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“In just two weeks we had a Nutanix cluster up and ready for new business in the AWS public cloud. As well as meeting our immediate deadline, this allowed us to still meet geographic constraints and other regulatory requirements. Plus it can run all our workloads unchanged and be managed remotely along side other on-premises private cloud deployments”. Don’t let supply chain headache’s get you down when you need control and choice for your business systems and projects. Nutanix Hybrid Multi-Cloud Platform, with One Click operations and built-in automation, allows any workload at any scale to run in any cloud (including your private cloud) with your choice of financial model, be it capex or opex, giving you maximum choice and maximum control. Workload mobility with consistent management has never been this easy. Build a solid foundation for digital transformation with the industry’s best technical support to back it all up.
The COVID pandemic years have presented many curve balls to organisations of all shapes and sizes. Now more than ever it’s important to have infrastructure that supports ever changing business objectives and provides agility and flexibility at short notice. With Nutanix Hybrid Multi-Cloud Platform workloads can be moved between clouds, including private clouds, with a few simple operations, without the need to refactor the applications. Traditional applications are supported along side K8’s and modern cloud native applications and big data. Organisations can take advantage of new revenue opportunities by scaling infrastructure rapidly and aligning costs to allow profitable growth, all while maintaining consistent and simple management across all platforms.
Benefit from decreasing costs with predictable performance and easy management and troubleshooting, while reducing risk of downtime across all of your cloud platforms. Linear scalability with predictable performance removes some of the question marks about how applications will behave regardless of the cloud they are running in. While cloud hardware might be transient in some cases, smart infrastructure software can protect your data and applications even in the situation of maintenance and failure. Spend less time troubleshooting and more time innovating and differentiating against the competition.
Business initiative being more successful than planned? Needing additional capacity earlier than planned? Wanting to allow for a seasonable peak in demand? No problem. Scale out infrastructure in a few minutes or on demand automatically with supported cloud providers. Fractional consumption of IT resources regardless if they are local, hosted or cloud based. Use existing cloud accounts and access existing cloud credits and all native services directly (on same VPC) from the local cloud provider. No need to set up brand new cloud accounts with the Nutanix Hybrid Multi-Cloud Platform!
A hosted bare metal cloud, such as Equinix, could form part of an integrated multi-cloud strategy and allow for multiple geographic technology hosting solutions to support any sort of business projects on demand. Network connectivity, resiliency and access is key for a global multi-cloud strategy, and Nutanix partners, including Equinix, can provide the stable onramp and interconnection between all the clouds.
Final Word
Ultimate flexibility and choice is available across hybrid clouds, all backed up by legendary industry leading support with a 90+ NPS. Nutanix has the solutions and partner ecosystems to handle the toughest business challenges and deliver consistently high quality results. Nutanix is the enterprise easy button for hybrid multi-cloud technology solutions. If Nutanix can save you time and money, while offering you ultimate flexibility, what would you rather be investing those spare resources in?
This post first appeared on the Long White Virtual Clouds blog at longwhiteclouds.com. By Michael Webster. Copyright © 2012 – 2022 – IT Solutions 2000 Ltd and Michael Webster. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced for commercial purposes without written permission.
Public Cloud, Private Cloud, Hybrid Cloud, Multi-Cloud, or all of the above? That is the question many organisations are asking. Do you refactor your apps or lift and shift? What about data security and data soverinty? Do you need a combination of things to support a complex business environment? It’s not likely a one size fits all situation. Nutanix Cloud Platform on Equinix Metal could be a great onramp to a Hybrid Multi-Cloud world.
Nutanix Cloud Platform on Equinix Metal hybrid multi-cloud platform solution that spans private and multiple public clouds, with a unified management plane, complete license portability, and seamless application migration across the multiple cloud environments. It enables complete freedom to run applications, without the need to refactor, on any platform with unified infrastructure management, leveraging existing cloud accounts and existing credits (if any).
Equinix Metal is built on top of Equinix Fabric. This enables Equinix to provide some of the best direct cloud network connectivity and peering as it operates datacenters at the heart of peering locations and close to public cloud resources. This adds simplified network connectivity onto a simplified hybrid multi-cloud experience.
