Category Archives: Hyperconvergence

AI, Cloud Providers, Hyperconvergence, News

New Report Shows AI Technologies Ushering In New Era of Data and Infrastructure Modernisation

Nutanix a leader in hybrid multicloud computing, today released the Nutanix State of Enterprise AI Report, a global research study providing insights into Enterprise decision-making around AI. The report provides a holistic view into how enterprises are approaching AI technology strategy and adoption, as well as how future plans will affect IT spending and budgeting.

“In just one year, Generative Artificial Intelligence (genAI) has completely upended the worldview of how technology will influence our lives and Enterprises are racing to  understand how it can benefit their businesses,” said Sammy Zoghlami, SVP EMEA at Nutanix. “While most organisations are in the early stages of  evaluating the opportunity, the State of Enterprise AI report confirms that most consider it a priority. More importantly, the survey uncovered an important theme among enterprises adopting AI solutions: a growing requirement for data governance and data mobility across data centre, cloud, and edge infrastructure environments making it even more important for organisations to adopt a platform to run all apps and data across clouds.”

Key findings for EMEA include:

  • EMEA organisations plan to embrace AI solutions but are slowed by a generative AI skills-gap. 90% of EMEA respondents said that AI is a priority to their organisation. Today, the top two AI solutions deployed by EMEA organisations include virtual assistants/customer support bots, as well as a mix of generative AI solutions. However, when it comes to AI solution implementation, EMEA respondents indicate they lack generative AI and prompt engineering skills, and they also require more data scientists and data science skills to support their initiatives.  
  • AI data security, scale, and management will be top challenges for EMEA organisations. More than 90% of EMEA respondents say that security, reliability, and disaster recovery are important considerations in their AI strategy. EMEA organisations also ranked “managing and supporting AI workloads at scale” as their organisation’s #1 challenge over the next one to two years – higher than any other region. When it came to AI data governance, over half of EMEA organisations indicated that AI data governance requirements will force them to better understand and track data sources, age, and other data qualities. Addressing data security, workload scale, and data visibility/management will be critical tenets of success for EMEA AI initiatives.
  • Infrastructure modernisation and data security are at the forefront of EMEA AI decision-making – not cost. Cost ranked as the third-lowest consideration for EMEA organisations running or planning to run AI workloads. Furthermore, when we asked about the key drivers behind upgrades for AI applications or infrastructure, EMEA respondents once again ranked “cost” as the lowest priority. By contrast, over 90% of EMEA respondents agree that their IT costs and cloud spending will both increase due to AI applications.  EMEA organisations are showing a willingness to spend in support of their AI initiatives, a sentiment which AI solutions/services providers will benefit from.

The report is based on a global research study conducted by Vanson Bourne, on behalf of Nutanix, surveying 650 IT, DevOps, and Platform Engineering decision makers between July and September, 2023. The respondent base spanned multiple industries, business sizes, and the following geographies: the Americas; Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA); and the Asia-Pacific-Japan (APJ) region.

To learn more, read the full Nutanix State of Enterprise AI Report here.

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About Nutanix

Nutanix is a global leader in cloud software, offering organisations a single platform for running apps and data across clouds. With Nutanix, companies can reduce complexity and simplify operations, freeing them to focus on their business outcomes. Building on its legacy as the pioneer of hyperconverged infrastructure, Nutanix is trusted by companies worldwide to power hybrid multicloud environments consistently, simply, and cost-effectively. Learn more at www.nutanix.com or follow us on social media @nutanix.

Business, Cloud Providers, Hyperconvergence, News, Tech, Technology

Nutanix Hybrid Multicloud Platform Recognised as a Leader

Receives Among the Highest Scores in Current Offering Category and Highest in Strategy Category

Nutanix has announced it has been named a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Hyperconverged Infrastructure, Q3 2023, published by Forrester Research, Inc. The report evaluated 11 HCI vendors on Current Offering, Market Presence, and Strategy, and Nutanix was positioned as a leader with the highest possible scores in the vision and innovation criteria. Nutanix also received the highest scores in the storage and data, and support and experience criteria. Nutanix believes these results show the company’s strength in helping organisations build a hybrid multicloud platform to run all apps and data anywhere – whether in the datacentre, in public cloud or at the edge.

“Most organisations are grappling with the messy, accidental multicloud reality of managing applications and data across multiple clouds and on-premises, resulting in operational complexity, increased costs and security risks,” said Thomas Cornely, SVP, Product Management at Nutanix. “Nutanix addresses these challenges with one platform to run applications and data anywhere. To us, this report underscores our leadership in this market and recognises our strong offering and vision to help customers simplify their hybrid multicloud environments.”

