Why Nutanix is a web-scale architecture ?

 

Recently, there has been a lot of buzz surrounding web-scale IT and
every vendor claims that they are web-scale IT.  
So, what qualifies a software or architecture as a web-scale architecture?
What qualifies Nutanix as a web-scale IT architecture ?

Here is my list of reasons why Nutanix is a true web-scale Technology:
(Andre's list: http://www.nutanix.com/blog/2014/03/11/understanding-web-scale-properties/ )

• Architecture should be defined in software, running on standard x86 hardware and no hardware crutches. Nutanix runs on a General purpose Supermicro hardware and Nutanix has been able to come up new hardware models frequently because of it. (NX-1000 to NX-7000)

• No single point of failure or bottleneck for management services. Fault Tolerance is key to a stable, scalable distributed system, and ability to function in the presence of failures. Every component in Nutanix software has fail-fast, NFS leader, Configuration node leader, Paxos Leader to provide consistency, UI leader, multiple replicas at data/metadata layer, QoS rate limiting, Traffic forwarding when CVM fails. Nutanix has a lot of distributed goodness that provides ability to tolerate single point of failure. In addition, DR capabilities provide additional Disaster recovery. Nutanix snapshot browser helps to Recover a VM to its previous snapshot.
  

• Web-scale system enables a non-disruptive approach to disruptive tasks, such as rolling or forklift upgrades, expandable clusters, always-on clusters, and all workflows always done online. Examples of Nutanix scalability include ability of adding and removing nodes dynamically, rolling upgrades of one node at a time ( different nodes can be at different version during the rolling upgrade), datastore availability when there is a disk failure and many other features. Nutanix Engineering is adding more features to improve resiliency and simplify workflows.

                  Please refer to: Add node:  http://stevenpoitras.com/2013/07/advanced-nutanix-add-node/ and rolling upgrade in http://craigwaters.org/2014/04/29/nos-4-0-feature-1-click-os-upgrade/

• Web-scale systems are built from the ground up and should expect and tolerate failures while upholding the promised performance, availability guarantees and service level agreements. Nutanix provides different levels of resiliency and UI provides information on what kind of tolerance is enabled on the cluster.

                 Please refer to: Fault domain awareness - http://nutanix.blogspot.com/2014/06/nutanix-40-feature-increased-resiliency.html and http://nutanix.blogspot.com/2014/05/40-features-fault-domain-awareness.html )

• Web-scale systems should provide programmatic interfaces to allow complete control and automation via HTTP-based services. Nutanix provides REST APIs and Powershell commandlets for programmatically configuring the block.

                 Please refer:- http://prismdevkit.com/?page_id=539 , http://nutanix.blogspot.com/2013/07/nutanix-rest-api-browser-how-to-get.html and myvirtualcloud.net/?p=6382 )

• Analytics software to reduce human interaction should be present in a true web-scale architecture. Nutanix cluster health in 4.0 provides analytics http://www.nutanix.com/blog/2014/04/16/nos-4-0-cluster-health-slices-dices/ .

  http://nutanix.blogspot.com/2014/07/40-feature-cluster-health-framework.html