Just because you need a mix of private, public, or hybrid multi-cloud doesn’t mean you have to be in the business of managing data centers and all the components that come along with them. Nutanix and Equinix can help manage globally diverse business needs with or without customer owned data centres. Deploy when you want, where you want, how you want, and in the type of cloud you want. Scale on demand and as needed.
Final Word
Take your licenses and cloud accounts whereever you go. Migrate your VM’s, files, and data among on-premises datacentres, clouds, without re-architecting, without re-factoring, to deliver the best experience. Hybrid Multi-cloud on your terms. Check out how a global retailer embraced hybrid multi-cloud and download the Nutanix Cloud Platform on Equinix metal Solutions Brief and contact Nutnix or Equinix to get started!
This post first appeared on the Long White Virtual Clouds blog at longwhiteclouds.com. By Michael Webster. Copyright © 2012 – 2022 – IT Solutions 2000 Ltd and Michael Webster. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced for commercial purposes without written permission.
Enterprise Strategy Group – ESG, recently completed a evaluation of Nutanix Cloud Platform for Enterprise Workloads and Databases, covering MS SQL Server, Oracle, SAS Analytics, Splunk, and VDI. The results compare performance from 2017 to 2021, and as you expect show some impressive improvements. One thing that shines through is the linear scalability and stability of the Nutanix platform. The performance you get with one node, you get each time you add a node, making performance and capacity scale easily without complications. You can access the full report here, this post will cover some of the brief highlights.
The report (download here) highlights that Nutanix Cloud Platform can simplify infrastructure supporting any enterprise workload or database, and provide consistent, repeatable, and linearly scalable performance with high availability. The elastic scalability and fractional consumption of the Nutanix Cloud Platform can benefit any type of workload, and create a cloud experience wherever a customer chooses to deploy it.
The following image displays the availability graph across Nutanix systems globally and demonstrates high levels of availability can be expected (not included in the report).
Two areas I would like to highlight from the report is the MS SQL Server and VDI Performance, both demonstrate the consistent performance and scalability of the Nutanix Cloud Platform, and low latency that can be expected.
As workloads are added, and nodes are scaled, overall performance increases and response times stay consistent. The report covers many more workloads and has special features to note applicable to big data workloads, such as SAS Analytics, Splunk or Elastic Search. I would recommend you download the full report (download here) and read through it, as it’s only 20 pages.
Final Word
Enterprise workloads and databases need a solid underlying infrastructure to ensure optimal business results. The Nutanix Cloud Platform allows a customer to deploy the same consistent infrastructure in public cloud, co-lo, or on-prem and experience the same reliability and linear scalability. Choose your location, build your cloud, all on your terms.
This post first appeared on the Long White Virtual Clouds blog at longwhiteclouds.com. By Michael Webster. Copyright © 2012 – 2021 – IT Solutions 2000 Ltd and Michael Webster. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced for commercial purposes without written permission.
In a recent press release (here) Nutanix and RedHat announced a joint strategic partnership for open hybrid multicloud solutions. As part of the announcement Nutanix AHV Hypervisor becomes certified for RedHat Enterprise Linux. Nutanix now offers more choice for operating systems and hypervisors. Which includes offering support for RedHat Enterprise Linux on Nutanix AHV Hypervisor for SAP HANA. SAP HANA is also supported by Nutanix on VMware ESXi Hypervisor with RedHat Enterprise Linux. Included below are the supported configurations.
Here is the list of supported configuration for SAP HANA when used with Nutanix AOS:
The major new additions to the above platform configurations include RedHat Enterprise Linux being added for support on Nutanix AHV and VMware ESXi.
There are supported configuration differences between Scale Up Hana and Scale Out HANA, as displayed in the following image:
You can find a full list of Nutanix HCI Certified Solutions on the SAP HANA HCI Hardware Certification Page.
There are a number of considerations when designing a platform for SAP workloads and especially SAP HANA. Nutanix has the expertise with partners to be able to provide full end to end solutions and assist with sizing. Nutanix has a number of customers with systems already in production. The Nutanix SAP Solutions Page has a lot of helpful content and resources that can get you started. Another great resource is the SAP HANA Cheat Sheet on the SAP web site.
