Phillip de Waal, Systems Engineering Manager, Nutanix Sub-Saharan Africa.

Today's businesses struggle with demanding workloads, high costs, and inefficient database operations. This is making it difficult for companies to optimise infrastructure to meet the performance requirements of critical databases and who are also feeling the burden of complex database management and limited scalability. These pain points ultimately hinder business growth and their ability to deliver a seamless user experience.

For these reasons, we have recently expanded database support on our cloud platform to offer customers a highly efficient and cost-effective solution for demanding workloads. The latest enhancements all form part of a need to optimise the database. They allow users to improve performance and lower the total cost of ownership (TCO) via our cloud platform, making it an attractive choice for businesses seeking improved database capabilities.

The enhancements mentioned have been released as part of a recent Nutanix AOS 6.6.2 update and bring support for compute-only nodes running either VMware ESXi or Nutanix AHV. Additionally, they provide best practices for configuring hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) database clusters using a combination of compute-only and storage-only nodes. By leveraging these enhancements, businesses can transition from traditional IT infrastructure to HCI, which offers superior performance and resilience.

Most notably, database performance is vital for IT systems, as it places significant demands on infrastructure resources and requires robust data services like snapshots and replication. Storage performance plays a critical role in delivering a consistently positive user experience, while high levels of resiliency are necessary to meet essential business service level agreements (SLAs). With these enhancements, organisations can now migrate from legacy IT infrastructure to HCI, leveraging its performance, scalability, and resiliency benefits.

Simplifying Database Management with Nutanix Database Service

Database management can be complex, but it becomes simpler and more efficient with Nutanix Database Service (NDB). NDB is a hybrid multicloud Database-as-a-Service that supports popular databases such as Microsoft SQL Server, MongoDB, MySQL variants, Oracle Database, and PostgreSQL.

A recent survey of Nutanix customers revealed that over two-thirds run databases and data warehouses on the Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) environments. This number is expected to grow as organisations embrace the latest enhancements and retire their ageing SAN infrastructure.

Expanded Support for Compute-Only and Storage-Only Nodes

HCI itself represents a shift away from traditional IT infrastructure architecture. Instead of separate compute and storage resources connected over a network, HCI consolidates virtualised hardware resources into a cluster of scale-out servers. This software-defined architecture brings numerous benefits, including the ability to buy resources incrementally, reduced planning and integration time, and enabling IT teams to focus on innovation rather than maintenance.

HCI allows for seamless deployment, management, and scaling of resources to meet evolving business needs.

The enhanced compute-only nodes are handy for managing software license costs, especially for enterprise database software. Since enterprise database software is often licensed by core, isolating cores dedicated to database processing is essential to containing licensing costs. Compute-only nodes support VMware ESXi and Nutanix AHV hypervisors, providing customers with choices as they consider migration to AHV over time. The new release has also improved storage-only nodes to enhance controller performance.

Optimised Best Practices for Database Clusters

With the increased frequency of database deployments on NCI, the compute-only flexibility offered by these enhancements expands the reach of HCI to accommodate large and demanding databases. Creating clusters using a combination of compute-only and storage-only nodes is ideal for scaling up large databases that require customised tuning of compute and storage resources.

What we have built into the architecture is the ability to facilitate flexible scaling without compromising the simplicity of HCI operations. The real benefit of this is that we have extended this operational simplicity to database management, another area that remains a sore point for IT teams as database resources are costly.

Better Businesses Have Better Databases

For customers who have reservations about migrating their large, business-critical databases from SANs to HCI, the independent scaling of compute and storage addresses concerns about efficiency and database license costs.

With the latest enhancements we have made to our platform, businesses can confidently achieve efficient and cost-effective database performance while benefiting from HCI's simple scaling, manageability, and consistent operating model across the edge, datacentre, and public cloud environments. It’s a big step in the right direction of overall optimised database management.