The Forrester Wave™ report ranked Nutanix as a leader and states, “Nutanix is known for simplifying infrastructure complexity and is applying that philosophy to hybrid cloud infrastructure as well.” It also notes, “The Nutanix vision focuses on building a hybrid and multicloud platform for business applications, easing adoption of cloud-native architecture.” Additionally, the report notes, “Nutanix puts customers at the heart of its innovation strategy, using its strong community ties to source new features for its roadmap.”

This news comes on the heels of continued strong innovation and momentum from Nutanix, including:

  • The launch of Nutanix GPT-in-a-Box to simplify adoption of generative AI among enterprises. This full-stack software-defined AI-ready platform allows customers to easily procure AI-ready infrastructure to fine-tune and run generative pre-trained transformers (GPT), including LLMs at the edge or in their datacentre, while maintaining control of the data.
  • The global strategic partnership with Cisco® to accelerate hybrid multicloud deployments by offering the industry’s most complete hyperconverged solution for IT modernisation and business transformation. Cisco Compute Hyperconverged with Nutanix delivers best-in-class cloud operations, unparalleled flexibility, and industry-leading customer support and resiliency.
  • Strengthened cyber resilience with accelerated ransomware detection and recovery with new features in Nutanix Data Lens™ and Nutanix Unified Storage™. These new capabilities enable organisations to detect a threat, defend from further damage and begin a 1-click recovery process within 20 minutes of exposure. The features build on the strength of Nutanix Cloud Platform to protect and secure customers’ most sensitive data across clouds.
  • Expanded product capabilities delivered with the AOS 6.7 release. This release expands the hybrid multicloud featureset while enhancing existing capabilities. It includes new enterprise virtualisation features, denser storage configurations with greater storage performance, greater resiliency for deployments in the public cloud, and enhanced hybrid multicloud management.
  • Strong customer momentum including Micron Technology, which selected Nutanix Cloud Platform for its manufacturing facilities globally, and the Department for Work and Pensions, the UK’s largest central government organisation which standardised on Nutanix for their hybrid cloud environment.

 

For a copy of the Forrester Wave™ for Hyperconverged Infrastructure, please visit: here.

Cloud Platforms, Hyperconvergence, News

Nutanix Rolls Out Elevate Partner Program’s Latest Updates and Incentives

New offerings enable partners to stay competitive while pioneering new frontiers in customer efficiency, agility, and experience

Nutanix (NASDAQ: NTNX), a leader in hybrid multicloud computing, today announced updates to its Elevate Partner Program, including offering a revamped incentive structure and channel-led selling motions that empower partners with deal control throughout the sales cycle. These enhancements offer partners new opportunities to grow their business, elevate their skills, and maximise earnings.

“With technology continuing to advance at an extraordinary pace, organisations across every sector are eager to harness the power of digital transformation, data-driven insights, AI, and the cloud,” said Adam Tarbox, Vice President of EMEA Channel Sales at Nutanix. “To support our valued partner ecosystem in meeting this moment, our commitment goes beyond just words. We remain laser focused on placing partners into the driver’s seat of the sales cycle, allowing them to achieve tremendous business growth and satisfied users.”

Enhanced Incentives Framework to Earn More

Nutanix introduced enhancements to the Elevate Partner Program’s incentives and Performance+ Deal Registration Program for FY24. The updated incentive structure includes:

  • Larger Payout for New Business Individual Incentive: Now partner sellers and sales engineers (SEs) can earn a 2% incentive, up to $7,500 per deal, for identifying, registering, and winning new business with Nutanix. This incentive program complements our New Business Rebate for partner reseller organisations, which maintains its lucrative structure from FY23.
  • Increased Discount Advantage for Deal Registration: FY24 brings an enhanced discount advantage to partners who register deals and quote Nutanix simplified product portfolio SKUs (PnP 2.0), as you’ll now see over a 40% greater discount advantage versus non-registered discounting. Registering deals not only provides you with deal protection but can drive even greater profitability for each deal.
  • Performance Bonuses: Top-performing partners will have the opportunity to earn even more through the Outperformance Rebate program.

