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DISTRIBUTED STORAGE FABRIC
The Acropolis Distributed Storage Fabric (DSF) virtualizes all
storage in a cluster into a unified pool. DSF uses the local SSDs
and HDDs on each node to store virtual machines and data.
DSF provides a number of cloud-like features that minimize
the management overhead of private cloud environments:
• Data locality. The data used by each virtual machine is
kept preferentially on local storage on the node where
the virtual machine is running, reducing noisy neighbor
effects.
• Auto-tiering. Hot data is stored preferentially in flash,
while cold data resides in the HDD tier. For optimal
performance, data is automatically moved between
tiers based on access patterns.
• Auto-tuning. Nutanix delivers excellent performance
for both random and sequential I/O without the need
for constant performance tuning—even when multiple
and/or different workloads are running simultaneously.
Figure 5. Acropolis Distributed Storage Fabric (DSF)
Applications and IT Services Nutanix Controller VM
(one per node)
CVM
Hypervisor
X86
CVM
Hypervisor
X86
CVM
Hypervisor
Node 1 Node 2 Node N
X86
Distributed Storage Fabric
Snapshots
Locality
Clones
Tiering
Compression
Erasure Coding
Deduplication
Resilience
