Nutanix Web-Scale Computing Platform Delivers up to 4x Performance Improvement

Nutanix, Inc. announced its web-scale computing platform that delivers up to 4x performance improvement for any workload with no additional hardware or software license, freedom to choose hypervisors without lock-in, and built-in machine learning capabilities that increase operational efficiency.

Company’s solutions for building and operating enterprise clouds uniquely deliver the agility, pay-as-you-grow consumption, and operational simplicity of the public cloud without sacrificing the predictability, security, and control of on-premises infrastructure.

To support the increasing demands of modern businesses, an enterprise cloud platform must include a web-scale infrastructure fabric that delivers resiliency, availability, predictable performance across a wide range of enterprise applications. In addition, it should incorporate seamless application and data mobility, invisible operations with one-click simplicity through built-in machine intelligence, extensive automation and rich analytics, and a security-first design. The 4.6 release of the firm’s software extends the company’s technology leadership and provides a platform that furthers its mission to deliver invisible infrastructure to elevate IT.

“We use the cloud for services such as messaging, collaboration, and our web presence, but still rely on on-premises infrastructure for our healthcare applications because we need improved stability, security and sustainability,” said Brett Taylor, director, IT, St. Luke’s Health System. “The Nutanix enterprise cloud is the foundation that will allow us to strategically use both environments to meet the needs of our healthcare customers and improve overall IT end-user experience.“

Delivering continuous value with 4x better price/performance
Enterprise clouds must offer versatile performance for traditional and next-generation enterprise applications, delivering value back to businesses through continuous innovation. Acropolis 4.6 includes more than 25 powerful software enhancements that increase system performance by up to 4x compared to earlier versions. Current customers can get these benefits through a simple software upgrade at no additional expense. These enhancements increase performance across the full portfolio of company’s appliances, including the recently updated NX-9000 all-flash model. Customers benefit from:

• Better performance across a range of enterprise application workloads, e.g., powering up to 30,000 Exchange mailboxes in just 8U of rack space, as validated through the Exchange Solution Reviewed Program (ESRP)

• Delivering fast storage I/O performance across hyperconverged all flash solutions with over one million storage IO/s in just 4U of datacenter space.

• Up to 4x price/performance gains on existing investments to deliver as low as $0.35/IO/s, better than top-selling all-flash arrays which suffer from complex management and additional networking requirements.

As with public clouds such as AWS, wherein cost reductions achieved due to innovation and scale are passed back to the customer on an ongoing basis, customers deploying enterprise clouds powered by the company benefit from ongoing price/performance improvements on their existing investments without additional costs.

Removing hypervisor lock-in to enable infrastructure choice
for traditional and next generation apps
Public cloud services provide a single runtime environment, which while suited to some applications is a poor fit for others. In the new era of enterprise clouds, flexibility and choice are fundamental tenets, allowing businesses to run traditional enterprise applications such as databases and VDI as well as next-generation big data and DevOps applications uniformly and consistently on the best runtime environment for each application. This release extends the ambitious Acropolis App Mobility Fabric (AMF) with critical software updates that give IT teams the freedom to pick the right virtualization environment for their applications, and the flexibility to switch easily in order to reduce costs or simplify operations.

New features include:

• One-click hypervisor conversion – Switch the hypervisor running on a firm’s system from vSphere to the built-in Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV) in a completely automatic operation that can be completed in minutes with minimal disruption and risk.

• Cross-hypervisor DR and backup – Rapidly recover from a site failure by failing over VMs from one site to another location running a completely different hypervisor. Perform automatic backups of VM-level data from one firm’s system to another running a different hypervisor. IT professionals can choose the best hypervisor for each environment to minimize virtualization license costs.

“As the business-to-business arm of Hallmark, we are building the bridge between our iconic brand and today’s connected world. An enterprise cloud from Nutanix allows us to deliver innovative, relationship-building incentive solutions to our customers without losing control to the public cloud. The Nutanix solution gives us unparalleled simplicity and choice, allowing us to pick the best virtualization platform for our needs without getting locked in.” said Bob Dussault, director and information security officer, IT, Hallmark Business Connections, Inc.

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Making datacenter operations invisible with built-in machine intelligence
Enterprise clouds require machine intelligence and automation to simplify complex operations from many clicks to a single click, and eventually from a single click to zero-touch management. New in this release is Prism Pro, a datacenter automation solution with a unique search-first interface and customizable dashboards that bring unmatched simplicity to a diverse set of IT operations.

Prism Pro features the X-Fit technology with foundational machine intelligence built into the platform, delivering operations for every workload. With X-Fit, the platform includes self-learning capabilities that continuously improve prediction accuracy and the quality of automated decisions over time. Prism Pro leverages X-Fit to power automation and intelligence across a variety of operations, such as smart capacity management. This technology pits multiple predictive algorithms against one another, picking the best fit and making actionable recommendations to eliminate over-provisioning without increasing risk to application performance.

“At Corporation Service company (CSC), we are in the business of making business possible. With an enterprise cloud from Nutanix, we can focus on innovating and keep business moving. The Nutanix solution has enabled scalability, flexibility, and agility in our operations, allowing us to quickly migrate datacenters with minimal risk and effort.” said Karen Zetes, director, engineering and architecture, infrastructure technology and operations, CSC (Corporation Service Company).

“Nutanix has been an important innovator within the hyperconverged market and has played a key part in driving rapid technology adoption over a very short period of time. Today’s announcements show that Nutanix intends to continue pushing hyperconverged forward and ultimately help bring foundational elements of an enterprise cloud to data centers of all sizes in a turnkey solution.” said Eric Sheppard, research director, IDC.

“Nutanix is moving beyond hyperconvergence by providing businesses with the foundational elements of an enterprise cloud. Their application mobility fabric enables businesses of all sizes to seamlessly and non-disruptively port their application workloads to the right hybrid cloud resource at the right time; whether in an on-premise private cloud data center or out into public cloud environments like AWS.” said Colm Keegan, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group.

Availability and licensing
Company’s customers can non-disruptively upgrade their existing infrastructure to run Acropolis and Prism 4.6, and immediately benefit from the increased performance and richer feature set. There is no requirement to upgrade hardware.

Prism Pro is available as an add-on subscription and is currently offered as tech preview with a free 60-day trial evaluation.

The one-click hypervisor conversion capability in the App Mobility Fabric is available as a tech preview in version 4.6.

Resources:
About how an enterprise cloud drives business value
Application mobility in the cloud era
Nutanix Prism
451 Research Report on Flash in the Datacenter (registation required)