ReliaCloud Edge Features

Leverage built in data protection with native VM level snapshots which can be executed either as ad-hoc or as scheduled recurring snapshot.  Snapshots are the foundation for data protection and disaster recovery.   Snapshots can also be replicated to another cluster to provide disaster recovery.     

Snapshots incur no additional fees, as the storage in the cluster is yours to consume up to its safe operating limits.   

If leveraging a hybrid node type – combination of spinning drivers (HDD) and solid states drives (SDD) such as Flash or NVMe – the cluster will automatically tier data down to the larger, lower cost drives as data ages.

Clusters can be easily increased in size in just a matter of minutes, with the use of ReliaCloud reserved nodes or part of longer-term growth model upon requests. The cluster will adopt the additional node, make sure firmware, hypervisor, and cluster AOS versions are in-sync. Then redistribute the storage across the cluster to optimize efficiency and provide data protection.

Cluster shrink works basically in reverse, allowing nodes to be ejected from the cluster and the storage redistributed to the available nodes. Note: clusters cannot shrink below the 3-node minimum cluster size.

Access to the cluster storage is automatically route optimized to ensure access to the storage remains performant through maintenance operations and in the unlikely event of a node failure. 

The standard for ReliaCloud Edge is Data Redundancy Factor of 2 (RF2), with this feature enabled the cluster will contain two copies of the data within the cluster. One copy lives on Node where the VM resides, and the second copy is distributed out to a secondary node with in the cluster.

For additional data redundancy the RF can be increased to RF3, providing 3 copies of data within the cluster. While this does provide another layer of protection it will increase the rate of storage consumption within the cluster and may drive the need for additional nodes to meet the storage needs. This RF is however applicable to the storage containers the cluster creates, meaning some of the storage can be set to RF2, and some set to RF3, all within the same cluster.

Offering space savings might seem counter intuitive to a service provider, but we feel that is imperative that we provide you a cost-effective platform. ReliaCloud powered by Nutanix™ provides storage capacity optimization with

• Inline and post-process compression (LZ4) & (LZ4HC for cold data)
• Erasure Coding (EC-X – A post-process on write cold data with no overhead to the active path using an encoded strip of data blocks across nodes and calculates parity.
• Deduplication of both the cache and capacity tiers. Deduplication done at 16K granularity.
• Space efficient snapshotting leveraging pointers back to the original vdisk and block level write of the deltas.

Create policy-based performance tiers for storage performance down to the VM level. Protect cluster resources with cluster enforced performance resources.

Leverage the all flash tier with the ability to pin a VM into the flash storage tier.

Leverage volume groups to attach vDisks to a VM either directly or over iSCSI. Volume groups can also be presented externally over iSCSI to bare metal nodes for non-virtualized workload use cases, or for licensing constrained applications that may need a different hypervisor such as OLVM.

Volume groups can assist in disaster recovery solutions as they can be replicated from one availability zone to another.

Your ReliaCloud Edge cluster is capable of running Nutanix File Services, a modernized scale out and up File service that supports but SMB and NFS shares, ransomware scanning, anti-virus scanning via ICAP compatible AV software, detailed file analytics and the ability to tier cold data to lower cost storage platforms such as Nutanix Objects and other public cloud storage service providers. For in-cluster files usage 1 TiB of license free capacity is included.

Run an S3-Compatbile storage platform within your Edge cluster. Objects can be a great target for dense storage applications such backups, archives, video footage. Storage is contained in buckets which allows for various compression settings, as well as the ability to apply data protection with WORM capabilities. For in-cluster Objects usage 2TiB of license free capacity is included.

Async Replication provides the ability to group workloads into recovery groups and replicate VM snapshots to another availability zone. This process is ideal for workloads that have RPO greater than 1 hour.

A snapshot is crash-consistent if it captures all of the data components (write order consistent) at the instant of the crash. Crash-consistent snapshots are more suited for non-database operating systems and applications which may not support quiescence (freezing) and un-quiescence (thawing) and such as file servers, DHCP servers, print servers.

Application-consistent snapshots capture the same data as crash-consistent snapshots, with the addition of all data in memory and all transactions in process. Application-consistent snapshots are more suited for systems and applications that can be quiesced and un-quiesced, such as database operating systems and applications such as SQL, Oracle, and Exchange.

Self Service Restorations down to the file level from snapshots.

