Nutanix is a vendor that offers a range of cloud offerings – hyper-converged infrastructure appliances, software defined storage and a software-only cloud operating system. The company is this week holding its .NEXT conference which I am watching from afar. This is an interesting event for Nutanix since it comes only six months or so after its IPO. So here is a roundup of what Nutanix is announcing.
Nutanix Xi Cloud Services
Xi Cloud Services is a way for enterprises with existing infrastructure to “cloudy” their data centers. It is a software-only offering that has the same tooling and SLAs as Nutanix hyper-converged offerings. As such it is both a good entry point for Nutanix – giving them the opportunity to service new customers who are either not yet ready to invest in new hardware plus software offerings or who have existing infrastructure assets that they want to wring some more value out of.
Xi uses the same Prism management interface as the other Nutanix offerings and hence also has a proposition to offer for existing customers wanting a disaster recovery option without having to buy more kit. There is an argument that Nutanix salespeople can use with prospects that suggests they put production workloads on hyper-converged infrastructure, and get value out of their existing sunk costs by using their legacy infrastructure as a DR facility.
Nutanix Calm
Calm is a kind of management or automation offering that promises users the ability to define, instantiate and scale their architectures independent of the cloud environment being used. As such, Calm is being sold as a way of abstracting infrastructure from the application environment and harmonizing the various cloud offerings in use.
Borrowing a paradigm from products such as Chef and Puppet, Calm allows applications to be defined via blueprints, which can be provisioned, managed and scaled into different cloud environments. The solution includes an integrated marketplace so that application designs can be shared across the organization.
Unsurprisingly for a Nutanix product, Calm leverages the full capabilities of Nutanix to converge enterprise infrastructures on AHV, ESX, Hyper-V, extended to Xi Cloud Services, as well as public clouds including AWS, Google Cloud Platform, and Azure.
Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS Software
Delivered as software, the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS sees Nutanix extend beyond its own hyper-converged appliance offerings. This sees the company move on from Nutanix-branded appliances and OEM offerings from Dell EMC, Lenovo and IBM to now include subscriptions-based options on Cisco and HPE platforms.
MyPOV
It is always interesting watching a company post-IPO. Nutanix had to broaden its offering and give itself more entry points into meaningful enterprise revenue. These announcements should keep the markets happy, so long as the company can execute upon them.
