.NEXT 2018

.NEXT 2018: Xtract & X-Ray Updates

May 9, 2018

At .NEXT 2018 Nutanix announced some big updates to their overall vision, but none are bigger than some of the below (for me, specifically). In particular, one of them gets me EXTREMELY excited!

Nutanix Xtract:

Introduced seven months ago for application migrations. Xtract has been used by hundreds of customers, over 12,000 migrations with mixes of small, medium, and large sizes with a significant portion being used for critical workloads in production. These migrations have happened across many different applications and operating environments spanning both Windows and Linux. That’s an update on where we have come from, so here is a look at where we are going…

Continuing with the theme of freedom of movement and application (or data) mobility you can expect to see this tool extended to enable public cloud migrations (meaning from AWS to AHV, see above), which will reduce the public cloud dependency. Of course, all of this being done with the 1-click simplicity that we just cant let go of… Why would we?

X-Ray:

Next we have updates to the infrastructure testing tool introduced last year by the name of X-Ray… and this is where things get fun so I am going back to the bullet points to paint the picture!

Chaos Monkey for the enterprise cloud
Support for ESXi, HyperV, and AHV
Test Scenarios: Infrastructure Performance, Application Performance, Data Protection, Infrastructure Resiliancy, and Infrastructure Scalability
Platforms: Simplivity, HyperFlex, vSAN (& VxRail), Storage Space Direct (New), Nutanix
Last but not least: IT IS GOING OPEN SOURCE!!!!!!

X-Ray going Open Source is HUGE for the HCI community as testing distributed systems is quite different than your traditional stack, and it seems to cause quite a bit of needless bickering. No one trusts anyone else in anything they are testing (even if all settings are made public). Hopefully this tool being made Open Source will allow people to inspect the code, trust the code, and use the code in order for us to get some solid standardized testing going on that we so desperately need. Thank you Nutanix!

Good show boys. Until .NEXT year! 😉

Cheers!

Russ

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.NEXT 2018

.NEXT 2018: Nutanix Beam

May 9, 2018

Continuing with my coverage of .NEXT 2018… (I guess you could call this part 3?)

The saga continues on our journey to the “Enterprise Cloud”. We have discussed the original Nutanix offering having its final piece added in SDN to complete the HCI picture of Storage, Compute, and Networking. Then we moved into Era, where we focus on PaaS and one-click application delivery and life-cycle management. You can find the previous two posts here: Flow & Era

Now it is time for the very first Nutanix introduction to SaaS, which is enabled by the most recent acquisition (March 2018) of Botmetric. If you remember Nutanix Calm, then you will see some tie-in’s with what they are going for with Beam.

The acquisition was made in order to improve and expand on the multi-cloud story that was started at .NEXT last year. Beam compliments the strategy with Calm quite well as it expands heavily on cost optimization and visibility inside of the public cloud today (AWS & Azure today, GCP coming later).

The offering is delivered as SaaS (if that wasn’t obvious) and will continue the 1-click trend that is so tightly woven into the Nutanix identity. The ability to visualize the resource utilization across clouds is huge for business’ that are trying to chase the ever elusive multi-cloud strategy. Next up we will see not only comparisons with AWS, Azure, and GCP, but also with on-premise Nutanix Enterprise Cloud as well!

Let’s discuss what Beam (Formerly Botmetric) has already achieved in the market. They track over $1B in cloud spend as it stands TODAY, and are the highest rated CMP (Cloud Management Platform) on the AWS marketplace today. They also are servicing some impressive customers, but I am unsure if those are fair game so I am leaving the names off for now. I can’t deny that I feel this was a fantastic move by the leadership at Nutanix.

I will wrap this one with a quick bullet point list of what to expect from Beam both now and in the future:

Centralized budgeting for multiple cost centers
Policy based controls with intelligent alerting
Proactive recommendations
Confidence score based ROI projections
AOS/Calm integration (with a single dashboard) target for the 2H of 2018
GCP support in 1H of 2019

So there you have it! Flow completes the Nutanix Infrastructure, Era expands into the realm of PaaS, and Beam takes us to new heights with Nutanix’s first ever SaaS based offering. Pretty solid flow there fellas!

Cheers!

