Acropolis File Services (AFS) is a native file storage scheme for storing unstructured data from Nutanix. AFS has high availability and large, scalable data repositories that support many deployment environments and applications, including home directories and user profiles.

AFS is a clustered, distributed file server that runs as a set of file server VMs on the Nutanix platform. AFS has performance scalability built into the flexible design. As storage and performance needs grow, AFS can easily scale out or up, while also allowing dynamic load balancing. For more of a deep dive on AFS features and architecture, read our tech note.

The following workloads are well suited to be supported by the Nutanix designed AFS.

• Windows user home directories
• Virtual desktop user remote profiles
• Departmental shares
• Application shares

One of the first things that customers want to know when considering a file server solution is how well it performs. As someone who focuses on solution performance in my day job, I know how important this is. However, to answer the question, we first need to understand what the customer wants to do with the solution. The customer interactions with the file server constitute the workload.