Past week, Nutanix has released the Acropolis File Services (AFS): a web-scale native file serving solution built using the same technology that powers Nutanix Enterprise Clouds.

Announced at the last .NEXT Conference, this solution open also to non VM based services and make Nutanix a more complete storage vendor. AFS make possible manage storing and serving unstructured data, like home directories, user profiles, application logs and department shares, with the same Nutanix technologies and approach.

You can have a standalone AFS cluster service users, virtualization platforms or applications:

Or still use the same Nutanix cluster and hyperconverged platform and deploy AFS along with virtualization applications and desktops on the same Nutanix cluster allows in-step scaling. Applications, users and file storage consolidates on the same cluster, improving cluster utilization and unifying management:

AFS instances are each backed by an autonomous file system and protocol stack, with distributed metadata for Share, Directory and File structures and currently supports SMB 2.1, but adding support for NFS and SMB 3.0 is a matter of developing or extending protocol adapters.

AFS is actually available in tech preview through a non-disruptive software upgrade.