Nutanix shared some key additions to the Enterprise Cloud Platform last Wednesday, and shared plans to expand its hyperconverged infrastructure platform into all three major public clouds.
The company’s.NEXT conference was held in Washington, D.C. Nutanix Xi Cloud Services, which will allow Nutanix software as a service to Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform(GCP), and Microsoft Azure, was announced. Nutanix Calm is another addition to the Nutanix Xi Cloud Services.
Dheeraj Pandey, Nutanix CEO, presided over Calm & Xi demos at the conference stage. However, neither product will be readily available for a while. Calm will be available in the fourth quarter this year. Xi will initially be available as a disaster recovery application. An “early access” technology release is planned for early 2018.
Pandey outlined the company’s path to hybrid computing as the melding Xi and Nutanix on-premises products. “That’s the big news of this conference, but it’s a multiyear journey for us,” Pandey said Wednesday night during a conference kickoff keynote.
All three major public clouds are part the Xi plan. However,.NEXT’s Wednesday focus was on GCP as Alphabet and Nutanix, Google’s parent company announced a strategic alliance. Diane Greene, senior vice-president of Google Cloud, spoke on the stage to discuss the three components, which include GCP integration with Calm and Xi, a joint solution (Kubernetes, Google Container Engine, and Nutanix’s Acropolis Container Services), and a joint solution for Kubernetes.
On Wednesday, shares of Nutanix rose more than 7 percent following news of the Alphabet partnership. Nutanix was founded in 2009 and went public in September 2018. The first quarter of 2018 is expected to bring the fruits of this alliance. However, the first deliverable will be the integration of NutanixCalm with GCP.
Calm and Xi will expand Nutanix’s current offering. This is operating system software for a software defined datacenter that brings together storage, virtualization, and networking resources on one integrated hardware. Nutanix currently offers its hyperconverged infrastructure offerings on-premises only in three ways. As its own, branded appliances such as the NX-1000, as partner appliances from Dell or Lenovo, or as software running on Cisco UCS or HPE ProLiant hardware. Nutanix and IBM announced Tuesday that Nutanix will be coming to IBM OpenPOWER LC Systems.
Xi would allow users to use existing Cloud OS constructs within the Nutanix environment, and then use them in AWS and GCP as well as Azure. According to the company, the approach will eventually allow users to quickly move traditional enterprise applications (e.g. SQL Server or Oracle database deployments) from Nutanix private cloud into the public cloud and back again as needed.
“What if enterprises could move to the public cloud, but keep the tooling, the economics, and the SLAs intact?” said Nutanix Chief Product Officer Sunil Potti in a Tuesday morning keynote.
Potti stated that disaster recovery was the most important use case for the approach. He also said that it will improve the process for testing disaster recovery for enterprises, and reduce the need to have secondary datacenters. “You shouldn’t have to worry anymore about your secondary datacenters.” He predicted that in the next few years, you should be out the secondary datacenter business.
During his keynote, Potti also spoke about Calm, calling it Nutanix’s “first strategic product after Acropolis or Prism.” These are the company’s operating systems and management technologies.
“Every part of our workflows is now coming”
Nutanix Expands Platform to AWS Azure and Google with ‘Xi’
