Accelerate Hybrid Cloud: Simple, Scalable and Secure Data Services on AWS

Today’s enterprises must build their IT infrastructure to adapt quickly and efficiently as demands change. A key aspect of this adaptability is application mobility – the ability to move applications across the hybrid cloud to meet dynamic demands, simplify operations and reduce costs.

However, application mobility raises important questions about how data moves with those applications. Having versatile storage options and data services enables organizations to seamlessly manage their data alongside their apps, regardless of platform.

Nutanix offers flexible storage and data services across on-premises datacenters, edge and AWS cloud so that customers can seamlessly run workloads, improve data security and assist with meeting compliance requirements while retaining the adaptability customers need.

Nutanix and AWS recently signed a strategic collaboration agreement to simplify hybrid cloud adoption. We’re also innovating together on the product front with ground-breaking data and storage innovations that will provide customers with flexibility, cost-efficiency and security as well as purpose-built infrastructure solutions to run AI workloads.

Independently Scale Storage on AWS for your NC2 Workloads

In March 2024, we announced AWS Elastic Block Store (EBS) attached support for the Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) solution. This enables customers to provide scalable second-tier storage capabilities for their NC2 deployments.

EBS storage can be added to NC2 on AWS in the form of EBS volumes that appear as one storage pool. This provides a way to rightsize the NC2 cluster in terms of compute and to use EBS to handle any additional storage needs.

Starting early 2025, customers will be able to add EBS storage to both existing and new NC2 clusters regardless of whether they were initially configured with EBS attached storage. This provides flexibility to scale storage independently of compute and without the confines of available bare-metal instance types.

Cost-Effective Disaster Recovery and Data Protection

We also recently announced the Nutanix Multicloud Snapshot Technology (MST) capability, which enables customers to replicate their less critical snapshots to S3-compliant object storage. This unlocks flexible data mobility and optimizes TCO for their disaster recovery (DR) solution.

We’re now announcing the next version of MST, which goes beyond the previously announced pilot-light deployment option. This new version provides a zero-compute solution that doesn't require a pilot light in NC2 and enables customers to stream production snapshots from on-premises clusters to AWS S3.

If a DR event occurs, customers will be able to bring up a new secondary cluster on demand using NC2 in AWS and recover snapshots from S3 to the cluster. This new capability could dramatically reduce DR costs and bring implementing DR within the reach of organizations who would otherwise rely on tedious, error-prone manual backup and recovery processes.

With these additional storage options on AWS, organizations will be able to implement a cost-effective, tiered storage and DR strategy where:

• Primary storage on AWS bare-metal is leveraged for high-performance workloads and snapshots for mission-critical workload.
• EBS storage is used for secondary storage capacity.
• Lower-cost S3 storage is leveraged for workloads that are tolerant of higher recovery time objectives (RTOs).

From a DR perspective, snapshots residing across all three of these AWS storage types would then be usable  to perform recovery anywhere that the Nutanix Cloud Platform (NCP) solution runs – on-premises, at the edge and in AWS. The single unified platform from Nutanix will provide exceptional operational simplicity by utilizing the same protection policies and recovery plans across all of these substrates, all managed through the same interface.

Unstructured Data Solutions for Hybrid Cloud, Cloud Native and GenAI

The Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) solution enables customers to consolidate block, file and object data into a single unified data management platform. With the new cloud-native enhancement we are announcing today, NUS will operate natively on AWS EC2 and utilize EBS and S3 storage. This provides an alternative method for obtaining enterprise-grade scale-out file services on AWS.

NUS in AWS supports rich enterprise file sharing features, such as multiprotocol NFS/SMB data access, space-efficient snapshots, hybrid cloud data replication, WORM compliance, data governance, and ransomware protection.

Additionally, NUS now offers high-performance file sharing with a wide variety of EC2 instances, scalability with up to 32 EC2 instances in a single cluster, cost efficiency through dynamic provisioning of EBS volumes, and automatic S3 tiering and data compression. This solution helps customers efficiently and cost-effectively manage hybrid cloud use-cases such as cloud DR, cloud bursting (e.g., machine learning and data analytics) and cloud-native applications.

Furthermore, the NUS Objects Storage service now offers single namespace access to object data that is geographically distributed across multiple NUS object stores on-premises and in AWS S3. With NUS hybrid cloud object data replication and global namespace, customers can easily move and replicate object data from on-premises NUS object data stores to AWS S3 while maintaining a single point of access to the data, regardless of the data’s location.

This is particularly beneficial for distributed workloads, like big data analytics and IoT, where data collected at the edge and from various geographically distributed locations needs to be moved to the cloud for archiving or further processing. Customers get a seamless and efficient way to move data while maintaining visibility at all times.

Cyber Resilience for Data Stored in Amazon S3

The Nutanix Data Lens  SaaS-based cyber storage solution offers ransomware resilience capabilities and global data visibility for unstructured data on the NUS software platform. Nutanix Data Lens has expanded its auditing and scanning capabilities to support data stored natively on Amazon S3. This provides a couple of vital new capabilities:

• Allows organizations to scan and audit data tiered to Amazon S3 and reduces vulnerabilities from unauthorized access.
• Provides granular data visibility for improved risk analysis and minimizes the risk of data compromise.

For NUS customers utilizing Amazon S3 for hybrid cloud storage and Amazon S3 customers considering Nutanix, this enhancement delivers unified visibility, analytics, security, and auditing across on-premises and cloud data.

It also provides a seamless chain of events and analytics continuity, even after data is tiered from NUS Files into Amazon S3 buckets. This enhances operational efficiencies in data management while providing a much-needed additional line of defense against threats.

Simplified AI infrastructure across the Hybrid Cloud

In November 2024, we announced the extension of our Nutanix Enterprise AI (NAI) offering to the public cloud. In AWS, NAI runs and operates completely on the Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS).

NAI provides an easy-to-start infrastructure platform for AI workloads enabling organizations to leverage their models and data in a secure location of their choice, including different types of clouds and on-premises locations. This ensures you have a uniform environment for running inference – regardless of the underlying infrastructure – with consistent operational, resiliency, security, and privacy constructs.

In Summary

The integration of Nutanix with AWS offers a range of solutions for a unified hybrid cloud experience. These solutions provide flexible data mobility, optimized TCO, enhanced security, and simplified management across on-premises and AWS environments. They address key enterprise needs for DR, data protection, unstructured data, cyber resilience, and efficient utilization of resources in a hybrid cloud world.

Visit Nutanix in Booth 147 at AWS Re:Invent.

Learn more about Nutanix on our website or take the Nutanix Cloud Platform on AWS for a free test drive.

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