No additional software to purchase for DR automation. Nutanix DRaaS (formerly leap DR) provides:

• 1-Click Failover, Failback, and Testing
• Auto-protect Applications using Nutanix Categories and protection policies
• Orchestrate Recovery Plans (runbooks)
• Restore apps selectively or site-wide
• Manage DR operations through the Prism interface
• Recover from the latest recovery point or a previous point in time
• Non-disruptive DR testing

ReliaCloud Edge cluster support integration with your Multi-factor authentication (MFA) solution via SAML 2.0, and can be integrated into your domain directory services such as Microsoft Active Directory or LDAP. Supported SAML Identify providers in

• Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS)
• Azure Active Directory Federation Services (Azure ADFS)
• Okta
• PingOne
• Shibboleth
• Keycloak

Role based access controls (RBAC) provide additional control and delegation options with cluster feature access customizations that align to your business policies.

Clusters hardening aligned to specific STIGs. The cluster can be further locked to a security baseline. Cluster self-healing ensures continuous compliance back to that base-line.

For ReliaCloud Edge data at rest encryption is the standard for all node types and service that we create. We use Nutanix software defined DARE with native key management services, aligned with FIPS-140-2 Level 1 compliance.

ReliaCloud Edge nodes include TPM chips. A TPM chip is a secure crypto-processor that is designed to carry out cryptographic operations. The chip includes multiple physical security mechanisms to make it tamper-resistant, and malicious software is unable to tamper with the security functions of the TPM.

An add-on service for AHV hypervisor based Edge clusters, Nutanix Flow Security provides a distributed firewall architecture that provides a policy-driven security framework that inspects traffic within the data center (a.k.a east-west traffic). The framework works as follows:

• Security policies inspect traffic that originates and terminates within a data center and help eliminate the need for additional firewalls within the data center.
• The framework uses a workload-centric approach instead of a network-centric approach. Therefore, it can scrutinize traffic to and from VMs no matter how their network configurations change and where they reside in the data center. The workload-centric, network-agnostic approach also enables the virtualization team to implement these security policies without having to rely on network security teams.
• Security policies are applied to categories (a logical grouping of VMs) and not to the VMs themselves. Therefore, it does not matter how many VMs are started up in a given category. Traffic associated with the VMs in a category is secured without administrative intervention, at any scale.

Nutanix uses data locality for additional cluster performance. This approach keeps the VM on the same node where its data resides. This eliminates the continuous need to traverse the network for data, it eliminates noisy neighbors, and reduces overall network chatter.

ReliaCloud makes cluster expansion simple. With the use of reserved nodes additional capacity can be provided in about an hour. The cluster will join the additional node(s) to the cluster, check of any AOS or hypervisor updates, and finally redistribute storage and workloads across the cluster.

Enjoy continuous cluster operations through upgrades, patches, firmware updates and even equipment failure as components within the cluster can assume any role. The cluster will self-heal to fix issues in real-time.

Nutanix Move allows you to migrate your VMs from 3-tier vSphere, 3-tier Hyper-V and AWS onto Nutanix Clusters, including ESXi and AHV hypervisor options. Benefit from agentless migrations with near-zero downtime and the ability to maintain the network configuration.

Included Hypervisor option for ReliaCloud nodes. Enjoy a cost-effective alternative to VMware’s ESXi solution with numerous features such as:

• AHV Templates – build templates from VMs capturing all aspects of the VM
• AHV Memory Overcommit – recommended for non-production workloads, share unused memory up to 75% of the unused portion. Enabled on per VM basis.
• Support for GPUs – Specialized ReliaCloud Node types provide support for GPU utilization leveraging the NVIDIA GPU technology.
• Native Containers Platform – Nutanix Kubernetes engine provides support of Rancher, Anthos and Red Hat OpenShift, EKS Anywhere, and Azure Arc. Unified data services provide security & encryption, data efficiency and performance across, volumes (block), Files and Objects storage.

Nutanix Prism Central allows you to manage multiple clusters with the same available domain all from one single interface.

• Get real-time cluster health information.
• Gain insight into system health and cluster utilization
• AI provides predictive capacity forecasting and anomaly detection for system trends and performance metrics.
• VM inefficiency detection and right-sizing suggestions
• One click-upgrades to cluster hypervisor and Cluster O/S
• Customizable dashboards
• Automated reporting
• Low-code / no-code operations automation

LEARN MORE ABOUT NUTANIX PRISM