Latin America. Nutanix announced that it will extend its unrivaled data center automation capabilities in just one click to include virtualization, security and network orchestration, in addition to augmenting its already broad line of APIs.
Digital transformation, the emerging Internet of Things (IoT), and the proliferation of mostly mobile applications have triggered a major redesign of the way software is built, deployed, and scaled. Modern applications are developed with flexible architectures by using more independent modular services. While these new application architectures have improved the global agility of information technology, they have also exposed a myriad of challenges for IT: visibility into application interdependencies for problem solving, new security threats, and a lack of unified management tools.
The rapid increase in the number of workloads puts more pressure on IT teams to monitor end-to-end infrastructure to ensure applications comply with performance and availability SLAs (service level agreements). Without a unified view of all infrastructure resources, including the network environment, identifying, isolating, and correcting problems becomes an extremely complex and time-consuming task. Common challenges, such as VLAN misconfigurations, take hours to diagnose and correct, triggering application outages and lost revenue.
In addition to providing valuable visualization of server, virtualization and storage resources, Nutanix Prism will now provide application-centric network visualization. Instead of drawing on a range of tools from different vendors, IT teams get a complete view of the physical and virtual network topology. This includes an intuitive view of how virtual machines (VMs) are connected to the physical and virtual network infrastructure, as well as providing detailed statistics on the condition and performance of the network environment. Integrated network virtualization enables data center administrators to instantly identify and isolate network issues affecting application SLAs.
Modern application environments are made up of hundreds of thousands of individual applications and services, where each of them is a potential point of attack. An internal application that has been compromised poses a serious threat to all other workloads that are processed in the enterprise data center. Micro-segmentation technologies have been available for some time to address these internal threats by controlling east-west traffic between applications, but their widespread adoption has been slow because of the complicated handling and installation that large-scale SDN deployments typically require.
Tightly integrated into the company's cloud infrastructure, Nutanix Acropolis Microsegmentation Services (AMS) will continuously inspect, monitor and govern communication flows between individual workloads to provide a more secure application environment. Application-specific policies will be defined within Nutanix Prism, giving IT teams a unified control plane to handle and secure communications between virtual machines (VMs), container-based applications, and microservices running in a common environment. Nutanix AMS can be deployed in minutes and will obviate the need to invest in large, complex SDNs to protect your application environment.
"The transition to the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform has already allowed us to shift our focus to value recovery for our company," said Alexandre Delen, managing director of Delen Private Bank. "With the addition of micro-segmentation services, we can have confidence that our critical applications will be secure without having to deploy an entirely new virtual network topology."
Orchestrating the various network services required for application delivery is not only complex and error-prone, but can also slow down the modernization of enterprise data centers. Achieving a more agile, dynamic, cloud-like infrastructure requires networks to be made invisible, as well as compute and storage resources, so THAT IT teams can channel their efforts into delivering business-critical applications.
Nutanix Acropolis provides simple, open APIs that enable automated policy updates to cabinet-mounted switches (Top of Racks), application delivery controllers (ADCs), and event-driven firewalls throughout the application lifecycle, providing Nutanix administrators with an optimized and automated application workflow. A leading cloud networking provider, Arista Networks, and storage network provider Brocade, in addition to ADCs and security providers such as Citrix and F5 Networks, can now automate network provisioning and modify policies in real time based on application and IT lifecycle changes.
In addition, virtualized networking and security services can be intelligently embedded into the application environment based on application-centric policies, ensuring that the appropriate services are applied to each application and run in the correct sequence. These services will complement Nutanix's native network visualization and security capabilities, providing advanced application inspection and threat mitigation capabilities. Prominent security vendors such as Illumio and vArmour can use service insertion and orchestration capabilities to enable fully orchestrated commercial security solutions that provide advanced security reinforcement and threat mitigation, and dramatically reduce operational complexity.
IT teams benefit from Nutanix Prism serving as a single point of control for all infrastructure resources, while seamlessly integrating with the network, so that network-based services instantly adapt to changes in the virtual environment.
"Enterprises clearly see the value of converging the data center to reduce complexity, but it's not enough to stop at storage and virtualization. Networking and security are end-to-end functions that can no longer be treated as incremental add-ons that introduce more complexity and distract IT from the task of delivering value to the enterprise," said Sunil Potti, director of product and development at Nutanix. "We are committed to making the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform the 'de facto' standard for companies looking to reduce IT complexity while benefiting from the full integration of the entire IT infrastructure, from storage to security."
