Latin America. Nutanix announced at its Conference. NEXT Mexico that new developer-oriented services will be added to its Enterprise Cloud OS software. These services focus on the unique needs of the ever-increasing number of applications that businesses need to be productive in a multi-cloud world.
The new Acropolis Object Storage Service, Acropolis Compute Cloud (AC2) and Nutanix App Marketplace services are aimed at application development teams, making it easy for them to develop, test and run almost any application within enterprise clouds. These new service resources enable developers to instantly produce enterprise and cloud-native applications to accelerate the time-to-market of new IT initiatives. The company also introduced powerful virtualization enhancements and platform innovations to accelerate the transformation of the enterprise's infrastructure to public cloud-like consumption models.
Gartner notes that "organizations want to stay in a position to leverage new and innovative services from different public cloud providers. However, they must ensure business justification and be aware of the challenges associated with adopting a second cloud provider." In the same report by Elias Khnaser, research director, Gartner recommends that technical professionals responsible for cloud computing architecture "choose tools and develop operational processes that support a multi-cloud workload architecture."*
Object-based storage service
Nutanix will improve support for applications using large unstructured data sets, such as big data analytics, data warehouse applications, and large-scale IoT deployments. To optimize the delivery of these applications, Nutanix will augment its data handling resources to include object-based storage, which application developers can leverage as a native service.
This new service, Acropolis Object Storage Service, will be integrated into the Enterprise Cloud OS operating system and will provide an API compatible with Amazon Web Services S3 to enable application development teams using Nutanix to consume high-performance On-Demand storage-as-a-service (such as public cloud solutions). Acropolis Object Storage Service will collect, store and handle billions of objects in a single namespace, thereby providing a highly efficient storage network for various use cases, including data archiving. With this new service, Nutanix will provide the foundation for a true multi-cloud storage strategy with complete data object lifecycle management, along with intelligent tier differentiation between clouds.
"Our network transformation team is moving toward introducing virtualization, programmability and automation technologies, forming a rich set of new features for the cloud and On-Demand connectivity for our customers," said Daniele Mancuso, sparkle's director of innovation and engineering. "Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS software enables agile operations, capacity planning, and management of the compute and storage resources of our private cloud environment, thereby increasing the productivity of our developers and the satisfaction of our customers."
Computing service
Nutanix also announced a new resource for delivering CPU-intensive applications, such as distributed analytics workloads, large-scale front-end Web services, Citrix XenApp deployments, and advanced in-memory analytics. This additional AHV-based computing service, Acropolis Compute Cloud (AC2), will be included in Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS and will support compute-only nodes in Nutanix-powered implementations. IT managers will be able to distribute computing services as a consumable resource to application development teams, giving them the flexibility to scale their infrastructure up and down economically. In addition, AC2 offers an affordable alternative for IT teams looking to unlock their virtualized server instances from expensive virtualization software that is difficult to scale and manage.
Integrated services for the application market
Nutanix App Marketplace services are being added to Nutanix Calm, the company's multi-cloud application orchestration and automation solution. With Nutanix App Marketplace, new and existing applications can be instantly defined through standards-based blueprints and then published to a marketplace, allowing teams to instantly consume application services in fully self-service mode. Nutanix Calm will also provide pre-integrated and validated blueprints that optimize the adoption of key tools for infrastructure and developers, such as Kubernetes, Hadoop, MySQL, Jenkins, and Puppet. These application drafts can be applied instantly by application teams so that new workloads can be easily developed and deployed in multi-cloud environments.
Sustained commitment to virtualization and next-generation platforms
Nutanix also announced new AHV capabilities and performance enhancements that are planned for its upcoming new v5.5 software release that will make the company's integrated hypervisor the de facto choice for customers looking for enterprise clouds that offer the simplicity and agility of public clouds. This continued investment is fueled by the overwhelming popularity of AHV, which is already the hypervisor of choice for more than a quarter of Nutanix nodes sold based on an average of four consecutive quarters. This new release will include support for Citrix Provisioning Services (PVS), a popular technology for virtual desktop deployments (VDI). It will also include integrated support for virtual graphics processing units (vGPUs), which will accelerate the generation of complex graphics common in high-resolution medical imaging workloads, 3D geospatial applications, and other demanding workloads.
"Our application developers require a full menu of services to create our core applications," said Joris Vuffray, head of network and systems management at Swisslos. "Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS gives us a full stack of cloud solutions that makes our developers happy while preserving the control and predictability we need in our cloud environment."
In addition, Nutanix formally announced that its Enterprise Cloud OS software will work on Intel CPUs based on the new Skylake architecture, thereby driving performance at higher speeds and on a larger scale. Support for Intel Skylake extends to Nutanix-branded devices, server-based platforms from its OEM partners Dell, EMC and Lenovo, and qualified servers from HPE and Cisco. Nutanix customers can continue to scale their Enterprise Cloud OS deployments by seamlessly combining newer generations of CPU and storage technology with existing deployments, and eliminate costly "forklift" upgrades.
These advancements, along with the recently announced Nutanix Calm and Nutanix Xi Cloud Services, demonstrate the evolution the company has undergone from a hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) provider to a leading provider of enterprise cloud software and application lifecycle management solutions that enable IT leaders to design, build and manage multi-cloud architectures.
"IT managers are being forced to implement a data center infrastructure that not only runs their business applications efficiently, but also provides public cloud-like services that can be consumed by internal application development teams," said Sunil Potti, director of product and development at Nutanix. "With these new solutions, aimed at developers and workload expansion, Nutanix is the only company to deliver a true public cloud-like experience in the enterprise that helps customers realize the promise of a multi-cloud era."
