Nutanix Objects

Nutanix Objects

Nutanix Objects is an enterprise-grade, software-defined S3-compatible object storage service built on the Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) and Microservices Platform (MSP). It delivers scalable, secure, multi-tenant object storage capable of handling petabytes of unstructured and machine-generated data for backup, long-term retention, big data analytics, and cloud-native applications.

Nutanix Objects combines:

• S3 & NFS Compatibility: RESTful S3 API compliance along with NFS v3 read/write access to object buckets.
• High Availability & Scale-Out: Microservices architecture running on Nutanix MSP with automated VM scale-out and storage expansion.
• Data Protection & Compliance: Write-Once-Read-Many (WORM) storage, object versioning, immutability, legal hold, and encryption (SSE-C).
• Multi-Site Streaming Replication: Active-passive and active-active bucket replication across Nutanix Objects instances and public AWS S3 destinations.
• Federated Namespace: Single global namespace spanning multiple Nutanix Objects deployments and external S3 object stores.
• Nutanix Objects Browser: Native web-based object browser for bucket management, object upload/download, and user key management.

Core Operations & Workflows

1. Bucket Operations & S3 API Access

Nutanix Objects endpoints provide standard S3-compatible REST interfaces accessible via AWS CLI, S3 SDKs, or standard HTTP clients:

# Set S3 endpoint and credentials for Nutanix Objects
export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID="your-access-key"
export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY="your-secret-key"
export ENDPOINT_URL="https://objects.domain.com"

# List buckets in Nutanix Objects
aws --endpoint-url $ENDPOINT_URL s3 ls

# Create a new bucket
aws --endpoint-url $ENDPOINT_URL s3 mb s3://my-app-bucket

# Upload object with server-side encryption or tags
aws --endpoint-url $ENDPOINT_URL s3 cp dataset.csv s3://my-app-bucket/data/dataset.csv

2. Multi-Site Streaming Replication

Replicate buckets between local Nutanix Objects instances or to AWS S3:

• Nutanix-to-Nutanix: Configured via Prism Central by adding remote Prism Central instances as Availability Zones and setting up IAM synchronization.
• Nutanix-to-S3: Direct streaming replication to external AWS S3 buckets using S3 access keys and endpoints.

3. WORM & Compliance Bucket Configuration

Ensure data immutability with WORM policies:

• Grace Period: 24-hour grace window during which WORM policies can be altered or removed.
• Retention Locking: After the grace period, objects cannot be deleted or modified until the retention period expires.
• Versioning: Bucket versioning must be enabled to update objects in a WORM bucket.

4. Telemetry & Prometheus Monitoring

Expose object store metrics directly to Prometheus:

# Scrape Nutanix Objects Prometheus Exporter endpoint
curl -k https://<objects-exporter-ip>:9443/metrics

Progressive Disclosure Reference Index

When performing specific administration, deployment, or troubleshooting tasks for Nutanix Objects, consult the detailed manual reference guides in resources/manual/: