Public clouds enable fast deployments, the ability to move and scale quickly, with powerful services that can be used to build applications. But the public cloud isn’t a solution for all of IT’s problems. That’s where private cloud comes into play, with better cost predictability, optimized performance, comprehensive compliance and greater control of your environment.
The unified hybrid multicloud enables organizations to benefit from the strengths of both public and private clouds, says Steve Carter, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Nutanix, speaking at CDW’s BTEX 2020 virtual event. But existing challenges can include data locality, workload and licence portability, latency, identity management, an increase in specialization and organizational silos, which can make it harder to get things done quickly.
Nutanix hybrid cloud infrastructure enables you to run any app in any cloud, with just one platform. “The foundation of this is hyperconverged infrastructure, which enables organizations to focus on the apps instead of infrastructure components,” says Carter. “Nutanix pioneered the HCI market and continues to invest heavily to maintain leadership in the space.”
How Nutanix delivers for customers
“We’ve built services on top of this foundation that enhance your organization’s ability to further consolidate workloads and streamline operations,” says Carter. This includes data centre services with additional storage services, networking, backup, disaster recovery, as well as DevOps, for things like container orchestration, automation, database as a service and desktop services.
“Now you can run your global infrastructure on a common platform with Nutanix, and all your workloads in these cases across both public and private clouds.”
The architecture delivers a common platform that spans the public and private cloud infrastructure. This enables seamless operations that span clouds, including application data mobility, a common management plane, with no need to retool your applications as you move them, depending on the needs of the organization.
Replatforming IT with Nutanix HCI
Traditional infrastructure is multilayered, requires careful architecture and implementation, and results in high operational costs and complexities that can slow down business, according to Carter. With HCI, you combine compute, networking and storage, as well as security and management, into a scalable infrastructure solution that scales along with your business.
“You can start with any size you need to power your workloads today, and then grow as your business needs change,” says Carter. “Nutanix simplifies the design, construction and deployment of IT infrastructure by leveraging cloud technologies, packaged into a consumer-like experience.”
These cloud technologies also enable both HCI and powerful hybrid cloud integration.
How to integrate legacy environments with Nutanix Clusters
Most organizations have a lot of different services in their environments. For instance, business applications could be running on some sort of SAN stack, where you’ve got compute, network and storage highly optimized for resiliency and performance. If you have VDI, you probably don’t want to put that on the same infrastructure as business-critical applications, so you’re going to have a separate SAN stack for that, which means more to manage, more to tune and more that could go wrong.
Remote offices and branch offices often don’t need the same level of infrastructure as core applications, so they’re often on a separate solution. Cloud-native applications will be deployed in the cloud, which often means different teams managing cloud infrastructure than the on-premises solutions. Big Data might be in the cloud, or it could be on bare-metal server farms. And then for databases, maybe you have an all-flash SAN stack, so this gets cumbersome pretty quickly. You end up with a lot of team sprawl and a lot of silos.
The benefit of HCI is that you can run all of this on a common platform, which can be managed by generalists and help break down silos to increase business agility. Nutanix Clusters are a delivery mechanism for Nutanix HCI, utilizing servers in the public cloud instead of your data centre, but running the same software as your private cloud. The Nutanix management console provides nearly identical functionality to on-premise AOS environments, so you can use that single management plane for both.
Key use cases for Nutanix Clusters
Lift and shift: Move applications to the cloud with no code change
On-demand elasticity: Rapidly burst into public cloud for seasonal increases in demand
Business continuity: Quickly build out disaster recovery sites in any public cloud region
Cloud-native services: Modernize applications and connect natively to cloud services
Nutanix hybrid cloud infrastructure is available for AWS and Microsoft Azure. To learn more about Nutanix solutions, please visit CDW.ca/Nutanix. And be sure to bookmark this page for more coverage of BTEX 2020.
