Availability of Nutanix Cloud Clusters on Microsoft Azure

Nutanix, Inc. announced the general availability of its Cloud Clusters (NC2) on Microsoft Azure, extending its hybrid cloud environment to Microsoft Azure dedicated bare metal nodes.

NC2 on Azure offers a HCI and unified management spanning private and public cloud environments to accelerate hybrid cloud adoption. It enables customers to deploy and manage their workloads in their own Azure account and VNet enabling them to keep the operating model simple and consistent between Azure and on-premises.

With license portability of the company’s term-based software and the ability to leverage all Azure benefits, NC2 on Azure provides customers the investment protection and choice to run their workloads in a hybrid cloud environment. NC2 on Azure is generally available to customers on Azure dedicated bare metal nodes in North America Azure regions, with additional global Azure regions to follow in 2023.

“Organizations are embracing hybrid multicloud to easily scale from on-prem to the public cloud, optimize costs for performant and secure workloads, and tap into a flexible subscription model,” said Rajiv Ramaswami, president and CEO. “NC2 on Azure gives our customers a frictionless on-ramp to Azure with consistent management of apps and data across their hybrid multicloud environment.”

“While public cloud has solidified as a crucial investment for businesses, many customers need to run and manage workloads across public and private cloud environments,” said Scott Guthrie, EVP, cloud + AI group, Microsoft Corp. “NC2 on Azure provides consistent management for businesses’ infrastructure across on-premises and cloud, reduces network latency, and increases cost efficiency.”

Customers can run workloads on NC2 on Azure and manage Azure instances from Nutanix’s management interface. This enables customers to run hybrid workloads across private clouds and Azure without needing to re-architect their applications. The expected result is simplified and consistent IT operations across clouds, hybrid cloud adoption in hours, and lower TCO when compared to other cloud deployment solutions.

Customers can also take advantage of Azure Hybrid Benefit as well as Extended Security Updates to improve cost, security, and efficiency. The customers will be able to port their existing term licenses to NC2 on Azure or get on-demand consumption of the firm’s software through the Azure Marketplace, enabling frictionless movement between private clouds and Azure.

“Customers are struggling with the reality of managing workloads across private and public clouds, and this challenge is not going away,” said Paul Nashawaty, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. “This Nutanix and Azure solution addresses key challenges many enterprises are facing by providing unified management across clouds with applications, data and license portability.”

Customers can leverage NC2 on Azure to:

Simplify and optimize DR, eliminating the need to maintain a secondary site by utilizing Microsoft Azure’s on-demand capacity for failover.
Access on-demand capacity bursting to Azure, rapidly scaling capacity while leveraging existing applications and tooling.
Migrate and modernize their datacenters by moving their existing applications and data as-is without costly and time-consuming refactoring or retooling.

“As we strive to financially protect 39 million customers around the world with our products and services, we continue to see hybrid cloud as a key milestone in our digital transformation journey,” said David Fitzgerald, assistant VP, IT delivery, Unum Ltd. “With NC2 on Azure, we are excited about leveraging a seamless hybrid cloud platform for disaster recovery as well as to migrate and run workloads in Azure to handle a myriad of hosting scenarios. We can now, on-demand, expand our Nutanix Cloud Platform to Azure regions without having to re-factor our applications. We look forward to continuing our strong partnership with Microsoft and Nutanix.”

“TCS has a long track record of embracing technology innovations to satisfy customer demand and enable them to focus on business outcomes,” said Dinanath Kholkar, SVP and global head, partner ecosystems and alliances, TCS (Tata Consultancy Services Ltd.). “Microsoft Azure and Nutanix have been popular technology choices of TCS customers looking for digital transformation, and NC2 on Azure is an attractive option for us to help our customers extend and migrate their on-prem workloads into a cloud space more easily. The ability to rapidly deploy and burst workloads through NC2 on Azure is vital to our customer’s hybrid and multicloud strategy. TCS Microsoft Business Unit (MBU) is looking forward to taking this solution to our joint customers.”