Nutanix: Availability of Xi Cloud Services for Multicloud Era

Nutanix, Inc. announced the availability of Xi Cloud Services, a suite of offerings designed to create a more unified fabric across different cloud environments, that gives IT teams the freedom to run their applications on the optimal platform, not restricted by technology limitations.

Xi Cloud Services is comprised of five distinct offerings at launch, including Xi Leap, a native extension of the company’s Enterprise Cloud Platform providing DR as a service.

A hybrid cloud that allows IT to make strategic workload placement decisions is the goal of many businesses. In fact, according to Gartner, “a multicloud strategy can help a customer gain access to a broader range of capabilities, especially bleeding-edge innovative capabilities.“⁽¹⁾

But identifying the best of public and private cloud deployments and knitting them together for a seamless experience is hard, and too often results in siloes of infrastructure spread out across various on-prem and public cloud deployments. This complexity forces companies to experiment with new workloads in public clouds while keeping traditional enterprise applications in the private cloud datacenter, even if those workloads would be more efficient in the public cloud.

According to the recent the firm’s Enterprise Cloud Index, enterprise workloads running in both private and public clouds are expected to jump nearly 20% in the next two years. Through Xi Cloud Services, the firm makes it easier for companies to integrate cloud services into their multicloud deployments, whether by natively extending their Nutanix environment beyond the boundaries of a traditional datacenter or by finally gaining the visibility and insight into their infrastructure deployments across platforms to monitor costs and ensure compliance.

Xi Leap
Nutanix Leap, which is available, is a turnkey and integrated service that rapidly and intelligently protects the applications and data in a firm’s environment without the need to purchase and maintain a separate infrastructure stack. From within Prism, customers can simply select VMs for protection and set up protection. The selected VMs will then be replicated in the background, ready to be recovered in the event of a site failure – all within the same management tool as an organization’s broader infrastructure deployment.

According to Gartner, “DR is often technologically tedious, especially handling IP addresses and DNS changes for applications and servers.” ⁽²⁾ The analyst firm states: “The rise in cloud adoption, with deployment models for IaaS, platform as a service, and software as a service, has shown the benefits of rapid provisioning and elastic, on-demand capability for applications and users. Cloud-based DR solutions also provide these benefits.“⁽³⁾

Leap reduces the complexity of achieving DR readiness, converging all elements of provisioning, replicating data, defining a DR runbook and configuring security and networking into a single service.

“DR is deceptively difficult and yet critical for any IT organization to manage perfectly so essential data is not lost,” said Dr. Gary Mattei, director, technology, Avon Grove. “Nutanix Xi Leap solves all of these challenges for us, allowing us to upload our data directly into the DR solution while providing a single view across our entire infrastructure. Xi Leap gives us confidence that our data is safe no matter what happens.“

Xi Cloud Services
Xi Cloud Services is comprised of five distinct services at launch, including Leap, which address the growing challenges of the multicloud era. These services bring together not only the ability to standardize workflows and harmonize operations across environments, but also the ability to blur the lines between clouds, utilizing applications and data across multiple clouds for a variety of data protection, application delivery and edge locations requirements.

Offered as part of Nutanix Enterprise, customers can take advantage of:

Xi Leap – cloud-based DR services to protect your critical business applications and data. Leap services are enabled directly in the firm’s Prism for a completely integrated public + private cloud experience.
Xi Frame – desktop-as-a-service platform built from scratch specifically for cloud deployment, now integrating role-based access control.
Xi Beam – a multicloud cost optimization and governance tool that allows customers to reduce cost and enhance cloud security across platforms, public and private.
Xi Epoch – an observability and monitoring solution for multicloud applications that provides a Google Maps-like view of applications to determine performance bottlenecks and availability issues in any cloud environment.
Xi IoT – an intelligent edge computing platform that performs real-time processing of sensor and device data pipelines, and moves intelligently filtered data back to a customer’s cloud platform of choice for long-term decision-making, allowing them to eliminate the complexity of deploying and managing edge locations while deriving more value from data at the edge.

Xi Epoch
Click to enlarge

“As we move into the multicloud world, a fundamental challenge for all businesses is running IT applications seamlessly across platforms,” said Dheeraj Pandey, CEO, Nutanix. “It has been our mission since we were founded to make infrastructure invisible to our customers so they can focus on their applications, not where the applications reside. Xi Cloud Services is the next evolution in that journey as we help our customers achieve invisible, together.“

Availability:

Xi Cloud Services are available.
Leap is available to customers in East and West availability zones in the United States.
Additional availability zones are expected to be available in the UK in calendar Q1 2019.

⁽¹⁾ Gartner, Technology Insight for Multicloud Computing, Lydia Leong, August 16, 2018
⁽²⁾ Gartner, Exercise Caution Before Stretching VLANs, Andrew Lerner, Ron Blair, Mark Jaggers, March 22, 2018
⁽³⁾ Gartner, Comparing Three Approaches to AWS-Based DR, Lowell Schulman, October 23, 2018