Managing infrastructure is a headache for more and more companies. In addition to their own data center, there are often multiple clouds and edge locations in use. The platforms differ from one another. It takes a lot of expertise to manage it all. Finding the right people is also difficult, which creates huge challenges. In addition, Edge computing is growing tremendously. How are organisations going to manage that as well?
Nutanix is hosting another virtual event this year; the popular .NEXT event is scheduled for next May. Yesterday was their virtual event, called Nutanix Essentials. Here the CEO of Nutanix, Rajiv Ramaswami, gave an opening keynote in which he once again pointed out the hybrid and multi-cloud issues.
More and more applications
Infrastructure is increasing rapidly and also in different locations with different technology. Managing all that infrastructure is becoming a problem at many companies. It takes a lot of expertise in compute, networking and storage, as well as the various cloud platforms. That is not sustainable. At the same time, organizations are rapidly developing or buying new applications. More and more modern applications are finding their way into organisations. The disadvantage of all these apps is that they also need to run somewhere. There is also a database behind them that needs to be managed and it needs to be available across the organisation.
Nutanix has invested heavily in recent years to simplify infrastructure and its management. With Nutanix HCI all on-premises infrastructure is invisible. The goal for the next few years is to make the cloud invisible as well.
Also read: “Nutanix will make the cloud invisible”
Delivering consumer experience
According to Ramaswami, more and more companies expect a consumer-like experience when using new platforms and tools. Managing them should no longer take hours, days or weeks. It should all be managed autonomously or in a few clicks. Nutanix facilitates this with its infrastructure platform.
Nutanix argues that companies need to move away from having large infrastructure teams with network, database, compute and storage specialists. Those IT Teams need to deal with more important issues, not day-to-day management and maintenance.
In the near future, most data will come from the Edge
Research suggests that Edge computing is going to be responsible for most data. Which is often very valuable data for organizations. Organisations now may be struggling to control their on-premises data centers and clouds. If dozens, or even hundreds of Edge sites are soon added to that, they will have yet another challenge.
There are organizations that already have a large Edge infrastructure. Consider supermarkets or large retail chains, for example. Those already have the necessary Edge computers in each store on which all the data is processed centrally. That also means a huge job for the IT teams to manage and maintain all those Edge locations.
Ramaswami says it can be much simpler
Ramaswami hopes to start convincing many of these organizations to choose Nutanix in the coming years. According to him, Nutanix is the easy route to the future. It takes a tremendous amount of management tasks off its hands. It can also help save costs by properly analyzing what should be running in which location.
Nutanix’s basis is the HCI (hyper-converged infrastructure), a set of multiple servers (nodes) that together form an infrastructure cluster. This Nutanix cluster can be managed from a single portal. Meanwhile, you can already extend these clusters with cloud nodes, which run in AWS, Azure or Google Cloud, for example. However, it is also possible to place a node or a couple nodes at Edge locations. You can connect them back to the central cluster, you get one environment that reaches into all these locations.
Linking those environments together also optimizes the environments. Your network expert no longer comes into play. The Nutanix platform is great in managing networking and storage. Storage can be easily managed, duplicated and moved as needed.
Keeping costs under control
If you have a lot of infrastructure, an on-premises environment is often still the cheapest today. However, it’s not always convenient if your organization operates globally. In these situations, organisations add clouds to the cluster. Nutanix has proprietary tools to analyze your infrastructure and recommend in which environment or cloud you should place certain workloads. This advice is based on performance and cost. If needed, you can add compliance or latency requirements that certain workloads have.
Research shows that 85 percent of workloads are currently in poor locations in hybrid cloud environments. So there is a lot of room for improvement there.
Managing applications and databases with Nutanix Era
Ramaswami also really hammered on all these new modern applications that come with their own databases. If you want to roll out these applications in a traditional organization, it quickly takes several months because they still have to rig up the infrastructure. If organizations choose Nutanix and Nutanix Era, this can be done much faster. An application can run on the Nutanix platform and all the databases behindthe application can use Nutanix Era. On Era you can run different types of database servers, from MySQL to Oracle. When your databases run on Nutanix Era they are automatically optimized. Nutanix Era also applies security patches and upgrades automatically.
This allows you to deploy modern applications very quickly on Nutanix and Nutanix Era. The databases are managed automatically. You can land the application itself on your on-premise infrastructure and then get the advice on where the application will do best. Whether that is on-premises, AWS, Azure or the Google Cloud.
More about Nutanix Era: Nutanix Era aims to simplify the life of database administrators
Nutanix has little new to say
Ramaswami told us that 50 percent of all data will come from the Edge within a few years. Once again, that requires a new strategy for many companies on how they are going to set up the infrastructure. Many companies are far from ready for that. Nutanix is now ahead of the market in getting this fixed. All in all, Ramaswami’s keynote was certainly informative, but on the other hand, Nutanix didn’t really have any news to report. He made no announcements for new solutions, it was story much repetition with some new insights. If you are interested, you can go here for a recording. In any case, we can’t wait until next year, when .NEXT is back and Nutanix will hopefully have more to say.
Also read: What is Nutanix and how it conquers the hybrid and multi-cloud world