Shadow Clones is a Nutanix feature that provides effective caching optimization in VDI environments. VDI stands for Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, which is a technology that allows users to access virtual desktops hosted on a centralized server. VDI environments typically have a high degree of similarity among desktop images, which means that many VMs access the same data blocks from the storage layer. Shadow Clones leverages this similarity by creating read-only copies of frequently accessed data blocks on each node's SSD tier, reducing network traffic and improving performance. Shadow Clones works automatically and transparently without any configuration or intervention from the administrator.

Explanation
Prism is the central service control used by Nutanix to manage the clusters. It provides a unified view of the entire system, and it is used to control the HTML5 UI, the nCLI, and the REST API. Prism is used to manage the resources of the system, such as the nodes, storage, and networks, as well as to monitor the performance of the system and the applications running on it.