Nutanix patent stirs up software defined storage

When it comes to delivering cloud services, storage issues can sometimes seem to be rather mundane, but it is suddenly are area where developments – and perchance patent battles – are starting to occur.

For example, datacentre infrastruxcture specialist, Nutanix, has just announced that it has been granted patent (US 8,601,473) from the United States Patent and Trademark Office recognising the company’s fundamental storage architecture for virtualised datacentres. This, the company claims, not only makes the 20 year-old Storage Area Network (SAN) technology obsolete, but also challenges the entire industry to design a next-generation storage architecture with comparable performance and scalability.

The patent provides clarity as to how software-defined storage solutions are optimally designed and implemented, while at the same time bringing the technology into mainstream enterprises around the world.

It details how a system of distributed nodes (servers) provides high-performance shared storage to virtual machines (VMs) by utilising a `Controller VM’ that runs on each node. The Controller VMs aggregate the local storage resources across all servers, including direct-attached flash, and delivers a shared pool of data storage that is functionally equivalent to a SAN or NAS array – but with greater scalability and higher performance.

The company claims that this architecture natively delivers enterprise-class storage capabilities, such as snapshots, clones, compression and deduplication, that can run any production workload.

 “…massively-parallel storage architecture that scales as and when hypervisor hosts are added…”

Using this, Nutanix reckons it can bring simplification to enterprise datacentres by delivering scale-out storage services via software running on off-the-shelf x86 servers. Datacentre managers are now freed from rigid storage constructs and burdensome administrative tasks that have frustrated virtualisation teams and slowed important business initiatives.

Nutanix customers benefit from advanced web-scale technologies without sacrificing project velocity, data management or the freedom to choose the right hypervisor for their organisation.

The architecture also provides a unified data fabric for building hybrid clouds. Enterprise IT managers can leverage public cloud resources on-demand, while retaining the control and security of their private cloud infrastructure. This flexibility is made possible by a 100 percent software-driven architecture and implemented independent of any specific virtualisation technology or vendor.

In addition to publicly disclosing important intellectual property, the patent also details Nutanix’s vision for how datacentres will evolve in the cloud era. This includes virtualising all storage hardware as one global resource pool that is high in reliability, availability and performance in order to eliminate islands of storage that are difficult to manage, and nearly impossible to scale.

Storage, of course, plays and important part in the scalability of datacentres, and the company sees its massively-parallel storage architecture providing massive scalability through its ability to be scaled independent of any hypervisor constraints.

“While virtualisation has brought impressive flexibility to both applications and server infrastructures, it has also outpaced the capabilities of popular storage products that have dominated in the previous IT generation,” said Brian Byrne, Principal Engineer at Nutanix. “Nutanix’s research and development teams are re-imagining what storage architectures need to look like to enable the next generation of datacentres.”