Nutanix is now looking beyond just on-premises hardware and private clouds to help its users deploy and manage data based across hybrid cloud deployments.
Converged infrastructure vendor Nutanix is providing more database deployment capabilities with its new Era 2.0 service update.
Nutanix, based in San Jose, Calif., is in the business of helping its customers with cloud infrastructure across both hybrid and multi-cloud deployments. In 2018, the vendor introduced the Era service to deploy, patch and manage databases.
With the Era 2.0 update, launched Oct. 6, Nutanix is now providing expanded support for SAP Hana, as well as postgreSQL, in addition to enhancing deployment options for Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL and MariaDB databases.
Deploying and managing a new database is complex. The operations of database environments need to be closely monitored, especially in mixed environments. By simplifying not only database migrations and deployments, but also ongoing operations, organizations can save countless hours and significant dollars, said Mike Leone, an analyst at ESG.
"I would argue that database workloads are the top application being virtualized and leveraging hyper-converged infrastructure today," Leone said. "It's a natural next step for Nutanix and I believe customers will embrace the technology as they continue to look for ways to simplify and consolidate their database operations."
Nutanix Era 2.0 provides a management dashboard to give administrators visibility into database usage and operations.
Running databases on Nutanix Era 2.0
When Nutanix launched Era, it was an on-premises, multi-database management offering, noted Bala Kuchibhotla, senior vice president and general manager of Nutanix Era, databases and business critical apps at Nutanix. He added that the original vision for Era was to enable internal IT teams to offer database as a service to their internal database teams.
With Era 2.0, Nutanix has expanded the scope of the database as a service model. The Era service can be deployed on the Nutanix AHV hypervisor or on a VMware ESXi hypervisor deployment.
I would argue that database workloads are the top application being virtualized and leveraging hyper-converged infrastructure today.
Mike LeoneSenior analyst, ESG
The database services will also run across Nutanix clusters, which enables users to run on AWS, enabling a hybrid mode of deployment and database operations. Nutanix Clusters on AWS became generally available in August.
"This offers our customers a solution to simply burst Era to public cloud whether for disaster recovery or dev/test," Kuchibhotla said.
Kuchibhotla added that while Era originally ran on a single Nutanix cluster, Era 2.0 offers multicluster capabilities. This means customers can use the same instance of Era across multiple Nutanix clusters, multiple data centers, as well as multiple clouds through Nutanix clusters.
Nutanix Era goes deep on PostgreSQL support
Another key addition in Nutanix Era 2.0 is a new enhanced level of support for the open source PostgreSQL database. Era currently supports PostgreSQL versions 9.x, 10.x and 11.x., with plans for the PostgreSQL 12 database to soon be certified, Kuchibhotla said.
He noted that while customers could already run PostgreSQL on Era, with the 2.0 update Nutanix will now be providing its customers with 24/7 support on the PostgreSQL database engine.
"This means that if our customers experience issues with Postgres itself, they'll reach out to the Nutanix team for issue resolution," Kuchibhotla said.
Currently, for the other databases that Era 2.0 supports -- including SAP HANA, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL and MariaDB -- Nutanix provides a management plane to provision, protect, clone and patch the databases. Looking forward, Kuchibhotla said that Nutanix will keep adding capabilities that help users simplify database deployments.
Nutanix also plans to extend its database engine portfolio to NoSQL engines, and to extend service capabilities to database performance management, Kuchibhotla said.
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