Storage Services

Objects (Object Services)

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The Nutanix Objects feature provides highly scalable and durable object services via an S3 compliant API (More Information on S3: LINK). Given Nutanix Objects is deployed on top of the Nutanix platform, it can take advantage of AOS features like compression, erasure coding, replication and more. Objects was introduced in AOS 5.11.

Supported Configurations

The solution is applicable to the configurations below (list may be incomplete, refer to documentation for a fully supported list):

Core Use Case(s):

Management interfaces(s):

Hypervisor(s):

Upgrades:

Key Features:

Supported Protocols:

Note
Nutanix Microservices Platform (MSP)

Nutanix Objects leverages the Nutanix Microservices Platform (MSP) and is one of the first core services to do so.

Nutanix MSP provides a common framework and services to deploy the Objects component's associated containers and platform services like Identity and Access Management (IAM) and Load Balancing (LB).

Key terms

The following key terms are used throughout this section and defined in the following:

The figure shows the high-level mapping of the conceptual structure:

Objects - Hierarchy Objects - Hierarchy

Objects Constructs

This feature is composed of a few high-level constructs:

The figure shows a detailed view of the Objects service architecture:

Objects - Architecture Objects - Architecture

The Objects specific components are highlighted in Nutanix Green. With objects there’s no concept of an “overwrite” hence the CxxD vs. CRUD (Create/Replace/Update/Delete). The commonly employed method for an object “overwrite” is to create a new revision or create a new object and point to the new object.

Note
Open Source Components

Nutanix Objects is built using a combination of organic innovation while also leveraging open source components. We believe this makes our products more robust and performant giving our customers the best solution for their business.

More Information on our Open Source License Disclosures: LINK

Object Storage and I/O

An object is stored in logical constructs called regions. A region is a fixed segment of space on a vDisk.

The figure shows an example of the relationship between a vDisk and region:

Objects - vDisk Region Objects - vDisk Region

Smaller objects may fit in a chunk of a single region (region id, offset, length), whereas larger objects may get striped across regions. When a large object is striped across multiple regions these regions can be hosted on multiple vDisks allowing multiple Stargates to be leveraged concurrently.

The figure shows an example of the relationship between a object, chunk and region:

Objects - Object Chunk Objects - Object Chunk

The object services feature follows the same methodology for distribution as the Nutanix platform to ensure availability and scale. A minimum of 3 object VMs will be deployed as part of the Objects deployment.