Wind of change

Exploring new opportunities

It’s been another 8 months since my last post. During this time, Broadcom acquired VMware, leading to significant changes within the company.

With that going on, my daily business was basically non-existent, and I explored different topics. I dabbled with AWS and GCP, refreshed some Python skills, worked on the CS50X course (which I need to finish still) and looked for a change in career. After a while, a former colleague sent me a job posting from Nutanix. I always liked their products but didn’t get along with some of their older marketing campaigns. However, much time had passed, and I really haven’t checked in with what they were doing in the storage space for a while.

So, I look at the position for the NUS Solution Architect in Central EMEA and decide to dive into what NUS does.
After having a brief intro, I was sold on the idea of managing all my storage needs from the Nutanix platform.

Long story short, I apply, go through some interviews and get accepted as the Portfolio Solution Architect for Nutanix Unified Storage in Central EMEA.
I started this role in May and have written about it on LinkedIn here:

Nutanix Unified Storage

The change in career addressed, let’s look at what Nutanix Unified Storage does briefly. In a nutshell, it combines Nutanix Volumes, Nutanix Files and Nutanix Objects in a single subscription. Customers have a per-TiB subscription across their whole Nutanix install base, not limited to a cluster / site. So, I buy an aggregate capacity for all AOS clusters and use the storage wherever I need it, instead of assigning it fixed to a single cluster.

The function that customers use also does not matter. Whether you provide SMB or NFS file shares, S3 compatible object storage or volumes via iSCSI, we always count the NUS subscriptions against the TiBs used. From a high-level perspective, NUS is visualized like this:

Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) overview

The NUS components sit on top of AOS and the hypervisor (be that Nutanix AHV or vSphere). For files we deploy managed VMs on the underlying Hypervisor and push the file services bits there. For objects we use our “Microservices Platform” which you can think of as a managed Kubernetes environment, solely to run our object storage components.

In any case, we ultimately send the IO for our data services to the Nutanix Controller VM, which handles the IO the physical layer. I won’t explain the details of the CVM, since we don’t bother much with it on the NUS layer, but there are many articles on the inner workings of it.

Apart from the data services itself (file, block, object), we can see loads of other additional goodness in NUS:

Overview of additional data services in NUS

That’s it for today – I will probably pick different services and explain them each on their own.

 Thank you for checking in after a while!