Member Article

Groundbreaking Platform From Nutanix Strengthens Enterprise Cloud Offering

Evolving Platform Commoditises Siloed Hyperconverged and AFA Solutions with New Acropolis Services, Self-service Capability and All-Flash Platforms

Nutanix, a leader in enterprise cloud computing, announced today at the .NEXT Conference 2016 groundbreaking new 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, organisations must deliver new IT services in a frictionless manner modelled after public cloud companies like AWS while also retaining the security and control their businesses require. Nutanix 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. The new capabilities being introduced at .NEXT 2016 include:

Nutanix Runs All Virtualised Workloads

Traditional infrastructure has struggled to keep pace with the rapid innovation in application architectures and diversity of application requirements. With Acropolis Container Services (ACS), containerised applications and emerging microservices architectures can now be deployed on the Nutanix platform with persistent storage - avoiding the painful tradeoff in DevOps environments of using virtualisation for applications requiring persistent storage and containerisation for others. Both traditional and next-generation applications can leverage the rich storage performance, capacity optimisation and data protection capabilities of the Nutanix web-scale platform.

While the majority of services are now virtualised 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 now available across the full portfolio of Nutanix appliances to bring greater infrastructure choice and maximum application performance assurance, giving organisations a superior alternative to all-flash arrays (AFA) from EMC, NetApp and Pure Storage. These AFAs are based on traditional datacentre architectures and struggle to unleash the full value of recent hardware innovations such as NVMe. Nutanix all-flash nodes are offered at a modest premium over hybrid appliances.

Balancing Needs of Developers and Operators

With the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform, datacentres 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 infrastructure control. Further, Prism’s One-click Planning will include sophisticated scenario-based modelling, based on the company’s X-Fit™ machine intelligence, so that datacentre managers can foresee the impact that changes to the IT environment will have on application performance and availability.

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

A new integrated network visualisation 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 Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform is extensible with a rich set of APIs, enabling customers and partners to take advantage of the underlying powerful 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 specialised solutions.

• Nutanix 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
• A jointly engineered solution with Microsoft brings together the Microsoft Cloud Platform System (CPS) and Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform to deliver an Azure-like hybrid cloud environment that is ideal for enterprise applications like Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft Exchange
• With the upcoming release, Nutanix 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 commoditisation

Product Availability

Acropolis Block Services and Acropolis Container Services will be available in July 2016 in the 4.7 release. Nutanix Prism self-service capabilities, scenario-based modelling, AHV dynamic scheduling, ESXi management from Prism and network visualisation will be available in a subsequent release. Nutanix OpenStack drivers are available immediately. Microsoft CPS on Nutanix will be available by July 2016.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Pete Jackson .