Channel-Led Selling Motion Brings Empowerment for Full Lifecycle Ownership

Channel-Led selling provides Nutanix partners deal control throughout the sales cycle for customers and prospects in select accounts, placing partners into the driver’s seat of the sales cycle. Specific updates include:

  • A lucrative channel-led selling rebate incentive in the FY24 Elevate Partner Program built to make partner success even more profitable as partners win new deals with these select accounts.
  • Dedicated Channel-Led sales resource centres across the world, purpose-built to support partners on deals with select accounts when needed in any facet of the sales cycle.
  • Robust new enablement pathways launching mid-October in the updated Nutanix University platform to ensure partners have the sales, technical, and services capabilities needed to be successful around hybrid multicloud solutions.

Additionally, helping partners deliver customer success throughout the lifecycle is paramount to achieving business growth. To support this Nutanix is taking proactive steps to empower partners with increased visibility into Annual Team Renewals (ATR) data. By offering partners a comprehensive view of renewal data, Nutanix will enable partners to proactively address issues, to ensure their customers are not only satisfied, but also thriving.

Getting Customers to Hybrid Multicloud Faster

With the Nutanix Cloud Clusters™ (NC2) solution, partners can deliver on the promise of hybrid without expensive retooling or reworking. Starting now, Nutanix delivers the ability to leverage cloud marketplaces as a new route to market, including integrations with both the Microsoft Azure® and AWS® marketplaces. Most importantly, partners receive the same discount advantages as they would through traditional transaction avenues. Partners can now take advantage of seamless transactions and reduced sales cycles with their customers using programs such as the AWS Channel-Partner-Private Offer (CPPO) and Azure Multiparty Private Offers (MPO) where available.

Learn more about the Elevate Partner Program here.

Appointments, Cloud Platforms, Hyperconvergence, News, Technology

Nutanix Promotes Paulo Pereira to Vice President of EMEA Presales

Nutanix, a leader in hybrid multicloud computing, today announced that Paulo Pereira joins the worldwide leadership team as Vice President, EMEA Presales. 

Paulo joined Nutanix in 2016, where he hit the ground running as a Systems Engineering (SE) Manager for the Middle East. With his dedication and strategic approach, he quickly moved into managing EMEA Emerging Markets, where he has been leading with distinction for the last 5 years. Before Nutanix, Paulo spent 16 years at Cisco, working in diverse roles across Portugal, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE.

Commenting on the appointment, Mike Phelan, SVP Global Solution Sales at Nutanix says, “Paulo’s passion for work, and life, shine through in his leadership style.  Those who have worked closely with Paulo remark on his ability to simultaneously inspire, challenge and mentor others through change. He is deeply analytical, thoughtful, a straight shooter, and someone who doesn’t shy away from a challenge.  I couldn’t be more excited about what he will accomplish in this new leadership role at Nutanix.”

“I am truly honoured to lead Nutanix’s EMEA pre-sales team, at an exciting time when digital transformation is the need of the hour, cloud computing and AI are imperatives and no longer a luxury. In the cloud space, Nutanix is at the forefront of innovation – solving the very toughest challenges that plague organisations as they try to wrap their minds around the complexities of hybrid cloud. We understand that enterprises have unique requirements and are at different stages of the cloud adoption cycle, and our job is to identify and match technology opportunities with customers’ business issues and objectives. I’m looking forward to progressing the great work that’s currently underway and excited to move Nutanix’s business to the next level across the region,” concludes Paulo Pereira.

Cloud Providers, Hyperconvergence, News

Micron Selects Nutanix Cloud Platform for Its Manufacturing Facilities Globally

Nutanix, a leader in hybrid multicloud computing, today announced that Micron Technology, an industry leader in innovative memory and storage solutions, selected Nutanix to build a cloud platform for Micron’s manufacturing facilities globally. The Nutanix Cloud Platform will enable Micron to optimise its infrastructure resources, efficiently operationalise new cloud-ready applications, dramatically reduce costs, and pivot quickly as new opportunities to adjust workloads between private and non-private cloud environments emerge.

Nutanix offers a secure, resilient and scalable technology stack that supports modern application development, the most data-intensive workloads and hybrid multicloud flexibility.

“We are proud to have provided Micron with a solution that they expect will meaningfully reduce their cost, while also enabling enhanced agility in deploying new products and responding to changing market demands,” said Rajiv Ramaswami, President and CEO of Nutanix. “We see this win as a testament to the performance, scalability and total cost of ownership benefits delivered by our platform, and our ability to expand our footprint within some of the world’s largest companies.”

