In this series I want to cover some of the amazing features introduced in Objects 3.0 and Objects 3.1 releases.
This is 9th release from Nutanix since Objects 1.0 released around August 2019. This is probably one of the fastest growth of any product in delivering various features in just over a year. And that says a lot about how much, Nutanix Objects team is committed to bringing more value to the Nutanix customers and simplifying enterprise workloads.
These are some of the top features we will be focusing on in this series :
- Securing data against Ransomware.
- Deploying Objects on VMware platform.
- Data high availability with Objects Native Replication.
- Tiering data to public cloud.
- Objects native S3 client.
- Migrating data from legacy filesystem to Objects.
We may cover these topics in different order.
Securing data against Ransomware :
As data growth is exploding, protecting data becomes more critical than ever in today’s world. Enterprises are now focusing on protecting data against various attacks, whether its data theft vs malicious attacker vs protection against ransomware.
Data Protection against ransomware is a real threat and one of the real cause of concern for Enterprise workload. Nutanix Objects supports various functionality to secure user data, features like WORM on versioned and non-versioned buckets have further enhanced data security.
With Objects 3.0, Nutanix has taken step further to strengthen data protection against ransomware with Objects Lock feature. Object Lock enables applications to set up a Write Once Read Many (WORM) policy at a per file/object level granularity. This feature guards against unauthorized deletion or encryption of data rendering techniques widely deployed by ransomware attacks ineffective.
We have covered this feature at length in Objects 3.0 : Protection against Ransomware post. I would highly recommend you to go through the post, to understand why this is far more than just a feature. Bringing features in any product is easy but adding value to enterprise customers is the most important thing, and the above blog talks about how Object Lock is well integrated with top backup solutions such as Veeam, and provides advance level of protection. Nutanix has close relationships with many vendors and they bring far more value to any customer than just releasing features.
Upgrading your cluster to latest release :
Before we proceed further in exploring other features, its always good idea in upgrading your Objects cluster to latest bits. In past I did covered this in detail, but I thought to spend some more time on this to re-iterate, how easy and important it is to be on the latest release.
In my current setup, I have two Objects deployed. One of the Objects cluster is on 2.2 and the other one is on 3.0 release.
In case you are in the dark site environment, then follow https://scalcia.com/darksite for configuring LCM for darksite upgrade.
Let’s navigate to LCM and invoke Inventory operation, which will fetch all the latest data from Nutanix Portal and gives you an option to upgrade various components in the cluster.
This will take about 15-20m and post successful inventory operation, you should see available upgrades under the “Software” tab.
Navigate to the “Software” tab and select “Objects Manager”, “MSP Controller” (If available) and all the “Objects Service”. It's always good to keep all the components on the latest version, so I would recommend you to upgrade all the available components listed in the screen below.
This may take 30m-45m depending on how many clusters you are upgrading. Post upgrade you should see,
LCM landing page should show you the Objects Manager, Objects Service and MSP controller on the latest released version.
Even Objects landing page should show you both the clusters are on 3.1 release now.
Now that we are on the latest version, let's proceed with the next feature.