9.3 Nutanix Unified Storage: Files, Objects, and Volumes Use Cases

9.3 Nutanix Unified Storage: Files, Objects, and Volumes Use Cases

Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) is the answer to a specific customer question: "we bought Nutanix for virtual machines, but we still have a NAS filer, a backup appliance, and a SAN — can we retire them?" NUS delivers file, object, and block services from the same cluster and the same Distributed Storage Fabric that hosts the VMs.

For the NCA the requirement is recognition: given a workload, name the right NUS service. You are not asked to deploy one. The blueprint backs this knowledge statement with three references — Nutanix Unified Storage Overview, Introduction to Files Storage, and Nutanix Objects Overview — which tells you where the emphasis sits.

The Three Services at a Glance

Nutanix Files

Files is a scale-out file service. Rather than a single filer head, it deploys a set of File Server VMs (FSVMs) on the cluster, and share load is distributed across them. A file server deployment starts with a minimum of three FSVMs running on three separate nodes, which is what gives the service its resilience: lose a node and the shares hosted by that FSVM are served elsewhere.

Files grows in two directions, and knowing the vocabulary helps:

• Scale out — add more FSVMs to spread shares across more nodes, adding capacity and throughput together.
• Scale up — give the existing FSVMs more vCPU and memory to handle heavier load on the same number of shares.

Recognizable use cases:

• User home directories and profile shares, including the roaming profile and folder-redirection stores behind a VDI deployment.
• Departmental file shares replacing a traditional Windows file server or NAS appliance.
• Application file data — anything that expects an SMB or NFS path rather than a block device.

Features worth naming: multiprotocol access to the same data over both SMB and NFS, snapshots with self-service restore of individual files, and per-user or per-share quotas.

Data Lens

Where Files stores the data, Nutanix Data Lens watches it. Data Lens is a security and analytics service for Nutanix Unified Storage, offered as SaaS or as a self-managed on-premises deployment for organizations with data-sovereignty requirements. It provides capacity and usage analytics, searchable audit trails of user and file activity, anomaly detection, and ransomware detection and blocking using both signature and behavioral patterns. When an attack is detected, Data Lens and NUS can identify the last known good snapshot and recover the affected share from it.

For the exam the pairing to remember is simple: Files stores unstructured data; Data Lens tells you what is happening to it and defends it.

Nutanix Objects

Objects presents an S3-compatible endpoint. Applications write objects into buckets over HTTP using the same API they would use against a public cloud object store, but the data stays on your cluster. Objects is deployed from Prism Central onto the Nutanix Microservices Platform (MSP), which supplies the container runtime and shared services such as identity and load balancing, and like Files it starts with a minimum of three service VMs.

Recognizable use cases:

• Backup and long-term retention targets. Most modern backup products write natively to S3, so Objects becomes the retention tier without a separate appliance.
• Archive, where the requirement is capacity and durability rather than latency.
• Cloud-native and analytics applications written against the S3 API.
• Immutable retention. Objects implements the S3 Object Lock specification, which is how a bucket is configured WORM (write once, read many). An object under a retention lock cannot be altered or deleted until the lock expires — not by an application, and not by an administrator.

Two related bucket-level behaviours are worth recognizing. Versioning keeps prior copies of an object so an overwrite or delete does not destroy the earlier content, and on a WORM bucket versioning is enabled automatically and cannot be suspended. Lifecycle policies then handle the other end of the data's life, expiring objects or moving them to a lower tier once they reach a defined age.

[!TIP] WORM plus S3 compatibility is the giveaway pairing. If a question mentions immutable backups, ransomware protection for backup copies, or regulatory retention measured in years, the answer is Nutanix Objects.

Nutanix Volumes

Volumes exposes iSCSI block storage from the cluster to consumers that want a raw disk rather than a file share. The unit of management is the volume group — a container holding one or more virtual disks, presented as iSCSI targets with an access list controlling which initiators may attach. External initiators discover their targets through the cluster's Data Services IP rather than through an individual CVM address, which is what keeps a connection alive when a CVM goes down for an upgrade.

Recognizable use cases:

• Bare-metal physical servers that are not virtualized but should use the same storage platform.
• Shared-disk clustered applications, such as Windows Server Failover Clustering or Oracle RAC, where multiple nodes must attach the same disk.
• Guest VMs that need a disk larger or more portable than a normal vDisk, or that must retain a disk independently of the VM.
• Containers and Kubernetes, where persistent volumes are backed by Nutanix block storage.

Volume groups are covered operationally in section 12.1, because Objective 2.1 also asks you to configure storage for VMs and Objective 2.3 asks you to identify the different storage types.

Licensing

NUS is licensed separately from NCI, in Starter and Pro tiers, and it is sold on a capacity basis — per usable TiB — rather than per node or per core the way the compute-side NCI licences are. The practical point for the exam: running Files, Objects, or Volumes at scale is a licensing decision distinct from the NCI tier that licenses the underlying cluster. Objective 2.4 asks you to "identify correct license by use case," and NUS is one of the add-ons that question is built around.

Choosing Between Them

When a scenario is ambiguous, decide by how the consumer wants to access the data:

1. Does it open a path and read a file? → Files.
2. Does it PUT and GET over an HTTP API? → Objects.
3. Does it want a disk it can partition and format? → Volumes.

That question resolves nearly every NUS item on the exam, because the three services differ by access protocol far more than by underlying architecture — all three land on the same Distributed Storage Fabric and inherit the same replication factor, compression, deduplication, and erasure coding described in chapters 4 and 5. A distractor that claims one of the three bypasses the storage fabric, or needs its own dedicated disks, is wrong for that reason alone.