[By NBC-1TV H. J Yook]Nutanix (www.nutanix.com), the provider of SAN-Free data center solutions for VMware virtualized workloads, announces a turn-key platform that employs VMware’s core virtualization technology and Fusion-io (NYSE:FIO) flash for cost effective virtualized Hadoop deployments that demand high IO performance and rapid capacity expansion without the need for a SAN or NAS. This news follows the Series C Funding announcement of 8/21/12.

Elastic Provisioning meets Elastic Infrastructure. Nutanix’s Complete Cluster collapses the conventional two-tiered datacenter design -- compute and storage -- into one scalable tier of infrastructure. Inside each appliance, Nutanix software runs on top of VMware vSphere®, transforming local storage devices into a distributed virtualized cluster. The software-based approach to storage provided by Nutanix Complete Cluster is ideal for running virtualized scale-out workloads such as Hadoop. Its innovative use of server-attached Fusion-io flash memory and 10GbE network speeds, delivers ultra low-latency and performance at any scale. Clusters start at four nodes, but can dynamically expand to several hundred. This powerful combination of commodity hardware, flash and software-based scale out storage offers a compelling solution for Big Data deployments that demand high-end Hadoop performance optimized for virtualized datacenters.

“In order for Hadoop to thrive in the private cloud, it must borrow from the scale-out converged architectures prevalent in the public cloud -- virtualized, elastic, and with multi-tiered storage. To succeed, vendors must address this problem for the mass market with a software-defined approach delivered on off-the-shelf hardware” said Merv Adrian, a Vice President at Gartner.

“Nutanix Complete Cluster software-based storage capabilities enable a flexible deployment model ideal for running Hadoop workloads on VMware vSphere® virtualized workloads,” said Parag Patel, vice president, Global Strategic Alliances, VMware.

Software based scale-out storage delivers massively parallel performance.

Rack-busting performance, enterprise-grade data management: Nutanix’s network-less NFS delivers up to 2000 MB/s of sequential throughput in a compact 2U 4-node cluster for Hadoop workloads. A Terasort benchmark yields 250 MB/s in the same 2U cluster providing more than 200 percent better performance density than the nearest bare-metal rival. Throughput scales linearly by stacking more blocks.

“Hortonworks and Nutanix have incredible alignment in making Hadoop the next generation data platform for the enterprise,” said Mitch Ferguson, VP Business Development at Hortonworks. “Running Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP) on Nutanix Complete Cluster platform brings an extremely simplified scale-out enterprise-grade Big Data stack to the marketplace.”