Optimising your organisation’s cloud strategies

As organisations continue to embrace hybrid cloud for greater flexibility, scalability and cost efficiency, they need a reliable and robust platform to streamline and optimise their cloud strategies. Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Nutanix, with its Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) offering, deliver a seamless solution, simplifying hybrid cloud management while ensuring robust disaster recovery (DR). 

Back to basics… 

You may have heard of these two platforms, but what do they actually offer? 

AWS: the public cloud leader 

AWS offers a broad set of global cloud services, including compute, storage, networking, machine learning and analytics. Its secure and scalable infrastructure makes it a top choice for enterprises. 

Nutanix: simplifying IT operations 

Nutanix offers a unified platform (Nutanix Cloud Platform) that integrates infrastructure and management for seamless data and app operations across private and public clouds, the edge and core environments, reducing complexity by operating as a single cloud. 

What is Nutanix Cloud Cluster (NC2)? 

NC2 enables Nutanix Cloud Platform on AWS bare-metal instances, allowing organisations to extend on-premises environments to the public cloud. With a single management interface (Prism), NC2 ensures operational consistency, seamless app mobility and unified management across hybrid multi-cloud environments. 

The IT landscape has changed, requiring organisations to take a new approach. With employees working from a range of locations, data and applications spread across multiple environments and the explosion of data and AI technologies, many are looking to a modern IT infrastructure for a flexible and agile environment. A hybrid cloud platform may address their needs, combining on-premises IT with a range of cloud services, however there are challenges to consider before taking the leap into any cloud, including: 

• Complex cloud migrations 
• Managing IT across multiple environments 
• Lack of cost governance visibility 
• Need for multiple administrative skill 

Making hybrid multi-cloud cloud simple 

Combining Nutanix NC2 with AWS offers a fast, cost-efficient hybrid cloud solution with key benefits:  

AWS benefits: 

• Quick deployment: pay-as-you-go model with procurement in minutes. 

• Scalability: flexible storage scaling with AWS Elastic Block Store (EBS). 

• Global expansion: NC2 supports AWS regions worldwide, wherever it’s needed. 

Nutanix NC2 offers further benefits: 

• Automated operations: AI-driven workload planning and automation with capacity forecasting. 

• Proactive remediation: auto-detection and resolution of AWS hardware failures. 

• Cost-effective DR: flexible disaster recovery strategies with Nutanix replication. 

• Cost governance: unified cost visibility and AI-driven efficiency recommendations to right-size resources and save money. 

Disaster recovery with AWS and Nutanix NC2 

Safeguarding against data loss and ensuring uninterrupted operations, a robust DR strategy ensures business continuity. AWS and NC2 provide: 

1. Efficient replication: Native Nutanix replication of on-premises data to NC2 in AWS or AWS S3 object storage bucket, with built in tools for seamless data sync, without requiring additional integrations. 

2. Simplified failover and failback: quick disaster recovery and workload restoration, minimising downtime. 

3. Flexible DR costs: pay-as-you-go pricing options reduce infrastructure expenses, with the freedom to use portable Nutanix software licences for NC2 in AWS. 

4. Security and compliance: Nutanix and AWS support global security standards and certifications, ensuring regulatory compliance. Nutanix Security Engineering offers continuous monitoring, ensuring resilience and compliance. 

Getting into the detail 

If the theory sounds good, we can see below more of the detail of how a hybrid multi-cloud works in reality, with workloads deployed in NC2 on AWS. 

In our example above, a customer deployed web application workloads in NC2 on AWS to extend the on-premises infrastructure. 

Section A shows a web application running on the NC2 infrastructure, hosted with AWS Route 53, protected by AWS Web Application Firewall. AWS Route 53 has a set of routing policies to reduce latency and improve application availability 

Section B shows NC2 on AWS deployed into the customer's AWS Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). Native networking services connect on-premises cloud and AWS. This may be through a VPN or direct connection. 

Section C shows applications running on AWS using native storage solutions. AWS Elastic Block Store can be included with each NC2 server node at deployment. 

It may appear fairly technical, but this flexible infrastructure provides a fast, scalable and cost-efficient hybrid cloud solution, with additional beneficial features. These include: 

Cloud bursting: allowing eCommerce workloads to be scaled up during peak demand and then back down again. 

Cloud-native services: integrating NC2 workloads with AWS cloud native services analytics for fast data processing from a range of sources, for a robust and flexible environment. 

Business continuity: allowing secondary sites to be quickly deployed in AWS regions to resume business services, should an on-premises data centre suffer a cyberattack. 

Getting started with Softcat 

At Softcat, we help organisations adopt Nutanix NC2 on AWS with four simple steps: 

1. Assessment: evaluating workloads for compatibility with Nutanix NC2 and AWS.2.

2. Planning: building a migration and DR strategy together.

3. Deployment: implementing NC2 and migrating workloads. 

4. Optimisation: monitoring and cost efficiency improvements to maximise performance and cost efficiency. 

Embracing hybrid cloud can have incredible benefits; combining AWS's global infrastructure with Nutanix's innovative hybrid cloud platform, organisations can achieve greater agility, scalability, and cost-effectiveness, while ensuring robust disaster recovery.   

As an AWS Premier Consulting and Nutanix Top-Tier Partner, Softcat supports organisations at every stage of their cloud journey. Whether modernising IT, planning DR, or scaling for growth, Softcat can help. 

Explore Softcat’s case studies to find out more about how we have helped others with successful cloud solutions.  

Interested in extending Nutanix to AWS? Contact us at aws@softcat.com.