Nutanix Adds Capabilities in HCI Software for Security, Performance, Networking, and Automation Across Multiple Clouds

Nutanix, Inc. announced new capabilities in its hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) software, delivering significant innovations to the datacenter and cloud markets.

Specifically, these innovations will bring up to 50% faster performance, native virtual networking to simplify multicloud deployments, end-to-end security monitoring to support a Zero-Trust strategy, and expanded automation and budgeting capabilities for cloud resources. In addition to extending its HCI software stack to the public cloud, the company continues to set the bar for innovation in the growing HCI market, putting IT modernization within reach of all organizations.

HCI has become the standard for powering private clouds, and Nutanix software is recognized by more than 17,000 customers and  industry analysts for its simplicity, scalability, resilience, and security, all of which conclude that the company is a leader in the fast-growing HCI market. Most recently, the company was recognized as a leader in The Forrester Wave: Hyperconverged Infrastructure, Q3 2020, in which it received the highest score across all three categories: current offering, strategy (tied), and market presence.

The Forrester report shared: “Nutanix has maintained its position atop the HCI market with its innovation, R&D investment, sales momentum, partnerships, and acquisition of new customers from all segments and geographies … It has a clear, impressive roadmap for its product lines.“

The company’s announcement highlights commitment to innovation to meet emerging customer requirements.

With these HCI improvements, the firm’s customers will benefit from:

50% faster performance
The firm has advanced its HCI architecture to exploit storage technologies, including NVMe based SSDs and Intel Optane SSDs. The resulting lower latency will deliver up to 50% faster performance for I/O intensive workloads, such as large databases and large-scale healthcare applications. The advancements also improve VM density to lower the overall TCO for all applications.

The company’s Blockstore technology self-manages storage with efficiency than traditional file systems. In addition, the firm’s HCI software adds support for Storage Performance Development Kit (SPDK), currently available to customers as a technology preview, an open source library developed by Intel that enables applications to access NVMe capacity directly, avoiding any OS or kernel-level overhead to drive even faster workload performance. Together, Blockstore and SPDK reinforce the benefits of the firm’s software-defined architecture, enabling advancements in both performance and resiliency.

“Through our recently announced Joint Innovation Lab, we are collaborating with Nutanix to integrate Intel’s latest and greatest technology on the Nutanix software stack,” said Chris Tobias, GM, Optane solutions division, Intel Corp. “The advanced performance capabilities Nutanix announced, in addition to ultra low latency Intel Optane technology and high bandwidth NVMe storage technologies from Intel, will deliver our joint customers the HCI solutions they need to support their most intensive applications, allowing them to more readily innovate and develop new business models.“

Simplified zero-trust security
Continuing its commitment to deliver secure infrastructure services, the company announced Flow Security Central, a centralized SaaS-based management plane delivering compliance monitoring, network visibility, and security operations across both Nutanix-powered private clouds and public cloud environments.

Flow Central screenshot
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A Zero-Trust strategy requires granular network policy controls and the ability to monitor and update those controls in real-time. Many organizations, however, struggle with application visibility and unified security management. Security Central provides customers with a hub for their security operations so they can assess the overall security posture of their Nutanix deployments, generate recommendations to bring environments into compliance, and provide the network visibility and context needed to secure cloud networks and applications.

In addition to Security Central, the firm also announced security capabilities, currently under development, to help customers strengthen their Zero-Trust strategy. These include extensions to Nutanix’s native key manager and data encryption to deliver a simplified and secure environment for edge and ROBO deployments; AHV support for Microsoft’s Virtualization-based Security (VBS) and Credential Guard that helps protect Windows VDI desktops vs. sophisticated memory attacks. Lastly, the company announced security certifications, including updated FIPS 140-2 certificates, the government’s acceptance of all Common Criteria evaluation work, as well as the completion of testing for a listing on the DoDIN Approved Products List (APL).

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Virtual networking to simplify cloud deployments
The company announced that virtual networking capabilities in the company’s Flow, which are natively integrated into the HCI software stack, are under development. Based on well-understood VPC (virtual private cloud) constructs used by major public cloud providers, Flow Networking will simplify the tasks of creating, isolating, and managing software-defined networks that connect applications running in private data centers and in public cloud environments, simplifying networking for hybrid and multicloud deployments.

This VPC technology is a result of the company’s multi-year investment in Xi Cloud, which powers the firm’s cloud-based solutions. Integrated with its AHV virtualization, it will provide customers with expanded options to connect their multiple clouds, incorporate networking features, and support DevOps teams through agile networking that facilitates rapid and automated provisioning of new applications into multiple environments.

Applications insight and automation
The firm also announced enhanced infrastructure operations management to better serve IT teams and application developers. Prism Ultimate, an edition to Prism, adds application insights and automation for troubleshooting application-related infrastructure bottlenecks. It also offers visibility of cloud IT resource consumption for targeted IT cost reductions and more accurate budgeting. Additionally, Prism can monitor non-Nutanix environments, including popular virtualization stacks, giving the firm’s customers a single pane of glass for their entire infrastructure, including legacy infrastructure environments.

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“Our engineers and architects are building the foundation for hybrid architectures to run their applications and manage their growing volume of data, something even more important now as IT is playing a more strategic role,” said Rajiv Mirani, CTO. “To help our customers transition to hybrid and multicloud operating models, Nutanix has made significant investments in R&D to advance our core software stack. These new capabilities will help further strengthen the performance and reliability of our software, extending our journey across networking, security, performance, and automation.“

Software-defined networking capabilities in Flow are currently under development.

Read also:
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Nutanix Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure Available on AWS
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