Final Word
Nutanix offers choice of hypervisor, hardware platform and operating system for SAP HANA, while having a high performance, reliable and simple solution that accelerates time to use and lowers total cost of ownership. If you want to ‘run simple’ the best way to do that is with SAP HANA with Nutanix.
This post first appeared on the Long White Virtual Clouds blog at longwhiteclouds.com. By Michael Webster. Copyright © 2012 – 2021 – IT Solutions 2000 Ltd and Michael Webster. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced for commercial purposes without written permission.
Managing large databases is hard. Having changes go through a dynamic environment to production with thorough testing is also hard. When you have a 100TB+ production system, keeping non-production copies up to date is even harder still. Most companies can’t afford to keep exact copies of production due to the size and scale, so compromise the non-production environments. This is no longer necessary. Nutanix Era solves this acute database management problem, and many others!
Nutanix Era is a Database-as-a-Service Solution that solves many of the acute problems facing businesses and DBA’s today when managing large number of databases, or large databases, which impact productivity, reliability, availability and performance.
One of the biggest benefits for customers that have large databases is the ability to take a complete clone of the production system and make multiple copies for non-production uses. Any number of clones can be created without impacting storage capacity requirements, this is due to using native Nutanix API’s in the cloning process. The following 9 minute video shows an example of a 100TB Production Oracle RAC DB being refreshed to 10 clones, for use in testing and development. The clones don’t take up any additional space until the moment data is changed. I hope you like the Jazz music :).
If you like what you see and you’d like to get some hands on experience with Nutanix Era, please take a look at the Nutanix Era Test Drive – Available Online from the comfort of wherever you are.
Recently version 2.0 of Era was released, including the following enhancements.
Hybrid Cloud Flexibility and Multi-cluster Management
With Era 2.0 we have extended our database platform capabilities across clusters and hybrid cloud. This provides our customers the flexibility to build and manage databases on their own terms, giving them the freedom to develop and deploy databases of their choice in the environment they want.
Expanding Database Engine Portfolio with SAP HANA
SAP/HANA has joined Oracle, MS SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL, & MariaDB in the portfolio of database engines supported by Nutanix Era. SAP/HANA customers can now leverage Era’s 1-click capabilities to create an end-to-end sandbox environment on the Nutanix HCI platform.
Extended Choice and Support with PostgreSQL
With Era 2.0, PostgreSQL admins can now take full advantage of all Era capabilities, including patching and in-place restore. In addition, Nutanix will now provide 24×7 support for PostgreSQL databases provisioned by Era, allowing customers to call our support number with any issues.
Enhancing Service Model Delivery with HCL Partnership
For customers seeking fully-managed database services, Nutanix has partnered with global technology company HCL, to offer a joint solution called SKALE DB powered by HCL and Nutanix. The partnership provides a secure, scalable, cloud-ready managed DBaaS offering integrated with Nutanix Era and Prism for automation and management for database & hyperconverged infrastructure.
There is much more to come in future releases!!
Final Word
Good DBA’s are far too valuable to allocate to mundane tasks that can be automated. The DBA’s can create and control the policies, and delegate to competent team members the rights to perform tasks for themselves. DBA’s can then focus on solving real business problems, improving data efficiencies and delivering far greater insights. Utilising Nutanix Era can greatly reduce the storage required to manage database environments and maintaining large numbers of non-production systems. The capital saved from not needing excess storage infrastructure can be redeployed to more business focused investments. There is no need to migrate defects to production because you couldn’t test changes on a full scale copy in your non-production systems! Don’t forget to get some hands on experience with Nutanix Era, please take a look at the Nutanix Era Test Drive – Available Online from the comfort of wherever you are.
This post first appeared on the Long White Virtual Clouds blog at longwhiteclouds.com. By Michael Webster. Copyright © 2012 – 2021 – IT Solutions 2000 Ltd and Michael Webster. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced for commercial purposes without written permission.
I think John Troyer sums today at Oracle OpenWorld up well – Hell Freezes Over? VMware Support on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Oracle Software Support on VMware Hypervisor, even when deployed on-premises!
Today at Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco there was a small announcement that might not have initially got too much attention, but it’s really caused a tectonic shift in the IT industry. Oracle and VMware jointly announced VMware Cloud Foundation support for VMware’s stack on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and at the same time announced support for Oracle software on VMware, including premises deployments. This is the first time ever that Oracle has acknowledged the presence of VMware in the ecosystem and support for their software on VMware’s hypervisor, although previously they certified Hyper-V.
