News Flash:
Always wanted to try Nutanix Files (Formerly Acropolis File Services or AFS) but didn’t have the license to do so? Well now you can! With 1TB of Files for every AOS Cluster!
Nutanix continues to release amazing features and products on their journey of the Enterprise Cloud Platform. While the release of new products such as Calm, Era, Beam and Xi have continued to highlight Nutanix’s position on the Gartner Magic Quandrant for Hyperconverged Systems, a tweak to the Files licensing announced today can be a huge gamechanger for customers looking to migrate away from expensive NAS storage solutions.
Files Background
As background, Nutanix Files, or formerly AFS is the scale up/scale out file storage solution from Nutanix that is deployed into an existing cluster and uses existing storage/compute resources for a highly available file system. Files is deployed using a minimum of 3 File Server VMs (FSVM), supports both SMB and NFS protocols and can be configured for either Distributed or Non-Distributed shares.
There’s a lot more features of Files, that I won’t cover here. For more details, check out the Files documentation at the Nutanix Support Portal here.
Files Licensing
Licensing of Nutanix Files used to be done on a per-node basis, thru either Ultimate licensing or by using the Files Add-On SKU when the nodes were licensed for Pro.
That worked well, but if you started a cluster with Ultimate licensing and Files and needed to deploy additional nodes, you needed to ensure that Ultimate licensing was done on every node in the cluster, or else the cluster would be downgraded to the lowest feature set allowed by the licensing. So Pro licensing by default doesn’t include Files. Bummer…
Enter Capacity Licensing
Nutanix decided to tweak the licensing for Files, by simplifying the licensing structure. Rather than needing to either ensure Ultimate licensing was on every node or the Files Add-On SKU for every node, Nutanix moved to a capacity based licensing model.
Now, regardless of the number of nodes your cluster contained, you only needed to license Files based on the capacity of storage that Files would be configured for. So if you configured your Files FSVMs to have 3TB of available storage, you only need to purchase a capacity license for 3TB, even if you had 1, 3, 10 or 20 nodes.
Free For All
Nutanix has now announced that every AOS cluster deployed will have the ability to have up to 1TB of Files Capacity without the need for any additional licensing. This means that from Day 1, every customer with a Nutanix cluster can deploy Nutanix Files and expand as needed should > 1TB be needed, without having to destroy anything already configured.
If you haven’t tried out Files due to lack of licensing, now is your chance!
For more details around this announcement, check out the following post available on the Nutanix blog here.
If you’ve got an existing AOS cluster, what are you waiting for? If you want help with deploying Nutanix Files, let me know and the eGroup Data Center team can help you get it deployed!