“Nutanix enables Micron to build on our established industry leadership in technology and innovation by powering the cloud platform in our manufacturing facilities,” said Anand Bahl, Chief Information Officer at Micron. “Nutanix’s secure, resilient, and scalable cloud platform allows us to modernise our manufacturing environment and move away from traditional compute and storage.”

The Nutanix Cloud Platform provides a consistent cloud operating model with a single platform for running applications and data across hybrid multicloud endpoints. Nutanix delivers resilience with self-healing nodes, persistent storage natively integrated to best support modern application deployments, performance and capacity scale linearly. Additionally, the Nutanix Cloud Platform can help deliver cost efficiencies by eliminating unused compute and storage resources.

AI, Hyperconvergence, News, Technology

Nutanix Simplifies Adoption of Generative AI with New Nutanix GPT-in-a-Box Solution

AI infrastructure solution accelerates customers’ path to GPT and LLMs while keeping organisations in control of their data

Nutanix has today announced the Nutanix GPT-in-a-Box™ solution for customers looking to jump-start their artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) innovation, while maintaining control over their data. The new offering, available today, is a full-stack software-defined AI-ready platform, along with services to help organisations size and configure hardware and software infrastructure suitable to deploy a curated set of large language models (LLMs) using the leading open source AI and MLOps frameworks on the Nutanix Cloud Platform™. It allows customers to easily procure AI-ready infrastructure to fine-tune and run generative pre-trained transformers (GPT), including LLMs at the edge or in their datacenter.

Many enterprises are grappling with how to quickly, efficiently and securely take advantage of the power of generative AI and AI/ML applications, especially for use cases that cannot be run in the public cloud because of data sovereignty, governance and privacy concerns. New use cases emerge every day as organisations look to leverage generative AI to improve customer service, developer productivity, operational efficiency and more. From automated transcription of internal documents, to high speed search of multimedia contents, and automated analysis, many organisations see the opportunity with AI but are struggling with growing concerns regarding intellectual property leakage, compliance and privacy. Additionally, organisations looking to build an AI-ready stack often struggle with how to best support ML administrators and data scientists, while the prospect of large AI investment costs has enterprises stalled in their AI and ML strategy.

“As customers look to design and deploy generative AI solutions, they find themselves struggling with balancing the deep expertise required to install, configure, and run these workloads with concerns around their data security and protecting company IP – all while controlling costs,” said Greg Macatee, Senior Research Analyst, Infrastructure Systems, Platforms and Technologies Group at IDC. “With GPT-in-a-Box, Nutanix offers customers a turnkey, easy-to-use solution for their AI use cases, offering enterprises struggling with generative AI adoption an easier on-ramp to deployment.”

The Nutanix GPT-in-a-Box solution delivers ready-to-use customer-controlled AI infrastructure for the edge or the core data centre and allows customers to run and fine-tune AI and GPT models while maintaining control over their data. Nutanix provides a full complement of security and data protection offerings ideal for AI data protection.

Thomas Cornely, SVP, Product Management at Nutanix

“Helping customers tackle the biggest challenges they face in IT is at the core of what we do, from managing increasing multicloud complexity, to data protection challenges, and now adoption of generative AI solutions while keeping control over data privacy and compliance,” said Thomas Cornely, SVP, Product Management at Nutanix. “Nutanix GPT-in-a-Box is an opinionated AI-ready stack that aims to solve the key challenges with generative AI adoption and help jump-start AI innovation.”

This new solution includes:

  • The Industry-leading Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure™platform, with the Nutanix Files Storage™and Objects Storage™ solutions, the Nutanix AHV® hypervisor and Kubernetes, along with NVIDIA GPU acceleration, which can be sized for large to small scale.
  • Nutanix services to help customers size their cluster and deploy an opinionated stack with the leading open source deep learning and MLOps frameworks, inference server, and a curated set of large language models such as Llama2, Falcon and MPT.
  • Ability for data scientists and ML administrators to immediately consume these models with their choice of applications, enhanced terminal UI, or standard CLI.
  • The platform can also be leveraged to run other GPT models, as well as fine tune these models leveraging internal data, hosted on included Nutanix Files or Objects Storage services.

“Leveraging AI to more efficiently and effectively help our customers is a top priority for us but, as a regulated financial services organisation, maintaining full control over our data is necessary,” said Jon Cosson, CISO at JM Finn. “The Nutanix Cloud Platform delivers the performance, flexibility and security required to safely deploy AI workloads.”

