Nutanix Expands Its Portfolio of Data-Management Software for MultiCloud

By Jean S. Bozman

Summary: Nutanix’ .NEXT conference highlighted the importance of weaving together highly distributed data, traditional enterprise applications, and cloud-native enterprise applications running on multi-cloud infrastructure.

Distributed computing is sparking a makeover of traditional data-center computing, scaling up customers’ multi-cloud deployments on a national, regional, and global scale.

At its .NEXT conference in Chicago (May 9-May 10, 2023), Nutanix showed how it is weaving together highly distributed data and enterprise applications to run in a consistent way on multi-site multi-cloud infrastructure.

Software-defined infrastructure has long been the core of Nutanix’ strategy to transform customers’ IT deployments, as delivered by the company’s Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) and its support for hyperconverged architecture. Now, Nutanix has extended its portfolio of solutions to make it easier for customers to integrate data-based enterprise applications and distributed data?with Kubernetes-based cloud-native applications.

By reducing the complexity of managing data-based enterprise workloads alongside cloud-native workloads, Nutanix is acknowledging several key customer challenges in bringing the two worlds (enterprise and cloud) closer together.

These challenges include the following: proliferation of point-products for management and control, IT staffing shortages, demand for specialized DevOps skillsets, and the inexorable forces requiring enterprise-level data governance and data security to be applied to a new generation of containerized and virtualized enterprise applications running on the Cloud.

Managing both “styles” of computing – for the enterprise and the cloud – is an important step that will help customers integrate their multi-site, multi-cloud data management with their already-distributed deployments of physical servers and virtual machines (VMs) running business applications.

Software tools that help administrators manage workloads the “landscape” of a customer’s infrastructure are now – and will be -- essential to the work of transforming IT for Core, Cloud, and Edge compute hubs – no matter where they are located. Otherwise, the shortage of IT skill-sets, combined with a rapidly changing software environment and ever-changing business requirements, will slow the process of IT transformation.

In the wake of the pandemic, we have seen many companies consolidating their data centers, reducing the number of physical servers they have on-prem – and migrating more applications to the public cloud (e.g., AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud and Oracle Cloud) and to company-specific private clouds – with many of the private-cloud resources supported by on-prem resources due to data-security and privacy policies.

Top Announcements at .NEXT

• Nutanix? Data Services for Kubernetes ??(NDK), which gives customers control over cloud-native apps and data at-scale. It is expected to ship to customers later this year.
• NDK supports Nutanix Kubernetes Engine (NKE) and Red Hat OpenShift containers for multi-site, multi-cloud deployments.
• Using Multicloud Snapshot Technology (MST), NDK addresses storage provisioning, snapshots of enterprise data and disaster recovery (DR) for Kubernetes-enabled container deployments.
• MST enables data storage via AWS’ S3 storage APIs. It is also expected to ship later this year.
• Self-service software tools for developers and IT administrators, reducing training time, DevOps cycles, and easing management tasks.
• Integrated management of data for containerized and virtualized applications in multi-cloud environments.
• Support for cross-cloud data mobility, supporting the process of data discovery and data optimization to reduce latency for frequently-accessed data resources.
• Nutanix Central delivers a universal cloud operating model, simplifying management at a large, federated scale. This includes managing end-points at the Edge, the Cloud, and the Core data center – using a single console provided as-a-Service (aaS).?
• Nutanix will deliver the NDK and MST technologies later this year (2023), and also announced that two of the long-term projects that may extend into 2024.

Analysis of Announcements

?Cloud migration is well underway at customer sites, having accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, customers face the task of assessing their overall end-to-end compute and storage environments – in their second and third waves of enterprise cloud deployments. Enterprise customers are ensuring that governance, security, and management will operate predictably and consistently, no matter where specific applications and data are running.

?NDK is designed to bring the full power of Nutanix’s enterprise class storage, snapshots, and disaster recovery (DR) to Kubernetes. This is important because it leverages the portfolio of advanced tools to manage software-defined infrastructure across the customer’s multi-site-, multi-cloud landscape. Nutanix Data Services for Kubernetes (NDK) is initially being delivered as part of Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), which is how customers will first access it.

?Nutanix also provides services to help customers deploy NDK and NCI in a consistent way, so that multi-title administrators will be able to manage highly distributed computing environments more easily and effectively.

The new announcements will provide points of comparison with the management software portfolios of VMware, Cloudera, IBM, and other software providers that address data discovery and consistent management in highly distributed environments. Enterprise customers typically have two or more of these data-management solutions deployed in their IT environment.

Even so, many large customers are looking to consolidate data centers – and to redeploy applications and data to be hosted in new ways on highly virtualized cloud infrastructure.

This creates a market opportunity for the major software providers to sell into their installed base of customers – and to add their products to the software toolkit for large and medium customers. For SMBs, the pattern is a bit different, as they often look to partners to help them assemble, deploy, and maintain application-management and data-management software.

Block, File and Object Stores

Although many data-storage platforms address block and file storage – many do not directly address object stores. As announced at .NEXT, Nutanix is including object stores in its NDK solutions, enabling management of all three data types.

?The reason for this multi-data-type focus is clear – most cloud-native applications feature object-based data, while most enterprise applications feature block data and file data.

In a multi-cloud world, all types of data must be addressed and managed in a consistent way. Otherwise, cloud solutions would continue to be tier-focused, rather than providing a more integrated view of all data. Nutanix already has relationships with AWS and Microsoft Azure for data snapshots and backup-restore for disaster recovery and business continuity purposes.

?At .NEXT, Nutanix announced that its Nutanix Objects Storage solution now integrates with Snowflake data repositories. This means that that customers will be able to use data in the Snowflake Data Cloud to analyze data directly with Nutanix Objects software. This capability lets customers leverage a “single namespace” in Nutanix Objects to provide access to globally distributed data, for deployments based on multi-site data-stores across an enterprise, or ones that tap distributed sources of public data stores (e.g., to access health and government data).

Summary

Nutanix provided its roadmap for unified data management in a multi-cloud world, including data-discovery and data optimization across multi-cloud resources. Specifically, Nutanix addressed:

• Integrated data management for on-prem enterprise and cloud services, extending data access and data management services to cloud-native, containerized applications.
• Enabling customers to access multiple data stores for file, ?block, and object data, and using a consistent methodology to do so.
• Ease-of-use features in NDK (Nutanix Data Services for Kubernetes), NCI (Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure) and MST (Multicloud Snapshot Technology) to support developers and administrators working with multi-cloud application deployments.
• Expanding Nutanix support for customers working to enable faster multi-cloud deployments, simpler management, and maintenance.

Taken together, these announcements show Nutanix strategy to provide a “map” for driving deployments of multi-cloud applications and data right now – and a roadmap for future products that will extend the reach of the current product-set.

The NDK and MST products announced at the .NEXT conference will be shipping this year, increasing the options that customers have when deploying and managing multi-cloud solutions across the containerized, virtualized IT infrastructure they’re using now – and preparing them to adapt it for the future.

Copyright @2022, Jean S. Bozman; All rights reserved