Amritsar, NFAPost: Cloud computing company Nutanix Inc has announced general availability of Nutanix Clusters hyper-converged infrastructure on Amazon Web Services (AWS). This would majorly cater for the ability to lift and shift workloads to the public cloud, in particular in cloud-bursting scenarios as well as disaster recovery uses.
Nutanix Clusters was already available on AWS as an early-access scheme, and is used on bare metal instances on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud.
Nutanix Clusters will run equally on-premise or in the cloud because, in both cases, it is deployment of an operating system to commodity hardware, Nutanix Senior Vice-President of Engineering Manoj Agarwal said adding that deployment on AWS is identical to the private cloud.
According to Gartner, by 2021, 90% of organisations will have deployed a multi cloud or hybrid cloud model for their IT needs. Companies require the flexibility of multiple clouds while they continue to struggle with the complexity, operational silos, and costs of managing private and public clouds.
A unified solution that provides a consistent experience, tooling, and operational practices across clouds will allow companies to break down silos and reduce inefficiencies while enabling the advantage of flexibility to choose the right cloud for each workload.
Nutanix, with this announcement, will aid in eliminating the cost and management complexity of hybrid environments and enable seamless mobility across private and public clouds without any rearchitecting of the apps due to built-in networking integration with AWS.
Customers now will have the flexibility to choose the right cloud environment for each application with the added benefit of license portability across clouds, which has a direct impact on cost and resource optimisation, the company said.
Additionally, customers will be able to take advantage of the company’s full software stack on private and public cloud. This includes unstructured storage solutions Files, application orchestration solution Calm, database administration and automation solution Era, and more, it added.
“We are excited to support an extension of a customer’s private cloud environment into AWS with the launch of Clusters on AWS. This provides customers the flexibility to get the most out of both their AWS and Nutanix environments,” Head of Worldwide Channels and Alliances at Amazon Web Services, Doug Yeum, said.
“Customers now have an opportunity to take advantage of Nutanix Clusters on AWS to deploy adjacent to their cloud-native applications in AWS and fast track their digital transformation, Yeum added.
Key features in Nutanix Clusters include:
- Apps and Data Mobility: Nutanix Clusters solves a significant pain point for enterprises on their cloud journey by providing a seamless way to move legacy apps and data to the cloud. It enables mobility without needing to re-architect apps, something that can be extremely costly and time consuming.
- Streamlined Operations with Unified Cloud Environment: Nutanix Clusters allows customers to create, manage, and orchestrate their infrastructure, as well as their applications, across private and public clouds, all through a single interface. Unlike competitive solutions that only offer siloed cloud management, Nutanix Clusters extends this to private and public cloud. This single stack removes the need for a separate team to manage each environment, or the re-skilling of teams, and also enables seamless app mobility across clouds.
- Built-In Networking Integration with AWS: Thanks to built-in integration with the AWS networking layer, Nutanix Clusters delivers benefits in terms of ease of deployment and performance. The networking integration also allows customers to use their existing AWS accounts, including unused credits, virtual private clouds, and subnets. This enables a truly unified management plan across private and public cloud, and hugely simplifies the customer experience of managing a hybrid cloud environment.
- Cloud Cost Optimisation: In addition to addressing key technical and operational challenges with hybrid cloud environments, Clusters can provide significant cost savings to customers. This is achieved by removing the need for different teams to manage each cloud environment, eliminating the need for costly migrations for legacy applications, and providing a way to easily hibernate public cloud clusters with just one-click to help eliminate waste. Additionally, available portable licenses, flexible payment models, and increased visibility in cloud spend, through Xi Beam, allow businesses to optimise their cloud investments and truly choose the right cloud for each workload, without lock-in.
- Freedom of Choice: Nutanix Clusters on AWS gives customers the choice to either reuse existing on-premises hardware or AWS credits when building out a hybrid environment. In addition, customers can also choose to bring the on-premises licenses or select a pay-as-you-go or Cloud Commit models.
Based on research with customers, key use cases for Nutanix Clusters include:
- Lift and Shift: Customers looking to move applications to the cloud, or consolidate their data centers, can simply “lift and shift” them without any change. Clusters eliminate the need to re-architect applications, resulting in very significant cost and time savings to customers. Additionally, Nutanix Move provides application mobility between non-Nutanix solutions and Clusters to further simplify the process.
- On-Demand Elasticity: Now customers can quickly scale capacity or expand to different regions in minutes by bursting into public clouds to support seasonal demands, changing priorities, and more. This is especially beneficial when speed is of the essence and adding capacity is a lengthy process, like expanding VDI resources.
- Business Continuity: Customers can now leverage AWS for high availability and disaster recovery without adding complexity arising from managing cloud environments or a stand-alone disaster recovery solution.
- Cloud Native Services: Customers can use cloud-native services with existing on-premises applications without expensive re-architecting. This results in easily modernizing existing applications by taking advantage of cloud native services like artificial intelligence, machine learning, analytics, and more to advance customers’ digital initiatives.
“As the industry evolved, our focus has expanded beyond the data center to help our customers manage the complexity of multiple clouds, whether private or public. Nutanix Clusters on AWS is the realisation of this vision. This enables complete flexibility by allowing businesses to write code once and use it anywhere, taking advantage of scale, location, integration, and pricing of multiple options – this is the true vision of hybrid cloud,” Nutanix Chief Commercial Officer Tarkan Maner said.