Russ

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.NEXT 2018

.NEXT 2018: Nutanix Era

May 9, 2018

Continuing with my coverage of .NEXT 2018…

This piece is a follow up to my previous post focused on Nutanix bringing software defined networking into the fold alongside their well establish software defined compute and storage offerings. You can find the previous post here.

Nutanix Era inches us higher up the stack into what Nutanix is considering their expansion into the PaaS arena. The idea? Databases made simple!

Era at its highest level is a provisioning and life-cycle manager with a focus out of the gate on databases and copy data management. The solution requires a CDM VM appliance (visualization below) that connects to the source databases and creates a “time machine” for that DB enabling any point and time backup and restore up to the most recent transaction.

In this scenario the DB admin is still in control and able to define the snapshot policies, which when restored will “replay” the snapshot and logs (combined together) as a clone to that specific point and time. Oh, and did you notice that the primary DB does NOT need to be on Nutanix? If your seeing a trend in mobility here just hold onto that thought 😉

The 1.0 release of Era brings support for Oracle and Postgress SQL with 1 click provisioning, 1 click in place backup & restore, clone, and refresh. The ultimate vision for Era to be able copy any database, at any point in time, to any infrastructure, or any cloud.

We are talking AWS, GCP Azure, Oracle, on or off the Nutanix platform. Efficient, Elegant, and Secure!

Next we will climb higher one final time into the world of SaaS with Nutanix Beam.

Cheers!

Russ

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.NEXT 2018

.NEXT 2018: Nutanix Flow

May 9, 2018

Nutanix .NEXT 2018 is in full swing in NOLA, and I am here right in the middle of all the action (so forgive for any formatting issues, I will correct/improve them over time)!

Starting in 2009 Nutanix took convergence to the next level by eliminating SAN based architecture and reunited compute and storage resources together in a single distributed package. Today we know this as HCI or Hyper-Converged Infrastructure.

That was then…

Today, Nutanix continues the quest towards software defining the entire stack on their journey towards “The Enterprise Cloud”. We saw the next logical step in this last year at .NEXT when they announced they would be moving into the SDN (Software Defined Networking) space by adding native, built-in microsegmentation to the Acropolis Hypervisor. That piece of the vision went GA in v5.6 recently.

Introducing microsegmentation is definitely the most common use case that my customers embrace SDN technologies to take advantage of, so it makes sense for Nutanix to tackle that piece first. Microsegmentation on it’s own does not complete the picture though…

Enter, Nutanix Flow.

The announcement this week of Nutanix Flow expands on the native SDN functions build into the Nutanix platform today by adding powerful visualization and policy based networking capabilities such as service chain network functions (APM, Load Balancers, vFirewall), in addition to the already implemented microsegmenation feature. The solution is designed to be an intuitive and an easily scalable solution with no additional tools needed. Naturally this is all built around the 1-click simplicity design paradigm so many of you are familiar with today.

Similar to other SDN techniques, Nutanix is using internal firewalls inside of the VM’s to control east-west traffic while augmenting (not replacing) the external perimeter firewalls. They continue to focus on the key use cases just like they have done with other technologies in the past. This is not a drop in replacement for NSX, so if you need things like overlay, VPN, NAT, etc… then stay clear (for now). This is much more about the implementation, and management through an intuitive interface than it is the firewall itself. Firewalls on their own are quite boring… So what makes this special?

Flow is built into AHV and is designed around managing “Categories”. These Categories are defined as logical groups of VM’s or Applications. The administrator then maps security policies to the categories (not on the VM’s). The AHV host OVS enforces the rules, which are logically enforced at the VM (vNIC) level. As a cherry on top, we do not care about the underlying network at all. There are no requirements or restrictions around it!

Lastly, I can’t forget to mention Netsil (a recent acquisition) as when combining those capabilities with Flow we gain even deeper visibility into the infrastructure with network based application discovery, mapping, and performance monitoring. This piece is less about security, and more about assisting in root cause analysis. The initial target for release is set for the second half of 2018, with long term plans of integrating this outside of the Nutanix platform and gaining the same visibility across the public clouds!

Nutanix has finally added the final piece to the puzzle and completed what they consider to be the IaaS portion of their offering with comprehensive visibility, security, and automation at the network level in the form of Flow.

Next, its time to move higher up the stack to PaaS with Nutanix Era.

Cheers!

Russ

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