Nutanix (NASDAQ: NTNX), a leader in enterprise cloud computing, today announced general availability of Nutanix Clusters on AWS, extending the flexibility and ease of use of the company’s hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) software, along with all Nutanix products and services, to bare metal Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances on Amazon Web Services (AWS). With this announcement, Nutanix delivers hybrid cloud infrastructure— one that allows businesses to accelerate their digital initiatives and optimize spending, priorities further amplified in the age of COVID. Nutanixoffers a single stack that integrates compute and storage, provides unified operations across private and public clouds, integrated networking with AWS, and license portability from private to public clouds, thus addressing key technical and operational challenges of the hybrid cloud era.
According to Gartner, by 2021, 90% of organizations will have deployed a multi cloud or hybrid cloud model for their IT needs. Companies require the flexibility of multiple clouds while they continue to struggle with the complexity, operational silos, and costs of managing private and public clouds. A unified solution that provides a consistent experience, tooling, and operational practices across clouds will allow companies to break down silos and reduce inefficiencies while enabling the advantage of flexibility to choose the right cloud for each workload.
With this announcement, Nutanix extends the simplicity and ease of use of its software to public cloud. This eliminates the cost and management complexity of hybrid environments and enables seamless mobility across private and public clouds without any rearchitecting of the apps due to built-in networking integration with AWS. Customers now have the flexibility to choose the right cloud environment for each application with the added benefit of license portability across clouds, which has a direct impact on cost and resource optimization.
Additionally, customers will be able to take advantage of the company’s full software stack on private and public cloud. This includes unstructured storage solutions Files, application orchestration solution Calm, database administration and automation solution Era, and more.
“We are excited to support an extension of a customer’s private cloud environment into AWS with the launch of Clusters on AWS. This provides customers the flexibility to get the most out of both their AWS and Nutanix environments,” said Doug Yeum, Head of Worldwide Channels and Alliances at Amazon Web Services, Inc. “Customers now have an opportunity to take advantage of Nutanix Clusters on AWS to deploy adjacent to their cloud-native applications in AWS and fast track their digital transformation.”
Key features in Nutanix Clusters include:
- Apps and Data Mobility: Nutanix Clusters solves a significant pain point for enterprises on their cloud journey by providing a seamless way to move legacy apps and data to the cloud. It enables mobility without needing to re-architect apps, something that can be extremely costly and time consuming.
- Streamlined Operations with Unified Cloud Environment: Nutanix Clusters allows customers to create, manage, and orchestrate their infrastructure, as well as their applications, across private and public clouds, all through a single interface. Unlike competitive solutions that only offer siloed cloud management, Nutanix Clusters extends this to private and public cloud. This single stack removes the need for a separate team to manage each environment, or the re-skilling of teams, and also enables seamless app mobility across clouds.
- Built-In Networking Integration with AWS: Thanks to built-in integration with the AWS networking layer, Nutanix Clusters delivers benefits in terms of ease of deployment and performance. The networking integration also allows customers to use their existing AWS accounts, including unused credits, virtual private clouds, and subnets. This enables a truly unified management plane across private and public cloud, and hugely simplifies the customer experience of managing a hybrid cloud environment.
- Cloud Cost Optimization: In addition to addressing key technical and operational challenges with hybrid cloud environments, Clusters can provide significant cost savings to customers. This is achieved by removing the need for different teams to manage each cloud environment, eliminating the need for costly migrations for legacy applications, and providing a way to easily hibernate public cloud clusters with just one-click to help eliminate waste. Additionally, available portable licenses, flexible payment models, and increased visibility in cloud spend, through Xi Beam, allow businesses to optimize their cloud investments and truly choose the right cloud for each workload, without lock-in.
- Freedom of Choice: Nutanix Clusters on AWS gives customers the choice to either reuse existing on-premises hardware or AWS credits when building out a hybrid environment. In addition, customers can also choose to bring the on-premises licenses or select a pay-as-you-go or Cloud Commit models.
Based on extensive research with customers, key use cases for Nutanix Clusters include:
- Lift and Shift: Customers looking to move applications to the cloud, or consolidate their data centers, can simply “lift and shift” them without any change. Clusters eliminates the need to re-architect applications, resulting in very significant cost and time savings to customers. Additionally, Nutanix Move provides application mobility between non-Nutanix solutions and Clusters to further simplify the process.
- On-Demand Elasticity: Now customers can quickly scale capacity or expand to different regions in minutes by bursting into public clouds to support seasonal demands, changing priorities, and more. This is especially beneficial when speed is of the essence and adding capacity is a lengthy process, like expanding VDI resources.
- Business Continuity: Customers can now leverage AWS for high availability and disaster recovery without adding complexity arising from managing cloud environments or a stand-alone disaster recovery solution.
- Cloud Native Services: Customers can use cloud-native services with existing on-premises applications without expensive re-architecting. This results in easily modernizing existing applications by taking advantage of cloud native services like artificial intelligence, machine learning, analytics, and more to advance customers’ digital initiatives.
“On behalf of our customers, we have always worked to make IT so simple that it’s invisible,” said Tarkan Maner, Chief Commercial Officer at Nutanix. “As the industry evolved, our focus has expanded beyond the datacenter to help our customers manage the complexity ofmultiple clouds, whether private or public. Nutanix Clusters on AWS is the realization of this vision. This enables complete flexibility by allowing businesses to write code once and use it anywhere, taking advantage of scale, location, integration, and pricing of multiple options – this is the true vision of hybrid cloud.”
Nutanix customers shared:
“At Penn National Insurance, we were looking for a new solution to support our VDI workloads to ensure business continuity if our primary datacenter suffers from a disaster event. Nutanix Clusters allows us to easily create a hybrid and multicloud environment spanning our Nutanix data center and AWS, so that we can very rapidly burst capacity in AWS when we need to quickly restore our workloads from a backup,” said Craig Wiley, Senior Infrastructure Systems Architect at Penn National Insurance. “On top of the flexibility that this solution provides, the ability to use our existing AWS networking setup made the Nutanix Clusters deployment very easy while delivering the expected performance. Now, we know we can expand VDI capacity with one-click and hibernate our hybrid cloud workloads when not in use, so we only pay for the capacity we need.”
“The Australian Bureau of Statistics is Australia’s national statistical agency, responsible for, among other things, the Australian Census. The Census is Australia’s largest peacetime logistical operation, and the increased IT demand needed to support this Census project is one of the main reasons we looked at hybrid cloud platforms. They provide the flexibility and agility needed to adapt to significant spikes in demand,” said Julian Doak, CISO at the Australian Bureau of Statistics. “We were already Nutanix customers, running our VDI and analytical workloads in our datacenter, and also use AWS. A single cloud solution to manage multiple clouds will make it easier to scale our IT needs. Nutanix Clusters provides a seamless way to burst capacity into public clouds to increase our VDI workloads when needed to support Census activities, while knowing all our apps will just work – without needing to repackage or rearchitect them.”
Nutanix Clusters on AWS is currently available to customers in 20 AWS Regions. In addition to being able to easily use their existing portable Nutanix licenses, customers will be able to choose between Cloud Commit and pay-as-you-go models. To learn more about Nutanix Clusters on AWS, its use cases, or to Test Drive it, visit here.
