Nutanix Reveals Developer-Centric Services and Expands Workload Support to Simplify IT in Multi-Cloud Era

Nutanix, Inc. announced at its .NEXT Europe Conference that new developer-oriented services will be added to its Enterprise Cloud OS software.

These services address the needs of the growing number of applications that enterprises need to deliver in a multi-cloud world.

The Acropolis Object Storage Service, Acropolis Compute Cloud (AC2) and the company’s App Marketplace services target application development teams, making it simple to develop, test and run nearly any application within enterprise clouds. These new service capabilities enable developers to quickly deliver both enterprise and cloud-native applications in order to accelerate time to market for new IT initiatives. The company also introduced virtualization enhancements and platform innovations to accelerate the transformation of enterprise infrastructure to public cloud-like consumption models.

Gartner, Inc. notes: “Organizations want to remain in a position to leverage new and innovative services from different public cloud providers. However, they must secure business justification and be wary of challenges associated with adopting a second cloud provider.”

In the same report authored by research director Elias Khnaser, Gartner recommends that technical professionals responsible for cloud computing architecture “choose management tools and develop operational processes in support of a multicloud workload architecture.” ^(*)

Developer-oriented services and workload expansion object-based storage service
The company will enhance support for applications using large unstructured datasets, such as big data analytics, data warehouse applications and large-scale IoT deployments. To optimize delivery of these applications, the firm will be extending its data management capabilities to include object-based storage, which application developers can leverage as a native service. This service, Acropolis Object Storage Service, will be built into the Enterprise Cloud OS and provide an Amazon Web Services S3-compatible API to enable application development teams using the company’s solution to consume storage as a high performance, on-demand service – just like public cloud offerings. Acropolis Object Storage Service will collect, store and manage billions of objects in a single namespace, providing an efficient storage fabric for a variety of use cases, including data archival. With this new service, the firm will provide the foundation for a true multi-cloud storage strategy with complete lifecycle management of data objects, along with intelligent tiering across clouds.

Compute service
The company also announced a capability for delivering CPU-intensive applications, such as distributed analytics workloads, large scale front-end web services, Citrix XenApp deployments and advanced in-memory analytics. This additional AHV-based compute service, Acropolis Compute Cloud (AC2), will be included in the firm’s Enterprise Cloud OS and support compute-only nodes in Nutanix-powered deployments. IT managers will be able to deliver compute as a consumable resource to application development teams, providing them the flexibility to cost-effectively scale up, and scale down, their infrastructure. Further, AC2 provides an affordable alternative for IT teams looking to unlock their virtualized server instances from expensive virtualization software that is difficult to scale and manage.

Calm
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Integrated App Marketplace services
The company’s App Marketplace services are being added to the firm’s Calm, a multi-cloud application automation and orchestration solution. With App Marketplace, new and existing applications can be defined via standards-based blueprints and then published to a marketplace, empowering teams to rapidly consume application services in a fully self-service manner. Calm will provide pre-integrated and validated blueprints that streamline the adoption of key infrastructure and developer tools, such as Kubernetes, Hadoop, MySQL, Jenkins and Puppet. These application blueprints can be quickly applied by application teams so that new workloads can be easily developed and deployed into multiple cloud environments.

Continued commitment to next generation virtualization and platforms
The firm also announced AHV capabilities and performance enhancements planned for its upcoming v5.5 software release that will make the company’s built-in hypervisor the de facto choice for customers seeking enterprise clouds that deliver the simplicity and agility of public clouds. This continued investment is fueled by the overwhelming popularity of AHV, which is already the hypervisor of choice for more than one-fourth of Nutanix nodes sold based on a rolling four quarter average. This release will include support for Citrix Provisioning Services (PVS), a technology for virtual desktop (VDI) deployments. It will also include integrated support for virtual Graphics Processing Units (vGPU), which will accelerate rendering of complex graphics common in high-resolution medical imaging, 3D geo-spatial applications and other demanding workloads.

Additionally, the company formally announced that its Enterprise Cloud OS software will run on Intel CPUs based on the Skylake architecture, driving faster performance and higher scale. Skylake support extends to company-branded appliances, server-based platforms from its OEM partners Dell EMC and Lenovo and qualified servers from HPE and Cisco. The company’s customers can continue to scale their Enterprise Cloud deployments by combining newer generations of CPU and storage technology with existing deployments and eliminate expensive ‘forklift’ upgrades.

These advancements, coupled with the recently-announced Calm and Xi Cloud Services, demonstrate the company’s evolution from a hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) vendor to a provider of enterprise cloud software and application lifecycle management solutions that enable IT leaders to design, build and manage multi-cloud architectures.

Availability
The features noted are currently under development, and the qualification of Xeon Skylake servers sold by HPE and Cisco is currently in process. Pricing details will be announced closer to the applicable release dates.

“IT managers are being pushed to deploy datacenter infrastructure that not only runs their business applications efficiently, but also provides cloud-like services that can be consumed by internal application development teams,” said Sunil Potti, chief product and development officer, Nutanix. “With these new offerings, targeted at developers and workload expansion, Nutanix is the only company that is offering a true public cloud-like experience in the enterprise, which helps customers realize the promise of the multi-cloud era.“

“Our network transformation team is moving toward the introduction of virtualization, programmability and automation technologies, building a rich set of new, on-demand, cloud and connectivity features for our customers,” said Daniele Mancuso, director, innovation and engineering, TI Sparkle spa. “The Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS enables easy operations, capacity planning and management of the compute and storage resources of our private cloud environment, increasing the productivity of our developers and the satisfaction of our customers.“

“Our application developers require a full menu of services to create our core applications,” said Joris Vuffray, leader, network and system management, Swisslos. “Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS gives us a complete cloud stack that makes our developers happy, while preserving the control and predictability we need in our cloud environment.“

^(*) Gartner, Decision Point for Selecting Single or Multicloud Workload Deployment Models, Elias Khnaser, April 18, 2017

Resources:
Acropolis Object Storage Service
Acropolis Compute Cloud
Nutanix Calm Marketplace
Intel Skylake Support