Nutanix launches two new services as .Next sees revival in Chicago after Covid

It was the first .Next 2023 event after the Covid-19 pandemic, and brought together industry leaders, executives, developers, IT experts, and thought leaders to explore the latest trends in hybrid multi-cloud computing.

The event offered attendees the opportunity to collaborate, train and network with peers, while discovering cutting-edge technologies and strategies for building the ideal architecture for their businesses.

In addition to insightful keynotes on cloud strategies, developer productivity, IT infrastructure costs, performance, and security, Nutanix said it was introducing two new services and a project to address “customer demands for simplicity, effectiveness, resilience, and affordability”. The services are designed to provide a single-click solution for organisations seeking to streamline their operations and achieve optimal performance, the company said.

Project Beacon is a hybrid multi-cloud platform to deliver a portfolio of data-centric Platform as a Service (PaaS) level services. This is aimed at organisations with a single API and console, integrated with Kubernetes container orchestration, and consistent management across environments. Kubernetes is a popular open source platform for container orchestration.

It enables developers to easily build containerised applications and services, as well as scale, schedule and monitor those containers.

“Project Beacon is our vision for enabling developers to write applications once and run them anywhere by delivering data-centric PaaS level services that are no longer tied to a single infrastructure provider,” said Rajiv Ramaswami, the president and CEO of Nutanix.

Through these services, developers would have access to a suite of data-centric PaaS services whether in native public cloud, on-premises or at the edge. The operations teams would be able to remain in full control of data governance, compliance and data protection, he said.

“We hope to enable enterprises to fully embrace the benefits of hybrid multi-cloud, not only at the infrastructure layer but also at the application data layer.” the CEO added

Nutanix Central, a cloud to edge management solution, is available as part of the Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure licence. This provides cloud-delivered unified management and reporting of the entire Nutanix environment distributed across private, public, and edge clouds from a single place. It will also support multi-domain use cases, enabling IT teams to deliver self-service infrastructure while remaining in control of governance and security.

From the Nutanix Central dashboard, customers will access domain and cluster-level metrics, including capacity utilisation and alert summary statistics, to get a quick overview of the state of each domain, Ramaswami said.

The third service is Data Services for Kubernete (NDK). This will help accelerate containerised application development for stateful workloads, he said. NDK will empower Kubernetes developers with self-service capabilities to manage storage and data services, while also enabling IT with visibility and governance over consumption.

Amid the fast-growing demand for technologies that can tackle problems, many companies are facing, challenges, such as IT management complexity, cost, lock-in, on-premises, hosted datacenter, and edge endpoints, etc.

“Our customers are facing more challenges every day with different complexities. They are sharing those experiences and recognising that Nutanix's job is to take a thoughtful approach rather than follow the trend. We are continue to evolve to offer federated management and bring a level of control for the costumes and assist them on maximising their values, cost governance, etc,” said Venugopal Pai, chief evangelist and vice president of customer experience

Daryush Ashjari, Nutanix vice president of APJ - Presales Engineering, said: “Every customer has different needs, therefore our hyper-convergence combines all of the customers’ requirements in common resources that can be shared in one entire stack."

“Nutanix offers one simple solution for customer demand in one click. We sit on top of the hardware; compute, storage and network can be virtualised and automated,” he added.

Nutanix is a global leader in cloud software, offering organisations a single platform for running apps and data across clouds. The company reported a turnover of US$1.58 billion for fiscal year 2022.

“We have a cloud platform that can run any workload for our customers, we have the data services our customers need to run their applications wherever they like in a multi-cloud environment,” said Ramaswami.