Nutanix Objects Storage and Snowflake Data Cloud Collaboration: Unlocking the Power of Data Analytics for Businesses
Phillip de Waal, Systems Engineering Manager at Nutanix Sub-Saharan Africa
The rise of ChatGPT has sparked a revolution, bringing the tangible benefits of AI within reach of not just tech enthusiasts but also businesses across various industries.
While the potential of AI is being explored by many, it is crucial to understand the significant IT groundwork required behind the scenes. Collecting, processing, and annotating large datasets from disparate sources to train AI machine learning models is time-consuming and costly, particularly without an efficient data management system.
Moreover, storage silos with diverse data types and protocols create substantial hurdles when running big data analytics.
Consider the challenges healthcare institutions face to extract valuable insights from vast volumes of patient and diagnostic data scattered across geographically distributed hospitals, clinics, and labs. Consolidating this data into a single location can be cumbersome and expensive, further complicated by stringent data compliance requirements.
Financial services firms also encounter obstacles when attempting to gain meaningful insights into consumer behaviour. The difficulty lies in transforming and consolidating massive, distributed customer datasets into a unified data warehouse suitable for analysis.
Success in partnership
To address these complexities, Nutanix and Snowflake have joined forces to empower businesses with the ability to conduct robust analytics on extensive, geo-distributed datasets. By leveraging the integration of Nutanix Objects Storage technology with the Snowflake Data Cloud, organisations can unlock valuable insights by efficiently querying and analysing vast amounts of unstructured data stored in a high-performance, cloud-native object service.
But it’s not just exciting for Nutanix; according to Snowflake, the news is fantastic for joint customers as it will enable them to extract greater value from their on-premises data and gain deeper insights by harnessing the performance, simplicity, and powerful collaboration capabilities of the Snowflake Data Cloud and Nutanix Object Services.”
Enhanced Efficiency and Actionable Insights from On-Premises Data
What is so powerful about Snowflake is that its external tables eliminate the need to move data into the cloud before performing analytics. This allows businesses to run fast, SQL-like queries on distributed, unstructured data—an unprecedented capability not offered by traditional data warehouses.
By integrating it with our solution, we allow customers to gain the advantage of directly querying data stored in Nutanix Objects Storage without redundant data replication in the cloud. Critically, we are delivering a highly scalable, cloud-native software-defined storage solution that seamlessly integrates, regardless of location—edge, core, or cloud. Leveraging the capability to run queries on selected portions of objects, applications experience significantly accelerated query performance, leading to quicker insights and actionable intelligence.
Furthermore, businesses can leverage geo-federation features, which provide a unified global namespace, eliminating the time-consuming process of manually connecting multiple data sources. This streamlined approach significantly reduces the time to derive value from data assets.
The two perfectly complement each other, drawing additional benefits from Snowflake’s external staging capability by aggregating data from multiple edge locations into a central staging location. This pre-processing step allows for efficient data validation, cleansing, and subsequent data upload.
Unlocking Additional Business Benefits
The collaboration offers additional compelling benefits for businesses that include:
- Data Control: Analyse on-premises data without the need to move datasets to the cloud, reducing concerns related to data sovereignty and compliance.
- Accelerated Time to Value: Gain faster and more meaningful insights without the need to cleanse and transfer massive volumes of data to the public cloud.
- Global Data Access: Perform analytics on geo-federated data, expanding the data surface across edge, core, and cloud environments.
A Comprehensive Hybrid Multi-Cloud Experience
Clients can now take advantage of an effective solution for storing, securing, and managing large datasets, which can be easily accessed, reviewed, and analysed to unlock deeper and faster insights.
Further, as users use a software-defined storage solution compatible with a wide range of qualified infrastructures, businesses can choose the most suitable options based on their specific needs. The geo-federation and object replication capabilities enable global data accessibility through a unified namespace, facilitating efficient data movement across multiple locations.
Embedded security that supports integration with leading identity providers such as Active Directory, Open LDAP, and SAML-based providers, combined with policy-driven role-based access controls (RBAC), allows organisations to define and manage data access with precision.
Partnerships are critical to modern business success, and the collaboration between Nutanix and Snowflake delivers a robust data management system for distributed data analytics, enabling businesses to extract greater value and drive innovation from their data insights.