups in primary sites, which can then be replicated to any combination of secondary sites to ensure maximum business resiliency and application performance. Furthermore, any Nutanix cluster can serve as both a primary and secondary site simultaneously for different protection domains, providing flexibility and choice.

Nutanix OS 3.0 also delivers best-in-class runbook (failover and failback) automation that is hypervisor-agnostic, which means the native disaster recovery capabilities are available and consistent regardless of the underlying virtualisation platform or management tools.