The Nutanix GPT-In-a-Box solution builds on the full stack scalability, performance, resilience and ease of use that the Nutanix Cloud Platform is known for. Nutanix’s expertise with scalable infrastructure across public cloud, datacenter and edge use cases delivers the ideal environment to fine-tune and run AI applications while maintaining control over the data. In fact, in a recent survey, 78% of Nutanix customers indicated that they were likely to run their AI/ML workloads on the Nutanix Cloud Platform.

Nutanix’s expertise and involvement in the open source AI community provide customers with a strong foundation on which to build their AI strategy. Key contributions include: participation in the MLCommons (AI standards) advisory board; co-founding and technical leadership in defining the ML Storage Benchmarks and Medicine Benchmarks; serving as a co-chair of the Kubeflow (MLOps) Training and AutoML working groups at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

The Nutanix GPT-in-a-Box solution is available to customers today.

 

Cloud Platforms, Hyperconvergence, News

Financial Industry Ranks Second in Most Hybrid Multicloud Deployments

Nutanix, a leader in hybrid multicloud computing, has today announced the financial services industry findings of its fifth annual Enterprise Cloud Index (ECI) survey, which measures enterprise progress with cloud adoption. 

The research reveals that mixed deployments among financial companies are at 64%, which is slightly ahead of the global average, and data security considerations drive many of the financial sector’s infrastructure investment and application mobility decisions. This remarkable adoption rate in financialservices reflects the highly competitive industry’s commitment to significantly enhance the customer experience, leveraging hybrid multicloud deployments to fuel digitalisation, advanced data capabilities, and modernise applications.

“Increased infrastructure diversity and a heightened emphasis on data storage, management, security, and cloud-native services are driving all IT professionals to seek hybrid operations that transcend private and public infrastructure. As evidenced by recent regulatory measures such as the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA), operational resilience and concentration risk are additional driving factors to hybrid model adoption,” said Ian Haynes, EMEA Field CTO, Nutanix. “For cloud deployment models, the financialservices industry has emerged as a frontrunner, surpassing many other sectors in embracing the hybrid multicloud approach.”

Key findings from this year’s report include:

  • Hybrid multicloud adoption has accelerated and is expected to rise infinancial  The financial services industry has made significant progress in adopting cloud technology over the past year, with 64% of those surveyed using multiple IT environments – whether a mix of private and public clouds, multiple public clouds, or on-premises and hosted private infrastructure.
  • Cybersecurity is the biggest IT infrastructure driver.The financial sector and global respondents prioritised cybersecurity above all else. This is not surprising, given the increasing sophistication of cyberattacks and the critical role that IT plays in financial services organisations.
  • Mixed environments create new challenges and demand for a single place to manage all workloads and data.Most ECI respondents agree that having a single platform to manage their diverse private and public infrastructures would be ideal. Among those from financial firms, 96% agreed. However, only 42% reported actually having that visibility. The visibility findings indicate a gap in capabilities, highlighting the need for integrated tools to improve hybrid IT operations. Without visibility, IT teams are unable to manage, secure, synchronise, or analyse what they cannot see.
  • The overriding driver of application movement among ECIfinancial services firms in the past year was to improve data access speeds. All respondents in the financial sector (100%) indicated that they had moved applications between IT infrastructures in the past 12 months. Nearly half (49%) cited a desire to accelerate data access as a reason for the move. This driver was followed by aspirations to improve their companies’ security posture or better meet regulatory requirements and to gain the ability to integrate with cloud-native services, such as AI and machine learning.
  • Cost factors remain a wild card. ECI respondents tend to be fickle in their attitudes toward IT cost, which seems to be inching downward on IT priority lists – falling to last on global respondents’ infrastructure criteria lists and tying for fourth in importance amongfinancial At the same time, most respondents rank controlling costs high on their list of challenges. For example, 87% of financial services respondents described cloud cost control as a challenge with managing their current IT infrastructures, and about a third said it was a significant one.

For the fifth consecutive year, Vanson Bourne conducted research on behalf of Nutanix, surveying 1,450 IT decision-makers around the world in December 2022 and January 2023. This report is supplemental to the global 5th Annual Enterprise Cloud Index master report and focuses specifically on cloud deployments within the financial services industry. It sheds light on the cloud plans, priorities, challenges, and experiences of IT professionals operating in this sector, offering valuable insights for comparison with global responses and other industries. Gain a deeper understanding of the cloud deployment journey of financialservices organisations and uncover key trends and benchmarks in this ever-evolving landscape.

To learn more about the report and findings, please download the full fifth Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Index, here.

