Kathy Gibson reports from Nutanix .Next in Washington DC – Nutanix was set up 16 years ago as a hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) company focused on managing storage, compute, and virtualisation across data centres.
It has come a long way since then, today providing the platform for data centre and hybrid multi-cloud deployments – including software for virtualisation, Kubernetes, database-as-a-service, software-defined networking, security, as well as software-defined storage for file, object, and block storage.
The shift really started about 10 years ago, when Nutanix launched its own Acropolis hypervisor (AHV).
“We realised that once we had a server-based software-defined architecture, we had common underpinnings with the public cloud,” explains Lee Caswell, senior vice-president: product and solutions marketing at Nutanix. “So, if we extended the platform to the public cloud we could think about integrating cloud and on-premises infrastructure.”
The acquisition of D2iQ towards the end of 2023 opened up new opportunities with its established AI-driven Kubernetes management platform.
Nutanix could now offer its customers a comprehensive solution for managing cloud-native applications across multiple environments – and it’s been a game-changer.
“Now you can have snapshots and replication; that you can run a virtual machine in a container; and a container either cloud-native of on the edge on bare metal,” Caswell says.
Nutanix’s Acropolis Operating System (AOS) was designed from the ground-up to be independent of a hypervisor and so it can run with a hypervisor, on bare metal, or in the cloud
“That level of independence in the operating system – giving the choice of using a hypervisor or not – is the same architectural design point as D2iQ had,” Caswell explains.
“So now you have the infrastructure elements, and the Kubernetes environment, and you can run them all anywhere.
“It means we can confidently say that you can run anything, anywhere.”
Nutanix is going even further and bringing the end user computing (EUC) part of the equation into its embrace as well.
It’s a part of computing that is often overlooked by IT, but it can have a big impact.
“EUC was often a soft-landing spot for HCI,” says Caswell. “Because it is quite cost-sensitive, HCI was a good economic option.”
At the same time, EUC is often managed by desktop administrators who are generalists rather than IT engineers.
“Users want their virtual desktops to be resilient and perform; and they have to be able to scale quickly and easily,” Caswell explains. “So the virtual desktop interface (VDI) was a soft-landing spot for HCI.”
But this doesn’t mean EUC isn’t just as important to the business as other aspects of the IT organisation, he adds. “VDI users can complain a lot louder than a server if the system is not performing.
“Every end user knows what a physical desktop can do, and if a virtual desktop is any less performant, the admin will find out immediately.”
Partnerships signed with Omnissa and Citrix will bring these VDI solutions on to the AOS platform.