A really common question this summer has been “What did you do during the pandemic?” Most would respond with projects around the house, maybe learned a new language, etc. However, If you attended the Nutanix .NEXT virtual conference, it would be pretty clear what the team at Nutanix was doing – innovating to deliver new capabilities for their customers. As the image below indicates, Nutanix announced a slew of innovative new solutions designed to enable organizations to Run Better, Run Faster, and Run Anywhere.
To help organizations run better, Nutanix has focused on creating next-gen HCI – with one important distinction — now HCI stands for Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure. Given the rise in hybrid clouds and multi-clouds (see run anywhere), Nutanix believes that next-gen HCI is the perfect fit for organizations modernizing their on-premises data centers. ESG research agrees, as deploying HCI has been in the top three responses for the last two years when ESG asked – “What are you doing to modernize your on-premises data center?” There were a number of enhancements ranging from security to management. .NEXT also included two technology previews, one for networking and the other for a centralized management platform – which will certainly help drive operational efficiencies.
As organizations continue to adopt modern application environments (microservices architectures and container-based environments using DevOps methodologies), they need to run faster. According to ESG research, 86% of organizations using modern applications report being under pressure to deliver applications and services faster. To assist with this, Nutanix has created a Kubernetes Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) to help organizations deploy modern apps faster with its new Karbon Platform Services, which not only includes Kubernetes, but many of the associated services required to run applications as well. The goal is to provide a consistent experience regardless of where the application is being developed – on-premises or in a public cloud.
To enable organizations to run their applications in any location, meaning in the data center, edge or in public clouds, Nutanix enhanced its Clusters offering by announcing the upcoming release of Microsoft Azure as a supported public cloud alongside AWS (and I expect more to come), enabling true multi-cloud capabilities. The ability to have a unified platform for hybrid and multiple public clouds will be critical for organizations running modern apps that need to have a consistent operational experience.
In a time of digital transformation, virtually every business is either in the process of or planning to transform their business to thrive in a digital economy. Nutanix has been steadily executing against their vision to enable that transformation by abstracting the underlying infrastructure – starting with HCI nodes, racks, data centers and now extending that to public clouds to enable greater operational efficiencies and accelerate those transformations. This year’s .NEXT conference highlights their commitment to innovation as they continue to deliver new and enhanced solutions.