Cloud Providers, Hyperconvergence, News

Nutanix Unifies Data Services Across Hybrid Multicloud Environments

Company announces data services for Kubernetes and cross-cloud data mobility 

Nutanix has today announced new capabilities in the Nutanix Cloud Platform to enable customers to integrate data management of containerised and virtualised applications on-premises, on public cloud, and at the edge. This includes comprehensive data services for Kubernetes applications as well as cross-cloud data mobility.

According to IDC, by 2025 there will be 750 million new logical applications, more than the past 40 years of computing, all generating large amounts of data across clouds*. This means it will be paramount for organisations to integrate management of data for both containerised and virtualised applications as well as across multiple environments.

“According to the Enterprise Cloud Index, nearly all enterprises have started using Kubernetes for their containerised applications. Now IT teams need to find a way to both enable their developers with self-service data services, while also ensuring governance and security policies are applied uniformly,” said Thomas Cornely, SVP, Product Management at Nutanix. “With Nutanix Data Services for Kubernetes, the Nutanix Cloud Platform will extend storage provisioning, snapshots, and disaster recovery operations to Kubernetes applications to help accelerate containerised application development in the enterprise.”

Data Services for Kubernetes

Currently, developers and administrators are faced with gaps and complexity for stateful Kubernetes®applications, necessitating multiple third-party tools or complex DIY projects to solve for the application and namespace layers. Announced today, Nutanix Data Services for Kubernetes™ (NDK) will give customers control over cloud-native apps and data at scale.

Initially delivered as part of Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), NDK will bring the full power of Nutanix’s enterprise class storage, snapshots and disaster recovery to Kubernetes. This will help accelerate containerisaed application development for stateful workloads by introducing storage provisioning, snapshots, and disaster recovery operations to Kubernetes pods and application namespaces. 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. NDK is also designed for use with Red Hat OpenShift.

“Application modernisation is a key aspect of our digital transformation journey to continually deliver a better experience for our customers,” says Yongju Jo, Chief Manager, IDC Business Dept, Shinsegae. “We believe Nutanix Data Services for Kubernetes has a big potential to deliver simplified enterprise-grade storage provisioning, snapshots, and disaster recovery for our Kubernetes deployments.”

Cross-Cloud Data Mobility

Nutanix also introduced the Multicloud Snapshot Technology™ (MST) capability to deliver cross-cloud data mobility. MST will extend Nutanix hybrid multicloud data services by enabling snapshots directly to cloud native object stores, starting with the AWS S3™ object storage service. This will unlock hybrid multicloud data protection, recovery, and mobility use cases, such as the ability to seamlessly protect and migrate stateful Kubernetes applications and data across cloud infrastructures with NDK leveraging this technology.

MST will enable several use cases including disaster recovery and backup for both containerised and virtualised applications, the ability to create a snapshot and instantly recover it anywhere, cross-cloud data migration, the ability to share data for workflows like test/dev, long-term retention for compliance and more. This will also help many customers manage costs of their primary infrastructure enabling them to easily store snapshots in a less expensive storage medium, and just as easily recover them, across any infrastructure 一 private or public cloud.

In addition to these new capabilities, the Nutanix Objects Storage™ solution now integrates with Snowflake, the Data Cloud company, to allow organisations to leverageuse the Snowflake Data Cloud to analyse data directly on Nutanix Objects. This ensures ensuring data stays local, accelerates time to value, and delivers faster insights. Additionally, a single  namepsace in Nutanix Objects simplifies access to globally distributed data.

NDK and MST are under development. The Nutanix ObjectsStorage and Snowflake integration is currently available to customers. More information is available here.

Hyperconvergence, Networks, Technology

Exploring Hyperconverged Infrastructure: Benefits, Functionality, Use Cases

A few years ago, cloud storage was the new trend for organizations. Organizations started migrating their data and workloads to the cloud for various reasons.

Companies have understood that the cloud does not solve their needs, from data security to complex operations, increased costs, to fragmented infrastructure. But instead of returning to traditional data centers, they choose something in between — the hyper-converged solution.

For all that the cloud doesn’t offer, Hyper-converged solutions prove to be the solution. But what is HCI? What are its advantages and use cases? Well, we will discuss that in this comprehensive guide on Hyper-converged infrastructures.

What Is Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI)?

An all-in-one system, HCI Hyper-converged infrastructure is a software-defined solution that integrates computing, storage, and networking resources. Incorporating all aspects into a single system increases scalability and flexibility. Thus, simplifying management and reducing operational costs.

