Nutanix Updates Hybrid and Multicloud Vision

Nutanix unveiled Tuesday its latest vision for how organizations can manage data services, applications, storage and recovery across their environments, including the data center, edge and public cloud.

We have also announced several new services towards that goal.

One of them is Nutanix Central. It is a centralized, cloud-based control service that runs anywhere Nutanix software can run, even natively in the two largest public clouds: AWS and Azure. Lee Caswell, senior vice president of product and solution marketing at Nutanix, said at a press conference that the idea is to “use the same management model across Azure, AWS, and on-premises.”

To achieve this, the data and application services that are part of the Nutanix stack are platform agnostic and can be fully or partially moved between environments depending on requirements.

Caswell also mentioned two new elements. Nutanix data services users can now specify VMs optimized for storage, compute, or both, enabling organizations to meet unpredictable demands. There is also a new data service for Kubernetes (initially Red Hat OpenShift).

Data and application services now run natively on AWS and Azure without the need to host the Nutanix hypervisor on these services. Carswell said this will be extended to other major public cloud providers at a later date.

Combined, these developments managed through Nutanix Central will allow customers to easily move data services between different endpoints and avoid being tied to a single vendor, Caswell said. claim.

Another development is the multi-cloud snapshot technology. This allows applications and data to be restored to the environment of the user’s choice, rather than being restricted to the environment in which the application is currently running.

“The idea is that you can take a snapshot from primary storage, put it directly into a low-cost object store, and restore it wherever Nutanix is ​​running,” says Caswell.

The company also announced a new integration with Snowflake’s cloud data warehouse. This allows Snowflake-initiated queries to be applied to object storage running on Nutanix across multi- and hybrid-cloud environments.

These developments are part of a newly announced multi-year plan called “Project Beacon”.Allow developers to build applications once, run anywhere“Segregation of Services, Portable Licensing, Built-in security and governance for developer self-service and cloud operations teams.

Data services are the first to be separated from Nutanix cloud services because databases are ubiquitous, but Carswell says customers are interested in knowing what other services they want to break out and manage and deploy separately as PaaS. increase. Future options may include caching, messaging, and search.

Nutanix was born as an appliance supplier that virtualized compute, network and storage and delivered it all in one box. Then remove the hardware element, provided the software Use it on other vendor’s boxes and then in the public cloud. Now, Carswell says he presents new development as a natural evolution, decoupling the service from its own stack and allowing it to run where it works best.

“This removes the constraint of having to use our hypervisor. We believe this will extend the reach and relevance of Nutanix from thousands of customers to potentially millions of cloud users.” Possibly, the next couple of years.”

Nevertheless, Carswell cautioned to use warnings “with time”. Certain factors mean that the environment cannot be abstracted away, and cloud vendors still hold many cards. Project Beacon is not intended to automatically migrate workloads to new environments or for instant failover between clouds (the holy grail of the multi-cloud paradigm). Rather, its purpose is to reduce the friction and cost of planned migrations.

“We haven’t settled on cloud transmission charges. I have to say that,” he said. “We do not control egress fees.”