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Elevating hybrid cloud for AI, databases and general-purpose workloads at Microsoft Ignite

November 18, 2024 | min

Hybrid clouds are gaining popularity and maturity as organizations juggle workloads with different performance, governance and efficiency requirements. At Nutanix, we’ve long held the view that most organizations will require both on-premises and public cloud presence.

As a result, Nutanix has invested in building a platform that provides the best way to create a unified hybrid cloud architecture. At Microsoft Ignite, we're excited to share best practices for running hybrid workloads and simplifying your hybrid cloud deployments.

AI: The workload everyone’s talking about

AI in general, and AI inferencing in particular, is most often a hybrid workload. There are many reasons to run AI in a hybrid fashion. 

  • Inference testing in the cloud, inferencing at the edge: Organizations typically leverage the scalability and cost-effectiveness of the cloud for training AI models, while deploying those models at the edge for low-latency inferencing. Because training occurs in the public cloud, very often inference testing will be in the public cloud, even if actual production inference happens elsewhere.

  • Data sensitivity and compliance: Organizations can choose to run AI workloads that handle sensitive data, such as personally identifiable information, on-premises to meet regulatory requirements while running other AI applications in the public cloud.

  • Global presence and data sovereignty: Organizations can leverage public cloud infrastructure in specific geographic locations to meet data sovereignty requirements or establish a presence in regions where maintaining a physical datacenter is not feasible.

We recently announced the extension of our Nutanix Enterprise AI (NAI) offering to the public cloud. In Azure, NAI runs and operates completely on Azure Kubernetes Service. NAI provides an easy-to-start infrastructure platform for your AI workloads with built-in security and data privacy, as well a choice of foundation models from an extensive catalog, across 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. This also helps consolidate the skill sets required for your GenAI efforts across on-premises and cloud deployments while removing the complexity, operational and testing overhead of running hybrid inference in multiple environments.

Databases: The No. 1 mission-critical workload

Databases are often subject to the same data sensitivity and compliance considerations as AI workloads. Organizations may choose to run databases containing sensitive data on-premises while running less-sensitive databases in the public cloud. Hybrid cloud also provides flexibility during database migrations, allowing organizations to maintain a consistent operating model across on-premises and cloud environments.

The Nutanix Cloud Platform (NCP) solution provides seamless mobility for databases. With the Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) solution running on NCP, organizations can run databases in Azure and on-premises using the same tools, processes and skill sets. 

We recently announced an extension of the Nutanix Database Service (NDB) database management solution to Azure. Managing large database estates is challenging and it becomes even more complex in hybrid cloud environments. NDB enables seamless management of large database estates spread over multiple database engines, cloud locations and on premises in a uniform manner.

Organizations can supercharge database provisioning, copy data management, best practices implementation, database security, backups and restores, and much more. At the same time, developers are equipped with self-service capabilities for their database needs while you retain full control over database configuration, versioning and integration with other systems.

General-purpose workloads: Everything else

We’re also continuing to innovate on NC2, which makes it easy to migrate apps and data while helping to unify your hybrid cloud operations.

Recent enhancements to NC2 on Azure include automated self-service configuration of user-defined routing (UDR) to enable custom routing between NC2 and their network virtual appliances for traffic inspection. We’re also adding Azure regions to expand the availability of NC2, including the UAE region and India Central region. 

Our customers consistently praise the simplicity and flexibility that Nutanix brings to their hybrid cloud deployments. NC2 and other Nutanix offerings are available in the Azure marketplace here and can be used to reduce existing Azure spend commitments.

NC2 is supported on pay-as-you-go as well as reserved instance bare-metal nodes. Whether it's end-user computing, mixed workloads or other mission-critical applications, Nutanix Cloud Platform provides a unified and consistent experience across on-premises and public cloud environments.

See us at Microsoft Ignite in Booth 407.

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