Put simply, think of HCI as multiple physical servers — each with its memory, storage, networking resources, and CPU — but all are aggregated into a single cluster.

Since HCI eliminates the need for having separate management and hardware components, aspects like provisioning, scaling data, and security is enhanced. Additionally, since everything is clustered, it is easier for organizations to deploy and manage the Hyper-converged solutions. Furthermore, organizations can integrate HCI solutions into cloud or multi-cloud environments while ensuring seamless data mobility and workload portability.

Benefits of Using Hyper-Converged Infrastructure

From performance, scalability, and flexibility to manageability, the HCI system has many benefits for the IT infrastructure. Here are some of the benefits of deploying HCI solutions:

1.     Simplified Management.

With the HCI system, all the software and hardware components are integrated into a single cluster. This allows organizations to deploy and configure the systems quickly. By eliminating the management process of traditional infrastructure, where IT teams had to work on every aspect separately, HCI systems reduce the risk of errors and allow for faster troubleshooting.

2.     Organizations can Scale Up or Scale down Storage by Adding/removing nodes.

Organizations with HCI infrastructure can quickly scale up or down by removing or adding nodes. What’s exceptional is that whenever organizations have to add or remove nodes, they can do that without downtime or configuration. This ensures that all the business processes can continue even during scaling up or scaling down the storage resources. This is particularly suitable for organizations that see seasonal spikes in traffic and user demands.

3.     HCI Has Proved to Improved Organizational Performance and productivity.

Most HCI vendors leverage modern storage technologies like SSDs and non-volatile memory express, ensuring that storage performance is always the best and enabling organizations to utilize their resources to their full extent. Whether application response time or load balancing — the overall performance increases by adopting hyper-converged solutions.

4.     Results in Increased Resiliency.

Almost all HCI vendors have built-in data protection and recovery systems, allowing data replication and backup. So, unlike traditional infrastructure, businesses can always retain their data even when software or hardware fails. Additionally, even when such an event occurs, organizations can recover the data quickly. And return the operations to normal conditions. Furthermore, businesses do not have to spend additional data resources to create silos.

5.     HCI Offers Flexibility.

Cloud storage solutions seemed the next normal. However, soon businesses found that it is not suitable for all workloads. For instance, it became difficult for organizations with cloud solutions to integrate with their systems. But that’s not a concern with Hyper-converged systems; it allows organizations to integrate with cloud and multi-cloud environments, as well as it supports all workloads — like virtual desktops, databases, and so on.

6.     Operational costs Are low.

Hyper-converged infrastructure is a unified system. This means there isn’t a need for big IT teams. Additionally, the unified software allows IT teams to manage the system effectively from one control panel — thus, the total cost of ownership comes down significantly. But there are also long-term benefits of deploying HCI solutions. For instance, Hyper-converged infrastructures are designed to reduce power and consolidate the entire infrastructure into fewer devices — thus, reducing the total cost over time.

7.     Procurement is simple.

Since all the components are unified in HCI solutions, it is simple for organizations to deploy the tool. They do not have to look for different components — and integrate them in-house.

 

Top Use Cases: How Hyper-Converged Infrastructure is Used in the Real World?

Now that you know the benefits of HCI solutions, it is also essential to learn HCI solutions are adopted and used in the real world. Here are the top use cases of HCI solutions:

1.     Virtual Desktop Infrastructure.

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure requires computing, memory, and networking resources all in one place for better performance. And that is why organizations that deploy VDIs use hyper-converged infrastructure.

2.     Private Cloud.

Many companies looking for private cloud alternatives opt for HCI solutions, given it gives the same flexibility and is a scalable and flexible solution for hosting applications and services.

3.     Remote Offices.

Once again, the Hyper-converged solutions offer scalability a flexibility. Importantly, they are unified and can host a variety of applications and services. All these make Hyper-converged solutions a suitable system for meeting the requirement of the Remote office or Branch Office (ROBO). The primary reason Remote Office/Branch Office use Hyper-converged infrastructure is their ability to be deployed and managed remotely.

4.     Disaster Recovery.

Another primary reason many organizations are opting for hyper-converged infrastructure is they are resilient and come up with cutting-edge data security measures. For instance, they create data backup and also duplicate data. So, if there is ever a disruption, organizations can reassess the data quickly while halting the organizational processes.

