Nutanix, a leader in enterprise cloud computing, has revealed a number of major announcements at its .NEXT Conference, including new strides in its partnerships and multicloud and hybrid cloud service offerings.

1. Nutanix partners with Microsoft Azure

Nutanix released the news they will be working with Microsoft Azure on a partnership that will allow a seamless delivery of hybrid and multicloud solutions, bringing about increased agility and unified management across on-premises and Azure environments using Nutanix Clusters.

“We know customers are looking for solutions to truly, and simply, advance their cloud journey. This partnership helps us deliver a single software stack across public and private clouds,” said Tarkan Maner, the Chief Commercial Officer at Nutanix.

As part of this collaboration, users on Nutanix Cluster will be provided with a security upgrade along with the option to deploy and manage Microsoft’s cloud computing platform from Nutanix Cluster’s management interface. 

“Many companies face complexities when managing hybrid cloud environments across private and public clouds,” said Scott Guthrie, the Executive Vice President for Cloud and AI at Microsoft Corporation.

With the aim of streamlining these processes, customers will be empowered with the ability to manage servers, containers, and data services on Nutanix’s hyperconverged infrastructure software (HCI), on-premise or in Azure through the Azure Arc control plane using Kubernetes.

“I envision this hybrid cloud solution will accelerate our teams’ ability to try new innovative ideas and bring them to our customers, by increasing agility, scalability and reliability while reducing risk,” said Ken Shaffer, AVP Technology at CarMax.

An improved sales and support experience is also part of the deal. Nutanix customers will be able to port their existing term licenses to Nutanix Clusters on Azure or get on-demand consumption of Nutanix software through the Microsoft Azure Marketplace; while Microsoft Azure customers will be able to use their existing Azure credits to purchase Nutanix software.

The flexibility of solutions makes unified hybrid cloud an appealing option for organisations where technology is critical for their daily operations.

“At United Network for Organ Sharing, technology is vital in support of our mission. Technology makes it possible to match life-saving donor organs to transplant candidates,” said Tiwan Nicholson, the Director of IT Service Operations at the United Network for Organ Sharing.

A unified hybrid cloud solution was ideal for the United Network for Organ Sharing by bridging private and public clouds to create a reliable, scalable and flexible IT infrastructure.

2. Nutanix launches a new Kubernetes multicloud PaaS

And on the topic of Kubernetes, Nutanix announced a new multicloud Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) based on open-source system.

The service, known as Karbon Platform Services, is designed to accelerate the deployment and development of microservices-based applications like Grab, Netflix and Amazon across any cloud platform.

“IT resources are the engines that power digital enterprises. But as a company scales, adopts hybrid cloud, and manages an increasing number of applications, supporting engineering needs can be challenging for IT,” said Rajiv Mirani, the CTO at Nutanix.

The offering provides a turnkey managed services experience along with automated security and multi-tenancy​ for software developers looking to build cloud native apps whilst decoupling them from underlying infrastructures.

“We were looking for a single PaaS platform that could host our Reflex and Vision Insights on both the edge and in our private cloud, to take advantage of both a distributed architecture as well as support software development and machine training on the public cloud,” said Damien Pasquinelli, the CTO at Hardis Group.

With IT resources being the engine that powers digital enterprises, the infrastructures need to keep up with businesses scaling up and adopting new technologies without compromising their ability to manage data, applications, and IT resources simply and effectively. 

In a statement by Nutanix, the company identified Kubernetes as a rapidly evolving ecosystem of cloud native technologies that brings with it difficulties to implement without extensive technical resources.

“The complexities of Kubernetes and multicloud infrastructure management can not only overwhelm IT operations teams, but also limit the resources and tooling available to modern application software developers,”  said Bob Laliberte, the Practice Director and Senior Analyst at ESG Research.

A recent survey by ESG revealed that 70% of customers prefer a combination of public cloud and private data centers for containerised applications, making flexible multicloud solutions ideal.

Nutanix’s Karbon Platform Services represents a significant milestone for the company, as it looks to expand offerings aimed at accelerating enterprises’ cloud native journeys and simplifying application lifecycles.

3. New major HCI software capabilities

During their NEXT Conference, Nutanix also announced enhanced capabilities in its existing HCI software by extending its stack to the public cloud.

“HCI has become the standard for powering modern private clouds … Today’s announcement highlights Nutanix’s commitment to innovation to meet emerging customer requirements and further disrupt the industry status quo,” said Nutanix in a statement.

By utilising the latest storage technology, including NVMe based SSDs and Intel Optane SSDs, customers are purported to be able to reduce latency and power up workload performance by 50%.

“The advanced performance capabilities … will deliver our joint customers with the HCI solutions they need to support their most intensive applications, allowing them to more readily innovate and develop new business models,” said Chris Tobias, the General Manager for Optane Solutions Division at Intel.

On top of this, the new HCI improvements will support the increasingly common Zero-Trust security strategies through Nutanix’s Flow Security Central.

Rather than automatically trusting users, these strategies require granular network policy controls and the ability to monitor and update those controls in real-time to verify all that attempt to connect to a system.

However, many organisations struggle with application visibility and unified security management, according to Nutanix. To solve this, Security Central aims to provide a security hub for greater network visibility that can help IT teams assess the overall security of their deployments.

On top of that, Nutanix has made significant investments in research and development of their core software, with Flow Networking to simplify the creation of software-defined networks that connect apps running in private data centers and in the public cloud as well as Prism Ultimate, a solution used to troubleshoot application-related infrastructure bottlenecks and resource consumption visibility.

4. A New Global Partner Multicloud Program

To bring together all of Nutanix’s partner ecosystems for the very first time and further enable innovation using the above solutions, Nutanix launched its new global partner program known as Elevate.

Through a significant double-digit increase in investment by Nutanix, their partners, from service providers, telcos, hypersales and vendors, will come under one integrated architecture using a consistent set of tools, resources and marketing platforms.

“Our vision has always been about simplicity, from the technology we innovate to the way we do business, and Elevate will deliver that vision to the entire partner ecosystem – enabling them to leverage market shifts toward subscription-based, multi-product, multicloud delivery of IT for their customers,” said Christian Alvarez, Nutanix’s Senior Vice President of Worldwide Channels.

Nutanix partners include Berca in Indonesia, CTC Global in Malaysia, Questronix Corp in the Philippines, StarHub in Singapore, Fujitsu in Thailand, and Terralogic in Vietnam.

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