Kathy Gibson is at Nutanix .Next on Tour in Sandton – The Nutanix platform is evolving to help customers take advantage of all their applications, whether on-premise, in private clouds, or on public clouds.
‘We aim to make enterprise computing invisible,” explains Rob Tribe, chief technology officer of Nutanix EMEA.
This started with making infrastructure invisible, and has moved up the stack to making data centres invisible, with one-click private cloud operations. The next step is to make clouds invisible, with one-click multi-cloud management.
“We do this by making it super-simple and easy,” Tribe says.
On the infrastructure layers, Nutanix offers hyperconvergence in the form of virtual machine services, file services, object services and block services.
“This is to deliver applications to the business,” Tribe says. “We are not trying to deliver file services, but the actual files and software.”
With an application driven infrastructure, enabled by Era, this is possible.
Nutanix Era kicks off with delivering one-click databases, taking care of provisioning and lifecycle management. It takes out all the complexity, reducing a process that could take days and many people to accomplish, to a single administrator performing the task in minutes.
“This is a massive change in how you deliver,” says Tribe. “And it’s just the start. In the months and years to come we will focus on other applications as well.”
Nutanix Era is a set of enterprise cloud platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offerings to streamline and automate database operations so database administrators (DBAs) can focus on business-driving initiatives.
With Era, Nutanix is targeting one of the most prodigious consumers of enterprise storage capacity: according to IDC, as much as 60% of the IT storage budget goes to support copy data, and the total cost for copy data will reach $55,63-billion in 2020.
Nutanix Era will allow enterprises to reduce storage costs, simplify the management, control and security of data, while easing the complexity of database lifecycle operations.
Nutanix Era’s copy data management service will initially support Oracle and Postgres database engines, with planned support for other popular databases.
Building on Nutanix’s snapshot technology, Era will also incorporate new time-machine capabilities, along with application-specific APIs, for creating point-in-time database copies. This enables application developers to quickly select the exact database copy they need, and empowers database administrators to quickly restore or refresh any database instance with the confidence that every recorded transaction is captured.
Key capabilities of Nutanix Era will include:
* One-click time machine — leveraging integrated Nutanix snapshot technology, Era creates space-efficient database snapshots to lower capex costs, and enable databases running on Nutanix to be cloned or recovered to any specific point in time – up to the last recorded transaction.
* One-click clone/refresh — Nutanix Era lowers OpEx costs with one-click clone/restore database operations that include all targeted database transactions and take just minutes to complete. Automating database cloning eliminates the complex and time-consuming process of locating a specific snapshot, finding the right database logs and then initiating a database recovery operation.
Invisible data centres, the next step, are enabled by the Acropolis hypervisor and Prism.
Acropolis was designed to simplify the hypervisor experience. Tribe points to a number of successful enterprise users, including one that is running 80 000 virtual desktops using the Acropolis hypervisor.
A new addition to the stack is Flow, which brings software-defined networking and enables one-click secure networks in a simple and easy-to-deliver way.
Flow offers built-in network visibility, integrated network provisioning and one-click micro-segmentation.
Flow provides application-centric security to protect against internal and external threats not detected by traditional perimeter-oriented security products.
Flow capabilities are fully integrated into Nutanix’s Acropolis software for easy deployment and will be enhanced with realtime application visibility and discovery technology from the company’s acquisition of Netsil. Nutanix Flow non-intrusively automates the creation and management of application security.
Enterprise IT teams are turning to cloud-based infrastructure to deliver today’s modern business applications, many of which are built from discrete but interconnected services. Protecting these applications requires the microsegmentation capabilities of Nutanix Flow, which enforces app-centric policies that govern communications between individual application services.
Nutanix will also leverage Netsil’s advanced stream processing, application discovery and mapping technology to simplify security policy definition for applications running in both public and private clouds. IT teams and business owners gain the confidence that their business applications are protected from both internal and external security threats.
Nutanix Flow is built into the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS, and today provides:
* Network visualisation — giving application owners an at-a-glance view of network performance and availability per application.
* Application-centric microsegmentation — providing granular control and governance for all application traffic to protect sensitive workloads and data.
* Service insertion and chaining — integrating additional network functions from multiple Nutanix Ready ecosystem partners into a single networking policy.
* Network automation — streamlining and automating common network configuration changes, like VLAN configuration or load balancer policy modifications, based on application lifecycle events for VMs running on Nutanix AHV
To accelerate infrastructure innovation and agility, Gartner recommends that infrastructure and operations leaders “make network automation, visualisation and optimisation capabilities an integral part of their selection process by prioritising vendors that provide an application-specific view of cluster performance.”[1]
When it comes to invisible clouds, Calm and Beam come to the fore.
Calm is an automation tool, built into the stack, that automated provisioning and delivery of applications across public and cloud, private cloud and n-premise.
“So you have blueprints that ensure the platform makes the right choice at the right time,” Tribe explains.
Compliance and governance cannot be underestimated, Tribe adds. Nutanix Beam is a new software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering that delivers multi-cloud governance so organisations can manage their spending, security and regulatory compliance across nearly any cloud platform.
Beam is based on Nutanix’s recently-acquired Minjar Botmetric service, which is already used to manage more than $1B of cloud spend across Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.
Beam is the first SaaS offering from Nutanix, providing deep visibility and rich analytics detailing how customers are using the public cloud. It also provides one-click recommendations based on machine intelligence so IT teams can immediately optimise their cloud spend and enhance their security posture for improved compliance across clouds.
Nutanix Beam customers better manage their multi-cloud deployments with:
* Cost optimisation and cloud visibility — IT teams get full visibility into their overall cloud costs. They can then optimise their spending by quickly identifying unused and underutilised resources, and select more size and cost appropriate cloud resources for each application.
* Centralised financial governance — businesses get streamlined visibility into the entire cloud footprint so IT departments can track the consumption of cloud resources by department and group, make data-driven decisions balancing IT needs and cost constraints, and enforce policies based on allocated budgets.
* Continuous cloud security and regulatory compliance — customers can define custom health check policies for compliance audits, and proactively analyse cloud security operations, while realtime scans for cloud compliance identify risks and violations.