US-based enterprise virtualization start-up Nutanix has started shipping its highest performing storage appliance - the all-flash NX-9000.

The NX-9000 offers up to 9.6TB of flash memory per node, and fits into what Nutanix calls its hyper-converged platform, which virtualizes both storage and compute for easier management and better utilization.

The company also revealed that the upcoming Nutanix OS (NOS) 4.1 will introduce a new high availability feature - Metro Availability - for improved data protection across data centers in different geographical regions.

“The differentiator for us is the combination of web-scale engineering and consumer-grade design,” Howard Ting, SVP of Products and Marketing at Nutanix, said at the launch event in London.

“Bringing those two things together makes the product second to none. There’s no other company out there using Map Reduce to do things like deduplication. There’s no other company that’s bringing consumer-grade design to offer all of the controls through a single ‘pane of glass’ for management.”

Storage with a mind of its own

Nutanix is a web-scale infrastructure vendor founded in 2009. Earlier this year, it raised US$140 million in a Series E round of financing, bringing the total valuation of the company to more than $2 billion.

It builds hardware appliances for the hyper-converged data center, integrating compute and storage using proprietary software and offering a budget-friendly way to simplify the architecture of virtual environments. In a nutshell, Nutanix sells infrastructure with convenience of AWS, but designed for the private cloud.

Each of the NX-9000 nodes features six SSDs with capacity of up to 1.6TB each, 20 Intel Ivy Bridge cores clocked at 3.0 GHz, and up to 512GB of RAM. Such specification can support up to 115 Virtual Machines depending on the use case.

The nodes can make storage capacity go further using compression and de-duplication algorithms. This being scale-out architecture, customers can simply add more nodes whenever they need even more capacity.

With NX-9000, data is localized for each application so that read requests are handled directly by server-attached flash, avoiding network congestion. This makes the new nodes suitable for a wide variety of tasks, from demanding database applications to HPC projects.

Meanwhile, the upcoming Metro Availability feature promises to improve resilience of Nutanix infrastructure and prevent data loss, by enabling replication to a remote data center (up to 400km away) through a metro area network (MAN).

Metro Availability does not require any additional hardware components and works across different appliance models as long as the version of software is the same. Nutanix says it is the first hyper-converged infrastructure vendor to deliver such functionality.

The NX-9000 nodes are available today with list prices beginning at $110,000 per node. Customers need at least two of the new nodes to build a working system. They can be purchased directly from Nutanix, while the NOS software is also distributed alongside Dell hardware, thanks to a partnership announced earlier this year.

At the launch event, Nutanix also revealed its first official philanthropy project – the Web-Scale Wish. “Anyone in our community can nominate a non-profit, and we’ll be giving away about $500,000 in products and services to those non-profits, determined by a community vote. It’s a very exciting campaign and we’re going to be doing it here, in the UK too,” said Ting.