OCI has some special features including significantly less complex networking compared to some of the other cloud vendors, so VMware will get some benefit from that. Additionally VMware customers who use OCI will get direct access to all of the native OCI capabilities, including Oracle’s highly tuned offerings. This could be a big onramp both ways and shows VMware’s hybrid cloud strategy playing out. I would predict VMware would announce something similar with SAP’s cloud at TechEd in Las Vegas in a few weeks, or at a later date.
I sent a message to one of my long time friends at VMware congratulating him on this monumental announcement. We have both been fighting with Oracle for decades to come up with some sort of common sense. Finally they have made some movement. This will be good for all virtualization in the future as Oracle is more acutely aware of what their customers want. But let’s wait and see if it plays out more widely.
The good news for all Nutanix customers is that this announcement will directly benefit any Nutanix customer currently running Oracle on VMware on Nutanix. Previously there was a lot of FUD. Now the support situation is even more clear, and you can use all of the hybrid offerings as well. When it comes to AHV we already had our storage stack on the Oracle HCL for iSCSI (which AHV uses) and Nutanix Files, so we already had a higher level of support.
Final Word
This is a big announcement for VMware, finally getting Oracle to support their software on VMware’s hypervisor. It also provides an important route to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure for Oracle to potentially gain more customers. It’s almost like the Berlin wall coming down at the end of the cold war. I’m sure there will be more to come on this announcement as things develop. This is great news for joint customers, including Nutanix customers. Nutanix will be announcing jointly with Oracle Database Solution Bundles at Oracle OpenWorld, if you are at the conference, look out for them. As soon as the public announcements are made you’ll hear more on it.
Nutanix continues to make Oracle much easier for enterprise environments with our Database as a Service and Copy Data Management Solution – Era. You can create non-production clones of production data including masking with a zero byte overhead, freeing storage and developer and tester productivity. Nutanix Era is the easy button for Oracle and other database engines and allows much higher DBA control and productivity. I strongly encourage you to check it out and request a demo. It will be a tectonic shift for how you manage database copies and clones.
This post first appeared on the Long White Virtual Clouds blog at longwhiteclouds.com. By Michael Webster +. Copyright © 2012 – 2019 – IT Solutions 2000 Ltd and Michael Webster +. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced for commercial purposes without written permission.
By now most readers will know that Nutanix can scale linearly to meet almost any enterprise data center workload and we have many different models of hardware available with many different hardware vendors. Whether your requirement and deployment blueprint is a few nodes or a block, or a few racks at a time, we’ve proven across more than 10K customers and growing to have a rock solid solution. We were the first and still only hyperconverged vendor to achieve 1 Million IOPS in a Single VM. All of which is great, but what if you have a small use case, a small retail shop (or lots of small retail shops), a home lab, a small test environment. Can Nutanix scale down as well? The answer is yes, and I’d like to share some of the use cases that we’ve been cooking up in the Nutanix Engineering Skunkworks Department (Not a real department, used for dramatic effect).
A couple of years ago one of our engineers at Nutanix came up with the idea to help first responders, local authorities, farmers etc with a drone that could be fully autonomous, controlled over 4G LTE or Wifi, and ran a full Nutanix AHV/AOS stack and OpenStack environment, including control software and analytics. The above image of this fully operational prototype is the result of that work. This is kind of an out there use case, but could you imagine that after a hurricane, flood or earthquake is finished and you need to go looking for survivors, this Drone could be deployed and with an infra red camera identify survivors and their status and send back the GPS coordinates to the forward operations base. This could be done automatically (processing on the Drone at the edge) and the drone could fly a grid and be deployed with many other drones doing the same thing. It could also be used for livestock or crop monitoring and many other use cases. However not everyone will have a use case that requires a Drone like this, so lets look at something that is more widely applicable.
Let me introduce you to Jalapeno. This is the code name of a small form factor Nutanix solution. This was a skunkworks project to see if we could make a small system with a Skylake processor and some decent specs.
