Nutanix Extending Enterprise Cloud Platform to Physical and Containerized Applications

Nutanix, Inc. announced at the .NEXT Conference 2016 platform capabilities that tear down the IT silos that have emerged with every new generation of applications, strike the right balance between the needs of developers and operators and unify different vendor technology stacks.

In the era of digitally-powered innovation, organizations must deliver new IT services in a frictionless manner modeled after public cloud companies like AWS while also retaining the security and control their businesses require. The company has evolved from a single product hyperconverged infrastructure vendor to a broad platform company that runs all applications, delivers value to all users and connects to other popular technology stacks.

Nutanix runs all workloads, not just virtualized
Traditional infrastructure has struggled to keep pace with the rapid innovation in application architectures and diversity of application requirements. With Acropolis Container Services (ACS), containerized applications and emerging microservices architectures can now be deployed on the firm’s platform with persistent storage – avoiding the painful tradeoff in DevOps environments of using virtualization for applications requiring persistent storage and containerization for others. Both traditional and next-generation applications can leverage the rich storage performance, capacity optimization and data protection capabilities of the company’s web-scale platform.

While the majority of services are now virtualized and will be moving to containers, certain applications such as Oracle RAC and DB2 may continue to run on bare metal servers due to specific application needs or licensing constraints. Acropolis Block Services (ABS) enables databases running on servers from Cisco, Dell, Lenovo and HP to directly leverage the Acropolis Distributed Storage Fabric for the highest levels of data performance and availability.

All-Flash nodes are available across the portfolio of appliances to bring greater infrastructure choice and application performance assurance, giving organizations an alternative to all-flash arrays (AFA) from EMC, NetApp and Pure Storage. These AFAs are based on traditional datacenter architectures and struggle to unleash the full value of recent hardware innovations such as NVMe. Company’s all-flash nodes are offered at a modest premium over hybrid appliances.

Balancing needs of developers and operators
With Enterprise Cloud Platform, datacenters can now achieve the same degree of automation as the public cloud. New Nutanix Prism self-service capabilities enable developers and line-of-business operators to directly provision and manage applications and associated infrastructure resources, while still allowing IT administrators to have complete inrastructure control. Further, Prism’s One-click Planning will include scenario-based modeling, based on the company’s X-Fit machine intelligence, so that datacenter managers can foresee the impact that changes to the IT environment will have on application performance and availability.

Datacenter operators will also benefit from more invisible operations as a result of AHV dynamic scheduling. This capability delivers intelligent placement of VM-based not only on analysis of compute and memory resources as with traditional virtualization solutions, but also real-time analysis of storage utilization.

An integrated network visualization capability provides a rich view into how VMs are connected to both physical and virtual networks, simplifying remediation of network issues.

Enabling choice and extensibility to connect disparate technology stacks
The cEnterprise Cloud Platform is extensible with a of APIs, enabling customers and partners to take advantage of the underlying web-scale platform. With support for multiple hypervisors and containers, the platform can be easily extended to build a complete cloud leveraging the value of other specialized solutions.

• OpenStack drivers, which offer an easy way to build private clouds using OpenStack software, are available today, bringing together OpenStack services for automation and turnkey Nutanix infrastructure

• Jointly engineered solution with Microsoft brings together the Microsoft cloud Platform System (CPS) and Enterprise Cloud Platform to deliver an Azure-like hybrid cloud environment that is ideal for enterprise applications like SQL Server and Exchange

• With the upcoming release, Prism will be able to manage VMware ESXi environments, bringing the same one-click management simplicity to VMware that customers enjoy with AHV, and further driving hypervisor commoditization

Product availability:

• Acropolis Block Services and Acropolis Container Services will be available in July 2016 in the 4.7 release.

• Prism self-service capabilities, scenario-based modeling, AHV dynamic scheduling, ESXi management from Prism and network visualization will be available in a subsequent release.

• OpenStack drivers are available.

• Microsoft CPS on Nutanix will be available by July 2016.

“A true enterprise cloud platform delivers a consumer-grade consumption and operations experience across all applications while enabling partners and users to co-create value,” said Sunil Potti, chief product and development officer, Nutanix. “Nutanix is the only company that is elevating IT to safely and rapidly deliver virtual, physical and next-generation cloud-native workloads on a single, simple and intelligent platform that partners can extend and customers can truly rely on.“

“When containers are deployed in production use cases, where long-term data persistence and protection, container-aware data services, granular QoS and scheduler integration are key requirements, storage managers need to rethink data management.” Gartner, Inc., Containers Will Change Your Data Center Infrastructure and Operations Strategy, Arun Chandrasekaran, Andrew Lerner, Dennis Smith, March 28, 2016.

“Nutanix is changing the storage game yet again by bringing the simplicity and availability of its web-scale engineering to the broader non-virtualized applications,” said Madhu Pajeer, team leader, IT, Masdar – UAE. “Using Acropolis Block Services has enabled us to further simplify our storage environment and focus on innovation at the application level.“

“Containers are rapidly becoming the platform of choice for simple deployment of next-gen applications, and with persistent volumes, for traditional applications as well,” said Hemant Vijh, SVP IMS, Hexaware Technologies. “Nutanix ACS brings the best of enterprise storage capabilities, in terms of performance, availability and easy scalability to the world of containerized applications.“

“Since adopting the Nutanix platform last year, we’ve been able to reduce operating costs while improving performance and profitability,” said Jess Coburn, CEO, Applied Innovations Corp. “So it’s no wonder I’m excited about the possibilities of the new self-service functionality. The new portal will allow us to further optimize operations by enabling orchestration of advanced application deployments.“