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Nutanix MP Part Three: Guarantee five nines availability for your mission critical apps

April 29, 2016

Application availability today is like the old copper telephone lines running an analog digital signal -- when you picked up the phone, you always heard a dial tone. The reliability was referred to as having five nines, or 99.999 percent because there was always a small chance there may not be a dial tone, but the chances of not hearing one were miniscule.

IT teams are facing a similar challenge today: expectations for five nines reliability for mission critical apps like Citrix, Exchange, SQL, etc.

Hyperconverged infrastructure from companies like Nutanix helps IT organizations meet these expectations with key features like scalability, resiliency and high availability.

Nutanix reveals several high availability options for IT administrators through Prism, the platform’s management interface. One of the most important options exposes replication to another Nutanix cluster, which can be in either the same or a different location because of metro configuration, or it is in a cloud. This option provides high availability for mission critical applications in case of catastrophic events like an earthquake, flood or fire.

Some of the reasons replication failure occurs include:

  • Network issues, like switch or router failure, broken fiber cable, etc.
  • Power outages
  • Minimal free space on the replication target cluster

It’s crucial that IT teams have successful replication of their mission critical apps, and identify possible replication failures immediately because they impact an application’s high availability. One of the features of Nutanix Prism is replication monitoring assignments for Prism administrators and Level 1 and 2 administrators, because replication failures often originate outside of Nutanix. Level 1 and 2 administrators use management consoles like Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) to monitor the entire infrastructure, and can immediately detect where the problems exist while identifying the root cause. SCOM administrators can coordinate resolution between different IT administrators, which saves time and prevents the blame game.

Soon, HYCU will launch a Nutanix Management Pack (MP) for SCOM

Which exposes intuitive monitoring capabilities that detect replication failures in the Nutanix environment, such as nodes, clusters, VMs, storage and more. The MP allows IT administrators to execute proactive monitoring with the following functionality:

  • The Nutanix overview dashboard displays replication status, and sends alerts to Level 1 and 2 administrators when there is an immediate action that requires their attention
  • The data protection dashboard shows replication topology, including groupings of protection domains and remote sides, and exposes their state and performance metrics for bandwidth, transmission speed and more.

The HYCU Nutanix MP helps IT ensure five nines reliability when it comes to making sure mission critical applications are always on and operating at optimum performance.

Missed the earlier installments of our Nutanix MP series? Read about the plug-in’s application awareness feature.

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