Nutanix Acropolis and Prism to Deliver “Invisible” Infrastructure for Next-Gen Enterprise Computing

Nutanix, Inc. unveiled its next-generation Xtreme Computing Platform (XCP) to deliver invisible infrastructure, enabling IT teams to focus on what matters to them – the applications and services that power their business.

Comprised of two product families, Acropolis and Prism, XCP extends hyperconverged solution to enable application independence from infrastructure with an advanced app mobility feature, native virtualization and consumer-grade search capability. These innovations simplify the datacenter, reduce costs and enhance IT service delivery.

Today, many business applications run on traditional storage and virtualization products that are time consuming to deploy, expensive to manage, difficult to scale and challenging to migrate from. Enterprises need infrastructure that delivers cloud-like scalability, resiliency, agility and flexibility – but with lower costs, better application service levels, and trusted security. XCP makes the entire infrastructure lifecycle invisible and diminishes the innovation and financial burden borne by users of existing datacenter solutions.

“The most transformative technologies are the ones we don’t even think about. They work all the time, scale on demand and self-heal. In other words, they are invisible,” said Dheeraj Pandey, CEO and founder, Nutanix. “Building on our foundations of web-scale engineering and consumer-grade design, we will make virtualization as invisible as we’ve made storage and elevate enterprise IT expectations yet again.“

“With a leading 52% market share in the hyperconverged infrastructure market, Nutanix has demonstrated its ability to simplify storage for all size enterprises,” said Matt Eastwood, SVP, IDC. “Their next big opportunity is to tackle the inherent cost and complexity of legacy virtualization stacks, and elevate IT teams so they can focus on driving the business.“

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Acropolis
Acropolis builds on the core capabilities of the company’s hyperconverged product to incorporate an innovative open platform for virtualization and application mobility. It offers IT professionals the flexibility to choose the best application platform technology for their organization – whether it is traditional hypervisors, emerging hypervisors or containers. With Acropolis, infrastructure decisions can be made based on application performance and scalability and economic considerations, while allowing workloads to move more seamlessly without penalty should requirements change.

Acropolis is comprised of three foundational components:

• Distributed storage fabric. Nutanix continues to add software innovations to its hyperconverged infrastructure platform. Building on the company’s Distributed File System, the Acropolis Distributed Storage Fabric will enable common web-scale services across multiple storage protocols. Acropolis can mount volumes as in-guest iSCSI storage for applications with specific storage protocol requirements such as Exchange, unifying all workloads on a single infrastructure. Acropolis includes a robust implementation of erasure coding storage optimization, which is unique in a hyperconverged solution. Based on a patent-pending algorithm, company’s EC-X technology reduces the storage required for data replication by up to 75% compared to traditional mirroring techniques, and can be enabled on previously deployed company’s appliances with a simple software upgrade.

• App mobility fabric. The App Mobility Fabric is a newly-designed open environment capable of delivering powerful VM placement, VM migration, and VM conversion, as well as cross-hypervisor HA and integrated DR. It supports most virtualized applications, and will provide a more seamless path to containers and hybrid cloud computing.

• Acropolis hypervisor. While the Distributed Storage Fabric fully supports traditional hypervisors such as vSphere and Hyper-V, Acropolis also includes a native hypervisor based on the proven Linux KVM hypervisor. With enhanced security, self-healing capabilities based on SaltStack and enterprise-grade VM management, Acropolis Hypervisor delivers a better overall user experience at a lower TCO and will be the first hypervisor to plug into the App Mobility Fabric.

Prism
Prism is an enhanced solution from the company that brings simplicity to infrastructure management. Prism features ‘One-Click’ technology that streamlines time-consuming IT tasks, and includes one-click software upgrades for more efficient maintenance, one-click insight for detailed capacity trend analysis and planning and one-click troubleshooting for rapid issue identification and resolution.

Prism delivers value to IT administrators as result of:

• Convergence of storage, compute and virtualization resources into a unified system to provide an end-to-end view of all workflows – something difficult to achieve with legacy three-tier architectures;

• Advanced machine learning technology with built-in heuristics and business intelligence to easily and quickly mine large volumes of system data and generate actionable insights for enhancing all aspects of infrastructure performance; and

• True consumer-grade user experience with sophisticated search technology that makes management tasks elegantly simple and intuitive, with no need for specialized training.

