Author: Randy Evans, Field Solutions Architect, CDW Canada
The CDW solutions team participated in the 2020 Global Nutanix .NEXT Digital Experience, which offered this year’s content, demos and entertainment from the comfort and convenience of our own homes and time zones. We attend this conference each year due to the opportunities the event offers to collaborate, attend sales and technical training sessions and network during vertical-specific meetups.
Not only was the event a great opportunity for education and networking, but CDW was also named as the sole recipient of the 2020 Nutanix Americas Partner of the Year Award, which recognizes our exceptional efforts and collaboration with Nutanix over the past year. We are very proud of this achievement and are excited to continue our partnership and offerings with the Nutanix team in the years to come.
The Acceleration of Digital Transformation due to the Pandemic
During the opening keynote, Dheeraj Pandey, Founder, CEO and Chairman of Nutanix announced his retirement from the company, which will begin as soon as he finds a new CEO to replace him.
In addition to his big announcement, he focused his keynote mostly on the disruption that the pandemic has caused us all globally, and how it has quickly accelerated digital transformation over the past six months. Due to this acceleration, he expects that we will see autonomy gain momentum over the next five years, and a singular experience between private, public and the edge over the next 10, with a very simple, secure and seamless software that we will come to call a one-click hybrid cloud experience.
We also saw some special guests during the keynote, with Trevor Noah “zoom-bombing” the keynote, and special guests Condoleezza Rice and Simon Sinek offering their insight into the disruptions of the pandemic as well. Condoleezza Rice talked about the challenges in education and how we need to be more flexible to students needs, while Simon Sinek talked about replacing the problems we’re all facing with positivity, and that with the inspiration of optimism, the future is great.
The Top Technology Announcements from Nutanix .Next
This year’s keynote offered many different views into the current global landscape, which were both interesting and inspiring when looking at the future of technology. Some of the forward-looking innovations and technological advancements that came out of this year’s conference include:
- Nutanix Clusters on Microsoft Azure: This allows you to run all of Nutanix inside Azure using portable licenses, and to connect to native Azure services like artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and storage. With a similar announcement made a few weeks ago, Nutanix Clusters on AWS, the same software and central management can work in your private datacentres and in the public clouds.
- Karbon Platform Services: These services are a new Kubernetes multi-cloud Platform as a Service (PaaS) with automated system-managed security, which provides a managed services experience on-premises, in the cloud or at the edge, to build and run cloud-native applications. Karbon Platform Services takes some of the most common cloud-native services and makes them available on premises, such as containers functions, serverless applications, monitoring with Prometheus and advantaged networking and data services. Additionally, it is an integrated component of the Nutanix HCI software.
- Performance Acceleration with Blockstore and SPDK for NVMe and Optane: Nutanix Blockstore efficiently manages storage media and I/O, bypassing traditional file systems for lower processor overhead and lower latency. Blockstore enables Nutanix to leverage Intel Storage Performance Development Kit (SPDK) for direct access to NVMe and Intel Optane devices, and further decreasing latency and processor utilization. This allows Nutanix to leverage the highly parallel and extremely low latency of NVMe and Optane flash storage for up to 50 percent faster performance for the most complex workloads such as SAP HANA and Epic.
- Enhanced Infrastructure Operations Management with Prism Ultimate: This new edition offers a cloud-based SaaS that adds advanced application insights and automation for troubleshooting application-related infrastructure bottlenecks and cross-customer analytics, visibility of cloud resource consumption for targeted cost reductions and more accurate budgeting and monitoring of non-Nutanix environments. These environments include popular virtualization stacks, which gives Nutanix customers a single pane of glass for their entire infrastructure, including legacy infrastructure environments.
- Simplified Zero-trust Security with Flow Security Central: This is a new centralized SaaS-based management plane that provides compliance monitoring, network visibility and security operations across Nutanix-powered private clouds and public cloud environments. This is beneficial for a zero-trust strategy that requires granular network policy controls and the ability to monitor and update those controls in real-time. According to Nutanix CTO Rajiv Mirani, this new service can be thought of as “a single pane of glass from which you can monitor your Nutanix infrastructure, look for compliance violations, you can get recommendations on how to fix them—but on top of that, you can look into your network traffic, get recommendations on micro-segmentation rules and so on”
- New VPC Technology in Flow Networking: Their new virtual private cloud (VPC) technology in Nutanix Flow Networking allows you to connect multiple clouds, incorporate advanced cloud networking features and support agile networking for rapid and automated provisioning of new applications into multiple DevOps environments. This simplifies creating, isolating and managing software-defined networks that connect applications running in private data centres and in public cloud environments. Flow networking will also improve disaster recovery so that fail-over to the Nutanix cloud won’t require changing IP addresses. It will also allow you to create on-premises, multiple virtual private clouds completely isolated from each other.
There were many great announcements coming out of Nutanix .NEXT this year and as a team we’re looking forward to helping our customers bring the hybrid cloud experience to their organizations. If you want to learn more about any of the new technologies coming out of Nutanix .NEXT, CDW’s partnership with Nutanix or are looking to get started with a hybrid cloud solution, visit cdw.ca/Nutanix or cdw.ca/solutions for more information.
