Finding a needle in a haystack made easy with Nutanix Objects Storage and Snowflake Data Cloud

Extracting insights from siloed dataset is a challenge

ChatGPT seems to be all the rage and the power of artificial intelligence (AI) has suddenly been made real for people well beyond the tech community.

While many people are experimenting with the new capabilities of AI, few realize the magnitude of the IT work behind the scenes in collecting, processing and annotating large datasets from siloed sources to train an AI machine learning model. This can be time consuming and expensive without the proper data management system in place.

Moreover, storage silos with a variety of data types and storage protocols pose significant challenges for running big data analytics.

For instance, extracting, transforming and loading (ETL) terabytes of patient and diagnostic data from geo-distributed hospitals, clinics and labs into one location is cumbersome, expensive and can become complicated due to data compliance requirements.

Similarly, financial services firms struggle to get insights into consumer behavior as large, distributed customer datasets are not easily transformed to a single data warehouse for analysis.

Nutanix collaborated with Snowflake to help businesses run and store analytics on large, geo-distributed datasets. With the Nutanix Objects Storage™ technology plugged into Snowflake Data Cloud, customers can find a needle in a haystack by running fast queries on petabytes of unstructured data stored in the high-performance, cloud-native object service of the Nutanix Unified Storage™ platform. 

“Our collaboration with Nutanix is truly exciting for our mutual customers.,” said Tarik Dwiek, Head of Technology Alliances at Snowflake.  “It will allow these companies to realize greater value from their on-premises data and realize greater insights by leveraging the performance, simplicity, and powerful collaboration capabilities of the Snowflake Data Cloud and Nutanix Object Services.”

Faster and better insights from your on-premises data

Snowflake’s external tables eliminate the need for data to be ingested into the cloud before running analytics. This gives customers the ability to run fast SQL-like queries into petabytes of distributed, unstructured data in a way that was not possible with the traditional data warehouses. 

With the Nutanix integration, Snowflake customers can run queries directly into the data stored on Nutanix Objects without having to copy the large dataset into the cloud. Nutanix Objects Storage is a highly performant, cloud-native and highly scalable Software-Defined Objects storage that integrates with the Snowflake Data Cloud from anywhere - edge, core or cloud. Since Nutanix Objects Storage allows for running queries on select partial content of objects, applications speed up their queries drastically for quicker insights.

To make things even easier, customers can leverage the geo-federation common global namespace of Nutanix Objects Storage to eliminate the need to manually connect multiple data sources to Snowflake Data Cloud, which can significantly reduce time to value.

Nutanix Objects Storage also complements Snowflake’s external staging capability to collate data from multiple edge locations to a central staging location prior to validating, cleaning and uploading to the Snowflake Data Cloud.

The collaboration between Nutanix and Snowflake delivers additional benefits:

• Take charge of your data – Reduce your data sovereignty and compliance burden by running analytics on your on-premises data without moving datasets to the cloud.
• Accelerate time to value – Get faster, more meaningful insights without having to cleanse and push petabytes of data into the public cloud.
• Create Global Data Access – Run analytics on geo-federated data increasing the data surface to edge, core and cloud.

A true hybrid multi-cloud experience

Nutanix Objects Storage helps you to effectively store, secure and manage large datasets that can be easily accessed, reviewed and analyzed by Snowflake Data Cloud to get insights deeper faster.

As a software-defined storage solution, Nutanix Objects Storage can run on any qualified infrastructure you choose, at any location. With geo-federation and objects replication, you can access the data distributed worldwide through a single namespace and run N-way policy-based replication to move the data between the various locations.

Many customers realize the importance of having data accessible from anywhere. This introduces the need for an embedded security model. Nutanix Objects Storage integrates with Active Directory, Open LDAP and a range of SAML-based identity providers. Along with policy driven role-based access controls (RBAC), customers can decide who and how users access the data.

The integration of Nutanix Objects Storage with Snowflake provides a robust data management system for distributed data analytics that makes new workloads possible. It’s this type of cooperation that delights customers looking to bring more value to their data insights.

Additional resources  

• Download the IDC white paper: Business Value of Nutanix Unified Storage
• 2022 Gartner Magic Quadrant: Nutanix again named a Visionary for Distributed File Systems and Object Storage
• Gartner Peer Insights: 2023 Customer Choice award for Nutanix Unified Storage

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