Nutanix extends enterprise cloud platform to physical and containerised applications

Nutanix has announced new platform capabilities that meet 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 manner modelled after public cloud companies like Amazon Web Services 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 and connects to other popular technology stacks.

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 tradeoff in DevOps environments of using virtualisation for applications requiring persistent storage and containerisation for others. 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, giving organisations an alternative to all-flash arrays (AFA) from EMC, NetApp and Pure Storage.

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 let developers and line-of-business operators manage applications and associated infrastructure resources directly, while still allowing IT administrators complete infrastructure control. As well as this, 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 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, making network issues easier to fix.

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.

“A true enterprise cloud platform delivers a consumer-grade consumption and operations experience across all applications while enabling partners and users to co-create value,” said Sunil Potti, Chief Product & Development Officer, Nutanix. “Nutanix is the only company that is elevating IT to safely and rapidly deliver virtual, physical and next-generation cloud-native workloads on a single, simple and intelligent platform that partners can extend and customers can truly rely on.”

“Since adopting the Nutanix platform last year, we’ve been able to reduce operating costs while improving performance and profitability,” said Jess Coburn, CEO, Applied Innovations. “So it’s no wonder I’m excited about the possibilities of the new self-service functionality.  The new portal will allow us to further optimise operations by enabling orchestration of advanced application deployments.”

For more information visit www.nutanix.com