Nutanix announced at the .NEXT Conference 2016 new platform capabilities that tear down the IT silos that have emerged with every new generation of applications, strike the right balance between the needs of developers and operators and unify different vendor technology stacks.
Traditional infrastructure has struggled to keep pace with the rapid innovation in application architectures and diversity of application requirements. With Acropolis Container Services (ACS), containerized applications and emerging microservices architectures can now be deployed on the Nutanix platform with persistent storage - avoiding the painful tradeoff in DevOps environments of using virtualization for applications requiring persistent storage and containerization for others.
Both traditional and next-generation applications can leverage the rich storage performance, capacity optimization and data protection capabilities of the Nutanix web-scale platform.
According to Gartner, "when containers are deployed in production use cases, where long-term data persistence and protection, container-aware data services, granular quality of service (QoS) and scheduler integration are key requirements, storage managers need to rethink data management.”
While the majority of services are now virtualized and will be moving to containers, certain applications such as Oracle RAC and DB2 may continue to run on bare metal servers due to specific application needs or licensing constraints. Acropolis Block Services (ABS) enables databases running on servers from Cisco, Dell and HP to directly leverage the Acropolis Distributed Storage Fabric for the highest levels of data performance and availability.
All-Flash nodes are now available across the full portfolio of Nutanix appliances to bring greater infrastructure choice and maximum application performance assurance, giving organizations a superior alternative to all-flash arrays (AFA) from EMC, NetApp and Pure Storage. These AFAs are based on traditional datacenter architectures and struggle to unleash the full value of recent hardware innovations such as NVMe.
Balancing Needs of Developers and Operators
With the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform, datacenters can now achieve the same degree of automation as the public cloud. New Nutanix Prism self-service capabilities enable developers and line-of-business operators to directly provision and manage applications and associated infrastructure resources, while still allowing IT administrators to have complete infrastructure control. Further, Prism’s One-click Planning now includes sophisticated scenario-based modeling, based on the company’s X-Fit machine intelligence, so that datacenter managers can foresee the impact that changes to the IT environment will have on application performance and availability.
Datacenter operators will also benefit from more invisible operations as a result of new AHV dynamic scheduling. This capability delivers intelligent placement of VMs based not only on analysis of compute and memory resources as with traditional virtualization solutions, but also real-time analysis of storage utilization.
A new integrated Network Visualization capability provides a rich view into how VMs are connected to both physical and virtual networks, simplifying remediation of network issues.
Enabling Choice and Extensibility To Connect Disparate Technology Stacks
The Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform is extensible with a rich set of APIs, enabling customers and partners to take advantage of the underlying powerful web-scale platform. With support for multiple hypervisors, the platform can be easily extended to build a complete cloud leveraging the value of other specialized solutions.
The NutanixOpenStack drivers, whichoffer an easy way to build private clouds using OpenStack software, are available today, bringing together OpenStack services for automation and turnkey Nutanix infrastructure.
A jointly engineered solution with Microsoft brings together the Microsoft Cloud Platform System (CPS) and Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform to deliver an Azure-like hybrid cloud environment that is ideal for enterprise applications like Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft Exchange.
With the upcoming release, Nutanix Prism will be able to manage VMware ESXi environments bringing the same one-click management simplicity to VMware that customers enjoy with AHV, and further driving hypervisor commoditization
Acropolis Block Services and Acropolis Container Services will be available in July 2016 in the 4.7 release. Nutanix Prism self-service capabilities, scenario-based modeling, AHV dynamic scheduling, ESXi management from Prism and network visualization will be available in a subsequent release. Nutanix OpenStack drivers are available immediately. Microsoft CPS on Nutanix will be available by July 2016.