Nutanix Looks to Eliminate Need for Separate NAS Appliances

Rethinking Application Performance in the Digital Business Era

When it comes to IT, to some degree every silo adds latency to applications as well as additional costs. Within the context of hyperconverged platforms, Nutanix has made available Acropolis File Services (AFS), which eliminates the need for a separate system to manage files.

Prabu Rambadran, director of product marketing for Nutanix, says AFS means that Nutanix customers no longer have to acquire a separate network-attached storage (NAS) system to manage files. The benefits of that approach mean a significant reduction in the amount of physical IT infrastructure that needs to be acquired and managed, but also an improvement in application performance because the files that need to be accessed are now connected directly by the Nutanix platform.

Managed via the Nutanix Prism console, AFS is the latest Nutanix effort to reduce the need for dedicated specialists to manage every aspect of the data center. By making the file system a natural extension of a hyperconverged platform, Rambadran says, Nutanix is expanding its core mission to make IT infrastructure simple enough for an IT generalist to deploy and manage.

In fact, Rambadran says, when it comes to building a private cloud, hyperconvergence is in reality a means to a larger end. The average IT organization today on its own is not able to stitch together all the IT infrastructure elements needed to create a private cloud, says Rambadran. Hyperconverged systems by definition make that possible by managing IT infrastructure at a higher level of abstraction.

How all this hyperconvergence ultimately impacts the way IT is managed naturally remains to be seen. While not every application workload may lend itself to hyperconvergence, right now it looks like the majority of them will. As such, it’s now only a matter of time before hyperconvergence forces a realignment of job functions, with IT generalists becoming increasingly capable of managing IT more holistically. That may not completely eliminate the need for IT specialists. But over time it does mean the cost of IT labor should be substantially less as the need for dedicated IT infrastructure specialists in most IT environments starts to wane.