New Age HCI - Performance Innovations

Nutanix has been redefining HCI over the years and has made some fundamental changes in its stack to leverage the innovations that are happening in the hardware space with the advent of low latency devices like Optane. Overall the general paradigm has been to move away from having many context switches, and leverage the hardware as much as possible to offload the work off the cpu. We will go over how we have embraced this paradigm shift and have seen advantages with integrating SPDK, iSER, RDMA and implementing our own block management system in user-space, Blockstore. These enhancements have given us a significant performance boost.