This could be suitable for ROBO, home office, edge/IOT, retail, Telco network functions and other types of small use cases. Where something that fits under a desk, in a drawer, in a cupboard, or beside a desk is needed, without having a rack available. While these guys are small, the sure pack a punch.
So how small are they? Here are the specs:
Ok, so you can see they are small, but how powerful are they? You can fit 3 or 4 of these easily on a desk, in a cabinet, they have 4 x 10GbE NIC’s and 4 x 1GbE NIC’s, so networking is no problem. But what about storage, RAM etc? Will they actually be useful for something, like running a bunch of VM’s etc?
The systems are based off the ultra small form factor Supermicro E300-9D-8CN8TP:
REF: https://www.supermicro.com/products/system/Mini-ITX/SYS-E300-9D-8CN8TP.cfm
Note: Please use the specific SKU’s below when getting quotes and ordering from SMC. They have been specifically designed for Nutanix.
These systems pack a serious punch:
So seriously small, but also seriously mighty!! These would be perfect to run Nutanix Community Edition (Go for your life!!), but we also tested them with full versions of AOS with ESXi and AHV (however they are not an officially supported Nutanix hardware model yet).
Here are some of the SKU’s from SuperMicro that you could use to order these beasts!!
SYS-E300-9D-8CN8T-1-NI22 – E300 with 128GB RAM, 2 x SSD (3.94TB Samsung Pm863a) (May need to add on micron m.2 MTFDDAV240TCB)
SYS-E300-9D-8CN8T-3-NI22 – E300 with 128GB RAM, 2 x SSD (1.94TB Samsung Pm863a + Micron m.2 MTFDDAV240TCB)
SYS-E301-9D-8CN8T-1-NI22 – E300 with 128GB RAM, 4 x SSD (3.84TB) + Micron m.2
For home use you might want to get 480GB or 960GB SSD’s.
As part of the process of creating these nodes we helped SMC create a new bracket to hold the SSD’s and modify the case to allow for up to 4 SSD’s per node. These wasn’t part of the original SMC design, but I’m glad to report it is now part of their standard SKU’s. It was great seeing the work the skunkworks engineering team and SMC did to create this solution.
Final Word
As I stated before, the small E300 nodes are not officially supported for production use, they are not a Nutanix node that you can buy from Nutanix. However you can buy them, and Nutanix Community Edition will work great on them. If you think we should have these as an officially supported Nutanix solution and you see a massive demand for this type of solution for your business, or someone you know (perhaps a large global training provider, large global telco, large global retailer, large global hotel chain???), then please contact your local Nutanix partner or local Nutanix account team and let them know. We can’t make any promises, but we’re using these ourselves internally for our SE’s and training needs and for test labs for some of our engineers. Of course these make great home lab units. You can have 1 node, 3 nodes, or more nodes. The sky is really the limit!
This post first appeared on the Long White Virtual Clouds blog at longwhiteclouds.com. By Michael Webster +. Copyright © 2012 – 2018 – IT Solutions 2000 Ltd and Michael Webster +. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced for commercial purposes without written permission.
Just after SAP Sapphire in Orlando I wrote about how Nutanix AHV had been validated for SAP HANA Non-Production Environments. Great news is, on August 28th Nutanix AHV became the first hypervisor validated for SAP HANA Production environments with the publishing of SAP Note 2686722. This is a major milestone and represents SAP’s confidence in Nutanix AHV as a hypervisor to run the most critical workloads for production environments. It’s also worth noting that test results for the certification measured only a 4% different to bare metal. On September 13th Nutanix and our OEM Partners Dell and Lenovo became the first solutions to be full certified and listed on the SAP HANA HCI Certification web page. Nutanix AHV with our Partners Dell and Lenovo is certified for 2 socket and 4 socket solutions for SAP HANA production environments and all non-production environment use cases with certified hardware combinations. Check out the full list of SAP HANA HCI Certified Solutions. Important Note: A competing solution (VXRail) that includes VMware VSAN must turn off important data integrity features, such as object checksums, in order to meet the strict performance requirements for Production SAP HANA, Nutanix does not allow data checksums to be turned off and has met the strict performance requirements for SAP HANA with full data integrity features enabled. Let’s look at some of the resources and details for you to start planning your SAP HANA HCI journey, now that we’re fully certified for production environments.
