Nutanix Announces New Capabilities at NEXT 2023 Conference

Key takeaways

At the recent .NEXT 2023 user conference in Chicago – their first since 2019 – Nutanix executives used the platform to announce what they called a “re-launch.” This goes beyond the recent logo/colour change – although the new purple colour scheme (which we naturally love) separates them further from the blue and green competition (VMWare). Instead, Nutanix now sees its pioneering HCI (Hyperconverged Infrastructure) as the foundation of its cloud operating model with eyes firmly set on making hybrid multi-cloud easy to manage and deploy – “one platform to run apps and data anywhere.”  

By the way, the latest advancement in Nutanix’s technology journey is no doubt partly informed by an annually commissioned global research study, where 1,450 IT decision makers around the world are surveyed to share their thoughts on what their biggest IT infrastructure and cloud-related data management challenges are. You can read the ‘Enterprise Cloud Index’ here.

On to the updates…

Project Beacon

“Run Anywhere!” This is definitely the direction of travel for the foreseeable future for Nutanix: run any app, on any platform, in any cloud. “Project Beacon” is the start of this, with NDB (Nutanix Database) being re-developed so that it can use cloud-native database platforms, allowing you to manage databases across multiple private and public clouds using the same Nutanix interface. More products will follow too. Think objects, but deployed on either Nutanix hardware or Amazon S3 files deployed natively into Azure etc.

Nutanix Central

Another big announcement was Nutanix Central, a SaaS application that provides a cloud operating model across Nutanix deployments, running on-premises or in public clouds. It will serve as a global control plane and replace the need to manage multi-cloud deployments through separate Prism Central consoles. The Nutanix Central dashboard will show domain and cluster-level metrics such as capacity utilization and alert summaries. Early access to Nutanix Central is available to customers as part of their Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) and Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) licenses.

Compute-only nodes

Nutanix has also added compute-only nodes running Nutanix AHV or VMware ESXi hypervisors for independent scaling of compute and storage nodes in its flagship Nutanix Cloud Platform. The compute-only nodes are available in Nutanix’s Acropolis Operation System (AOS) 6.6.2 release.

Complementary new offerings

Nutanix announced two other new offerings – Nutanix Data Services for Kubernetes (NDK) and Multicloud Snapshot Technology (MST) – giving customers greater control for containers and cross-cloud data transit. MST in particular is under development but will allow snapshots to be intelligently offloaded from Nutanix primary storage, be written directly to S3-compatible object storage, including hyperscaler offerings such as Amazon AWS S3 and Microsoft Azure Blobs, and finally be restored anywhere the Nutanix Cloud Platform is running.

NC2 (Nutanix Cloud Clusters)

There is continued focus on NC2 as a true multi-cloud solution. There are now two bare metal configurations available for the Azure offering and this will only grow with time, as more customers start to shift onto the Nutanix-ready Azure native nodes located within the Azure DCs. Forestry and Land were one of the Softcat customers that were on stage presenting their continued investment in NC2.

Softcat is here to help on all things Nutanix

At Softcat we have the ability to very quickly identify whether NC2 could be a potential cost and time-saving pathway to cloud, using Nutanix’s ‘Direct to Cloud’ tool, a free-to-use resource for customers that takes a matter of minutes if we have the relevant workload/VM (virtual machine) info. If you’d like a run-through of this then please get in touch.

If you’re already in public cloud and costs are spiralling, or perhaps you are being pushed towards public cloud but want a quicker and more flexible pathway, then NC2 could potentially be a route to take. You could benefit from the same single management across on-premises, AWS, Azure, Cyxtera, Equinix & OVH clouds, whilst the same AOS licenses on-premises can be used across those same cloud environments, offering brilliant license portability. Plus, there’s no need to refactor apps when moving – saving you time and money!

If you’d like to hear more on any of the above – either from a non-technical or technical deep-dive standpoint – then please get in touch with your Softcat account team. We’re here to help on all things Nutanix.