The XC Series is a hyperconverged solution that combines storage, compute, networking, and virtualization into an industry-proven x86 Dell EMC PowerEdge server running Nutanix web-scale software. By combining the hardware resources from each server node into a shared-everything model for simplified operations, improved agility, and greater flexibility, Dell EMC and Nutanix together deliver simple, cost-effective solutions for enterprise workloads. Acropolis Distributed Storage Fabric (DSF) delivers a unified pool of storage from all nodes across the cluster, using techniques including striping, replication, autotiering, error detection, failover, and automatic recovery.

The XC Series infrastructure is a scale-out cluster of high-performance nodes, or servers, each running a standard hypervisor and containing processors, memory, and local storage (consisting of SSD flash for high performance and high-capacity SATA disk drives). Each node runs virtual machines just like a standard hypervisor host as displayed in Figure 1.

Figure 1.              Nutanix node architecture

In addition, the Acropolis DSF virtualizes local storage from all nodes into a unified pool. Acropolis DSF uses local SSDs and disks from all nodes to store virtual machine data. Virtual machines running on the cluster write data to ADSF as if they were writing to shared storage.