The only vendor to provide a complete @SAPInMemory #HANA solution for #HCI is @nutanix with certified OEM hardware. Official list of configurations is here – https://t.co/bEXHXPRnuE thanks to @KasimHansia @BasRaayman @vcdx026 for leading this! pic.twitter.com/lvuOrirN6v
— Lord WebScale Webster (@vcdxnz001) September 13, 2018
The first place to start is the Nutanix SAP Page, which lists all of the content available with regard to SAP on Nutanix. There is the blog article announcing our Nutanix AHV Hypervisor Certification For SAP HANA Production Environments. Which also links through to our SAP HANA on Nutanix Best Practices Guide, which has all the real details on how to architect a solution for SAP HANA on Nutanix. If you are an existing Nutanix customer you can access the guide and all other solutions documentation through the Support Portal under Solutions Documentation. You should also refer to the official SAP Note 2686722 for configuration details and options. You will need an SAP Support Login to access the note.
Also check out the official SAP HANA HCI Infrastructure Solutions page. This page lists all of the certified combinations of hardware and software. As of writing this article only Nutanix AHV was certified for 4 socket solutions. Over time we will continue to expand the options that are available.
Dell has also published detailed documentation and guidance on their solutions at their SAP HANA Technical Resources page. We expect Lenovo to follow shortly and publish their detailed guidance. I’ll update this article when they do.
It’s great to be at the point where customers can now experience the simplicity, predictability, scalability and performance with one click operations that HCI brings for SAP HANA production and non-production environments. The Nutanix SAP Engineering team worked with SAP to create the SAP HANA HCI Certification program right from the start. We wanted to make sure it properly validated day 1 and day 2 operations and provide the SLA’s and certainty of the hardware appliance approach for SAP HANA, with the flexibility of TDI, but without the complexity. I believe we have achieved this result and all customers as well as SAP will benefit from this.
Final Word
Not all solutions are created equal. Nutanix makes sure all enterprise features and especially data integrity are enabled by default and not disabled while at the same time meeting the very strict performance and reliability tests that SAP HANA solutions for production demands. Other vendors have taken short cuts and disabled important features like data integrity checksums. Our opinion is that makes those solutions not fit for purpose when it comes to production systems that expect highest levels of availability and performance. Return of your data and data integrity are our number one priorities and are built into everything Nutanix does. We created the Hyper-converged industry on this basis and continue to lead it as a result. Our solution is production ready, for the enterprise and at scale. No Compromises! Other vendors might be playing Russian Roulette with your data!!
This post first appeared on the Long White Virtual Clouds blog at longwhiteclouds.com. By Michael Webster +. Copyright © 2012 – 2018 – IT Solutions 2000 Ltd and Michael Webster +. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced for commercial purposes without written permission.
Last week SAP had their annual SapphireNow event in Orlando, Florida with over 20K people in attendance. Nutanix has been a global technology partner with SAP and AHV certified for the entire Netweaver suite of products for a few years now. Hundreds of customers trust the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform for their mission critical SAP environments. But this year was special because Nutanix was able to announce that we have jointly with SAP validated AHV, and our Enterprise Cloud Solution, for SAP HANA non-production environments. Nutanix is now also validated for Production SAP HANA environments!!
It would not have been possible without a dedicated and focused effort across many different teams in Nutanix. This is the first major step towards having Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI), and the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform, recognized as capable of running SAP HANA for production. This is also the first time since virtualization was introduced more than a decade ago that a completely new category was created for certification by SAP. So why HCI and how is that different from other SAP HANA validations/certification, why non-production, and what does this mean to you, our valued customers and prospects?
Prior to HCI being recognized as a validation/certification category for SAP HANA there were only two primary ways to get HANA. A pre-engineered and certified appliance from SAP HANA OEM Hardware Partners, which consisted of a server with all the components, including local storage, being validated in one bundle, or TDI. TDI stands for tailored datacenter integration, which included certified servers purchased separately and then combined with certified enterprise storage systems, which is then integrated/installed by the customer or integration partner, and supported by the different OEM vendors. HCI brings both of these components together, with the predictability and consistency of the pre-engineered appliance model, plus the flexibility of enterprise storage, and simplicity of HCI.