Nutanix Ecosystem
Nutanix has the explicit support from a large community of technology providers, all of whom recognize the need to drive down datacenter cost and complexity. Nutanix and its ecosystem partners have completed testing to ensure that applications and guest OSs run on Acropolis and Acropolis Hypervisor with no change to VMs.

Acropolis and Prism are available.

More on Xtreme Computing Platform

Jean Turgeon, VP and chief technologist, software defined architecture, Avaya, Inc., said: “Avaya is on the forefront of engagement and networking solutions for enterprises. Our customers are virtualizing team and customer engagement solutions to drive consolidation and improve operating efficiency. Avaya is extending this efficiency to the network fabric with server attachment automation. We look forward to working with Nutanix to deliver best-in-class solutions that allow for interoperability and future integration of our unified communications and networking with Nutanix compute, storage and virtualization for a truly simplified IT infrastructure that drives real cost savings.”

John Zannos, VP, cloud channels and alliances, Canonical Ltd., said: “Ubuntu is the OS of choice for enterprise and carrier customers building clouds. The Nutanix solution complements the Ubuntu OS with simple, scalable infrastructure, enabling improved service delivery, simplified operations and streamlined capital investments. The Nutanix Acropolis hypervisor has been thoroughly tested and validated as a robust platform for VMs running Ubuntu as a guest OS. Canonical and Nutanix is a great partnership for customer focused on cloud.“

Nand Mulchandani, VP, market development, delivery networks and cloud, Citrix Systems, Inc., said: “Enterprises and service providers today demand scalable, flexible datacenter technologies that can ensure optimal performance and security for network-delivered applications like Citrix XenDesktop and XenApp. Citrix NetScaler with TriScale technology is the most advanced application delivery controller for cloud environments and is deployed as a flexible software-based virtual appliance on the Nutanix Virtual Computing Platform. Together, this delivers a powerful integrated solution for the world’s largest enterprises and cloud service providers.“

Brian Allison, VP, WW alliances, CommVault Systems, Inc., said: “Commvault and Nutanix share a commitment to drive up efficiency and drive down costs in the enterprise datacenter. Commvault’s data management vision for a single software platform architecture is a natural fit for web-scale hyper converged architecture. The latest version of the Nutanix Virtual Computing Platform, with its built-in hypervisor and virtualization management capabilities, provides new opportunities for further integration between our solutions. This will allow us to deliver a joint solution for application-centric infrastructure and data protection to help bring additional value to our shared customers.”

Alan Atkinson, VP and GM, Dell storage, said: “Since the initial launch six months ago, we’re seeing substantial customer interest in the Dell XC Series, our hyperconverged appliances powered by Nutanix software on Dell PowerEdge server technology. The redefined Nutanix Xtreme Computing Platform fully complements Dell’s strategy to deliver solutions that fundamentally simplify IT and support a variety of customer workloads today with a path towards the future.”

David Messina, SVP, marketing, Docker, Inc., said: “The Nutanix Acropolis architecture will provide organizations the operational flexibility they seek by supporting applications that run on and migrate to any type of VM and through integration with Docker, these same applications can be seamlessly containerized to accelerate the entire development lifecycle.”

Amanda McPherson, CMO, Linux Foundation, said: “Nutanix’s enterprise infrastructure is built on a foundation of open source web-scale technologies. The company is also working with the powerful KVM open source hypervisor by integrating it into its infrastructure platform and making it simple to manage. We are pleased to see Nutanix supporting the open source projects it uses in their products, and we look forward to working with them as a member of The Linux Foundation.”

Michael Miller, VP, global alliances and marketing, SUSE, said: “SUSE, an open source software pioneer, is excited to welcome Nutanix to our ecosystem of partners. Together, we will provide reliable, interoperable Linux, cloud and storage solutions that give enterprises greater agility and control. Customers can now take advantage of innovative solutions that benefit from our decades of engineering excellence and Nutanix’s clear market leadership.”