Nutanix added new bells and whistles to its object storage platform to improve management for object storage, big data and analytics applications, as well as tame unstructured data storage.

The newly-updated Nutanix Objects 2.0 is designed to bring “simplicity” and “performance” to unstructured data management, or as Priyadarshi Prasad, senior director of product management at Nutanix calls it in a blog post announcing the update, “the amorphous blob.” 

The update supports 240-terabit capacity nodes and adds a single namespace across clusters that allows IT teams to choose from a selection to add new or denser nodes, or new clusters to deliver more capacity and to an object store. This presents an opportunity for IT to operationalize unused storage capacity in their Nutanix environment from a single console to reduce costs and streamline storage management and administration.    

The data center is no longer about speeds and feeds – it’s where digital transformation is won or lost and “object storage is rapidly becoming the storage of choice for next-gen and big data applications,” explained Amita Potnis, research director in IDC’s storage team in a prepared statement. “As object storage makes the leap from the cloud to the data center and mission-critical workloads, economics must be balanced with performance." 

The updates come after Nutanix’s stock fell back to earth following the release of its latest earnings, with the vendor being hammered on Wall Street due to a dour outlook hampered by the then possibility of an impact of the coronavirus on the Asia-led hardware supply chain. All of this despite the vendor’s most recent earnings coming in ahead of expectations. 

In response to customer feedback, Nutanix Objects – which already supports Amazon Web Services (AWS) S3 compliant write-once-read-many (WORM) storage – also extended its WORM implementation to support it on non-versioned buckets. WORM buckets lock data, meaning it cannot be deleted or modified. Customers can now lock their content to prevent modifications without necessarily enabling versioning.

“One of the aspects of being S3-compliant is that versioning on such buckets needs to be enabled always,” Prasad said. “We realized that some applications do not yet support versioning”

The updated platform is also now certified by Splunk as SmartStore compliant, which allows joint customers to run Splunk workloads on Nutanix software utilizing Nutanix Objects for the object store and Splunk software to manage data growth.