Nutanix Adds 3 New Parts to Its Multicloud Data Platform
Nutanix, which two years ago with Red Hat launched Nutanix Cloud Platform, its open multicloud data management platform, revealed several substantial additions to that product at its .NEXT 2023 Conference in Chicago.
The Nutanix Cloud Platform enables enterprises to build, scale and manage cloud native applications on-premises and in hybrid cloud environments. It serves as the core platform for all Nutanix users that provides a unified environment for virtualized workloads, containers and bare-metal applications across private, public and hybrid clouds. NCP is built on Nutanix’s hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), which combines storage, compute and virtualization into a single appliance.
The new additions announced on May 9 are:
- Nutanix Central
- Data Services for Kubernetes
- Project Beacon, a group of data-centric platforms as a service (PaaS) level services
Nutanix Central
Nutanix Central is a cloud-delivered software package that serves as a single console for visibility, monitoring and management across all IT environments: public cloud, on-premises, hosted or edge infrastructure. This aims to extend the universal cloud operating model of the Nutanix Cloud Platform to break down silos and simplify the management of apps and data anywhere, Nutanix SVP of Product and Solutions Marketing Lee Caswell told a group of reporters.
“Central is a service management model to manage federated endpoints,” Caswell said. “So from an observability and manageability standpoint, this now allows us to consolidate different clusters, if you will, across the hybrid multicloud environment. Nutanix Central then becomes our mechanism for how we go and help customers with a single pane of glass across all of these endpoints.”
From the Nutanix Central dashboard, customers will access domain and cluster-level metrics, including capacity utilization and alert summary statistics, to get a quick overview of the state of each domain, Caswell said. This functionality will also provide seamless navigation to individual domains, based on individual user role-based access control (RBAC), across all domains registered, he said.
Nutanix Central also will support multidomain use cases, including federated identity and access management (IAM), global projects and categories, and global fleet management, Caswell said. This all enables IT teams to deliver self-service infrastructure at scale while remaining in control of governance and security, he said.
Data Services for Kubernetes
Nutanix Data Services for Kubernetes is designed to give users control over cloud native apps and data at scale, Thomas Cornely, SVP of Product Management at Nutanix, said in a media advisory.
Initially conceived as part of Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure, NDK brings management of Nutanix’s enterprise-class storage, snapshots and disaster recovery to Kubernetes. This helps accelerate containerized application development for stateful workloads by introducing storage provisioning, snapshots and disaster recovery operations to Kubernetes pods and application namespaces, Cornely said.
NDK will give Kubernetes developers self-service capabilities to manage storage and data services, while also enabling IT with visibility and governance over consumption, Cornely said.
Project Beacon
Project Beacon is a multiyear Nutanix initiative designed to deliver a portfolio of data-centric platform as a service (PaaS) level services available natively anywhere — including on Nutanix or on a native public cloud. With a goal of decoupling the application and its data from the underlying infrastructure, Project Beacon aims to enable developers to build applications once and run them anywhere. Sort of the original aim of Java 30 years ago — long before the cloud and the edge.
“What Project Beacon does is it says, ‘We’re gonna move beyond the infrastructure we control today,'” Caswell said. “You can take portable licenses and move them from an AI-enabled edge to the multidata site to a data center and into our cloud partners.
“The issue there though, is that that’s about running our full stack. Now, what we’re saying is we’re going to go and expand into hyper-scalar infrastructure that’s running its own compute and storage constructs. And that’s very interesting because what Project Beacon then says is, ‘We’re going to show this NDB (network database) as a service — the basis of all modern and performance applications,” Caswell said.
Caswell said Nutanix did databases first with Project Beacon to show that “now we can take our database-as-a-service offering and allow that to go and run directly on AWS, without requiring the customer-controlled advertising. That’s a very interesting way to start thinking about our intent over time.”
All three of the platform additions will become available for users later this year, Nutanix said.
Nutanix’s .NEXT 2023 Conference continues through May 10.