 

Conclusion,

Integrating the storage, computing, and networking resources — Hyper-converged infrastructure reduces operational costs and avoids complex processes. Not to mention, it becomes simple for IT teams to manage the HCI solutions as they can manage it from a single location. As indicated, they are also several benefits of HCI solutions. From simplified management to improved performance, scalability as per need to flexibility as per workload — the operational benefits of using HCI solutions are just too many.

All in all, if your organization is looking to transform its data centers — and looking for agility, hyper-converged solutions are the way to go!

Data, Hyperconvergence, Networks, News, Technology

Nutanix Study Shows Data Management Becoming More Complex as Cloud Deployments Diversify

Nutanix, a leader in hybrid multicloud computing, announced the findings of its fifth global Enterprise Cloud Index (here) survey and research report, which measures enterprise progress with cloud adoption. This year’s ECI showed that IT infrastructure is increasingly diverse with organisations challenged with integrating data management and control. The research showed that the majority of IT teams leverage more than one IT infrastructure – a trend that’s expected to intensify in the future – but struggle with visibility of data across environments with only 40% reporting complete visibility into where their data resides.

“In the coming years, there will be hundreds of millions of applications created, which will generate unprecedented amounts of data,” said Lee Caswell, SVP, Product and Solutions Marketing at Nutanix. “Organisations are grappling with current application and data management across the edge, different clouds and in the core. What this year’s ECI shows and what we’re hearing from customers is that there’s a need in the market for a cloud operating model to help build, operate, use, and govern a hybrid multicloud to support all types of applications – starting today and planning for tomorrow.”

In the past five years of conducting the ECI, respondents’ attitudes have drastically shifted toward the use of multiple IT environments. In 2018, well over half of respondents said they envisioned running all workloads exclusively in either a private cloud or the public cloud one day. Rather than working to consolidate on a particular infrastructure or IT operating model, as seemed desirable in 2018, most enterprises now see the inevitability, and even benefits, of running workloads across public cloud, on-premises and at the edge.

The goal for organisations now is to make this hybrid operating model more efficient, especially when managing IT environments across the edge to the core. The growing level of diversity in cloud deployments creates enormous complexity in managing application’s data across cloud environments. Comprehensive tools that allow organisations to provision, move, manage, monitor, and secure applications and data from a single console in a uniform manner is a growing priority for IT. Nearly all respondents say they’d benefit from having a single, unified control plane to manage applications and data across diverse environments.

Key findings from this year’s report include:

  • Most organisations use more than one type of IT infrastructure, and nearly all agree that having a single platform to manage them all consistently would be ideal. The majority (60%) of IT teams leverage more than one IT infrastructure, whether it is a mix of private and public clouds, multiple public clouds, or an on-premises datacentre along with a hosted datacentre. That number is expected to grow to nearly three quarters (74%) in the near future. However, this leads to challenges and 94% say they’d benefit from having a single place to manage applications and data across diverse environments.
  • Data security and management considerations drive IT infrastructure choices. Data is driving infrastructure decisions for enterprises, with data security, protection and recovery, and sovereignty topping the list of key drivers. However, visibility is a growing challenge. While 94% of respondents agree that having full visibility is important, only 40% of ECI respondents report having complete visibility into where their data resides.
  • Cloud cost control ranks as a top IT management challenge. Among respondents, 85% consider cloud cost a challenging IT management issue, and more than a third (34%) rank it a “significant” challenge. Specifically, application migration across clouds is currently a pain point for organisations with 86% of respondents agreeing that moving applications among environments can be complex and costly. Additionally, nearly half of respondents (46%) plan to repatriate some applications to on-premises datacentres to mitigate cloud costs in the year ahead.
  • Nearly all respondents (96%) have begun using open-source Kubernetes orchestration. But they cite designing and configuring the underlying infrastructure, storage, and database services as among the top challenges they continue to face with their Kubernetes deployments.
  • Sustainability is now an IT priority. Nearly all (92%) respondents agree that sustainability is more important to their organisation than it was a year ago. This shift in priorities is primarily driven by corporate Environment, Social and Governance (ESG) initiatives (63%), supply chain disruptions (59%), and customers’ purchasing decisions (48%).

For the fifth consecutive year, Vanson Bourne conducted research on behalf of Nutanix, surveying 1,450 IT decision-makers around the world in December 2022 and January 2023. The respondent base spanned multiple industries, business sizes, and the following geographies: the Americas; Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA); and the Asia Pacific Japan (APJ) region.

To learn more about the report and findings, please download the full fifth Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Index, here.