WASHINGTON D.C. – Nutanix is taking its hybrid cloud capabilities to the next level.
The enterprise cloud provider has introduced two new capabilities for the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS: Nutanix Calm and Nutanix Xi Cloud Services. Additionally, the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS can now be delivered as a full software stack on various different hardware platforms, form factors, and third-party vendors.
The Enterprise Cloud OS aims to create a unified cloud management that can run across all enterprise environments. It can extend beyond Nutanix-branded platforms and OEM offerings from Dell EMC, Lenovo, and IBM, to single subscription-based software on Cisco and HPE platforms. Through the new Xi Cloud Services, it can be sold as a consumption-as-a-service model.
“We are trying to bring a fresh approach to building and managing hybrid clouds,” said Greg Smith, senior director of product and technical marketing at Nutanix to CDN. “Customers want to marry the goodness of private and public infrastructure, but have many challenges that stem from trying to fuse different cloud environments that were built with different technology stacks and different tooling. We are going to tackle that challenge.”
Tackling that challenge starts with Xi Cloud Services. With Xi Cloud, customers can provision and consume Nutanix software as a cloud-based service as an extension to an on-premises environment. Xi Cloud is managed in the same Prism management interface Nutanix customers are already familiar with.
The first Xi Cloud service revolves around disaster recovery (DR). Xi Cloud will be exposed as an integrated set of cloud-based services, allowing users to select those applications they want protected in the Prism interface. Then users would select their service level, their recovery point objective, and their availability zone for Xi Cloud, and the process is done. Xi Cloud allows customers to protect their applications and data without having to invest in a separate DR site.
“Everything running in the data centre, like applications and data, is replicated into Xi Cloud, giving customers a full copy of their data centre in that cloud for full disaster recovery,” said Smith. “If I have a data centre outage or my application somehow fails, I can fail over to Xi Cloud and preserve business continuity.”
“We think we are bringing a fresh approach to building hybrid clouds with Xi Cloud. Hybrid clouds that leverage the same technology stack, the same software on both sides of private and public infrastructure,” said Smith.
Calm is the extension of that ideology. It allows users to extend the application management capabilities of the control pane across multiple cloud environments, essentially providing application-centric management that spans multiple clouds. Organizations can manage an application with Calm for its entire life-cycle independent of where that application is running from.
The Calm tool will be available to converge enterprise infrastructures on AHV, ESX, Hyper-V, and extended to Xi Cloud Services, as well as public clouds including AWS, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure.
The Prism interface management is the piece that combines both new capabilities and services. Users can extend their data centre with Xi Cloud via Prism, and also manage their applications across different cloud environments.
“We think customers will embrace the ability to take traditional applications and provide cloud services for all applications in their environment,” said Smith. “Too often traditional legacy applications running in the data centre are soft of left behind with the advent of public cloud. Those applications weren’t built to run in the cloud environment, so they weren’t able to benefit from the variety of services that are emerging today. But by building Xi Cloud with the same technology stack, customers can take all the applications running in the data centre running on Nutanix and run them in Xi Cloud. No applications left behind.”
Both Xi Cloud Services and Calm will be delivered through Nutanix’ existing channel partners. With Xi Cloud being sold on a subscription basis, partners can expect revenue at the initial time of sale, as well as on an on-going basis.
“I know it sounds kind of cliche, but that’s the truth. Nutanix is gaining traction because there are real problems with what a customer wants to solve within the data centre and we help solve them,” said Chris Morgan, Nutanix’ global channel chief. “As you start to add true enterprise cloud and hybrid cloud, and what’s going on with Xi Cloud and the new Calm tool, these things are the next step for Nutanix for solving business problems.”
The Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS is available now as a software-only offering on Cisco and HPE platforms. Calm is expected to be available globally in Q4 2017. Xi Cloud Services for disaster recovery is planned for a U.S. release in Q1 2018, with a global release, including Canada, coming afterwards.