So why did SAP create a new category of validation/certification in the first place, what pain points were they trying to solve? There are a couple of different aspects to this. SAP is hyper focused on customer experience and customer support (very much like Nutanix), as they know their solution is mission critical and supports 76%+ of every financial transaction in the world today. They wanted a simple, consistent and predictable experience for SAP HANA, that was easy to support, highly resilient, meeting all of the performance criteria, fast to deploy, fast to migrate to, and at the same time flexible and easy to manage (not an easy thing with traditional approaches).
The appliance option lacked the flexibility many customers demanded, and the TDI option was complex and slow to implement. SAP really wanted fast deployment times and faster migration times to help encourage SAP customers to rapidly adopt HANA, without sacrificing the support predictability that comes with a pre-engineered appliance approach (no finger pointing with support). Nutanix took the lead in working with SAP to define the very strict validation and certification criteria for SAP HANA on HCI. As the founder and leader in the Hyperconverged Category (according to Gartner’s latest magic quadrant for hyperconvered infrastructure, as well as by revenue in the public earnings reports), this was logical.
As an example of how Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform helps improve SAP deployment and upgrade times, we had a customer recently complete a 9 months planned SAP patch upgrade, in approximately 2 months, saving 7 months on the project timeline, and a significant dollar amount in the process. SAP Projects are usually measured in months or years, so having rapid deployment with simple management afterwards is a significant benefit to customers, the savings can easily be measured in the millions of Dollars, Euros or Pounds.
SAP HANA HCI Validation/Certification is more than just about fast deployment and migration. The certification criteria also includes day two operations, such as upgrades (HCI software, hypervisor, disk firmware, NIC firmware, BIOS, BMC), expansion, resiliency and failure handling, noisy neighbor prevention, continuous system health checks for configuration errors, and monitoring, troubleshooting and support. It really is the complete end to end package.
The first step is for the hyperconvered platform vendor, in this case Nutanix with our Enterprise Cloud Platform, to validate the hypervisor and HCI stack that will be used. Next the chosen SAP HANA OEM Hardware Partners need to certify their hardware with the chosen HCI platform. The testing criteria is quite brutal, especially when it comes to performance, both during normal operations, and day two scenarios while under load. It’s fair to say that compromise on the performance and testing criteria is not an option.
Initial hardware partners that will be offering certified appliances for SAP HANA on Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform with AHV include Dell and Lenovo. More hardware partners will be certified in the future.
Final Word
Since originally writing this post full production validation has been announced, along with the full model list of certified hardware vendor appliances. This is the first major step along the road of making it faster and simpler to deploy, migrate to, and operate SAP HANA environments. See my updated post In Memory Performance, Hyperconverged Simplicity – Nutanix AHV Validated for SAP HANA Production.
This post first appeared on the Long White Virtual Clouds blog at longwhiteclouds.com. By Michael Webster +. Copyright © 2012 – 2018 – IT Solutions 2000 Ltd and Michael Webster +. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced for commercial purposes without written permission.
If you are a talented architect or administrator and you’d like to take your skills across multiple hypervisors and enterprise and public clouds to a new level then the Nutanix NPX Certification might be the way to do it. Nutanix NPX Solutions Design Bootcamps, which are free of charge, might be the best way to find out. You can find a list of available bootcamp locations on Eventbrite Here. The spaces are very limited and you need to have the Nutanix NPP certification (being a Nutanix Customer, Partner or Solution Integrator is an advantage) or related knowledge first before attending, but the only costs are for your travel and accommodation if there isn’t a local bootcamp in your city. If you know there are a group of interested people that meet the minimum requirements, then the NPX program may be able to schedule a bootcamp for you. Please contact NPX at Nutanix dot com and enquire about a bootcamp near you. Check out the Eventbrite Link to find out more.
For more NPX Related Blogs and Info on the Current Group of NPX Architects, check out the following:
Rene van den Bedem’s Blog – https://vcdx133.com/category/npx/
Magnus Andersson’s Blog – http://vcdx56.com/npx/ including the Meet the NPX’s
Nutanix Platform Expert Community Site – http://next.nutanix.com/t5/Nutanix-Platform-Expert-NPX/bd-p/NutanixPlatformExpert
Request Nutanix Platform Expert Preparation Guide – https://go.nutanix.com/npx-application.html