Over the last few years the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS has evolved greatly, and has been adopted by 7000+ customers. Two things have become evident:
- Customers value an infrastructure stack that embeds a hypervisor, offering an experience similar to the public cloud. We reported that in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2017, 24% of the nodes were deployed with AHV, based on a rolling four quarter average. This shows a strong interest in an alternative to traditional enterprise virtualization solutions.
- Continuous innovation at the storage level that incorporates, always-on compression, intelligent dedupe that leverages map-reduce algorithms, erasure coding with EC-X combined with ever increasing drive capacity sizes has helped customers optimize capacity and rarely saturate their storage tiers. These insights come from our built-in Pulse HD diagnostic tool and its anonymized call-home cluster utilization metrics.
We observed the onset of applications that adopted microservices-based architectures built for greater agility and scale. To truly unlock cloud-like efficiencies, these applications needed to be able to use just the right amount of capacity, while allowing application teams to add more as needed.
Addressing the Need for Additional Resources
Our native virtualization tool, AHV, combined with the use of X-fit machine intelligence in Prism, provides capacity projection and workload based what-if analysis to ensure optimal utilization, avoid capacity constraint surprises, and recommend configurations for expansion. Nutanix is all about options and choice! We support multiple combinations of CPU, RAM, and storage types (hybrid, all flash) that allow for variations in compute and storage capacity. Yet, there were scenarios where application growth (e.g. Citrix XenDesktop or XenApp, Cloudera etc) or new applications would require additional resources, but primarily in one dimension.
For storage, the problem is solved with our ‘storage heavy’ configurations, which supports flexible scaling of storage resources – without compute – in up to 60TB increments. We could also do ‘compute heavy’ configurations using the highest core count Intel CPUs, but those nodes would always have some measure of storage.
Introducing Nutanix Acropolis Compute Cloud (AC2)
What if there was a way to add exclusively compute-only resources to the Nutanix clusters, and there was no change in the operational experience? This is what we are announcing with Nutanix Acropolis Compute Cloud (AC2), compute-only expansions of Nutanix clusters.
AC2 allows Nutanix customers to drive infrastructure utilization by expanding compute capacity independent of storage. Providing flexible compute ‘services,’ expands application workload support, including demanding big data and machine learning applications.
The “1-click” Experience
AC2 makes it easy to expand compute capacity by using Prism’s “1-click” operations, providing immediate access to the full breadth of infrastructure and storage services (ADFS, Acropolis Block Services, Acropolis File Services, etc.) offered by the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS. All of the benefits of AHV-based virtualization are available, with nothing to configure:
- Always-on high-availability
- Automatic CPU compatibility
- Live migration, and resource contention resolution (for compute and storage) via Acropolis Dynamic Scheduling (ADS).
AC2 compute services expands the range of supported use cases, as Nutanix continues its journey to provide an operating system for multi-cloud management, with simple one-click operations that help IT deliver any application from any cloud.
Product Availability
AC2 is currently under development. Pricing details will be announced closer to the applicable release dates.
Interested in even more information on our new AC2 offering? Take a look at our press release.
Forward-Looking Statements Disclaimer
This blog includes forward-looking statements, including but not limited to statements concerning our plans and expectations relating to product features and technology that are under development or in process and capabilities of such product features and technology, our plans to introduce product features in future releases, product performance, competitive position and potential market opportunities. These forward-looking statements are not historical facts, and instead are based on our current expectations, estimates, opinions and beliefs. The accuracy of such forward-looking statements depends upon future events, and involves risks, uncertainties and other factors beyond our control that may cause these statements to be inaccurate and cause our actual results, performance or achievements to differ materially and adversely from those anticipated or implied by such statements, including, among others: failure to develop, or unexpected difficulties or delays in developing, new product features or technology on a timely or cost-effective basis; delays in or lack of customer or market acceptance of our new product features or technology; the introduction, or acceleration of adoption of, competing solutions, including public cloud infrastructure; a shift in industry or competitive dynamics or customer demand; and other risks detailed in our Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended July 31, 2017, filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. These forward-looking statements speak only as of the date of this presentation and, except as required by law, we assume no obligation to update forward-looking statements to reflect actual results or subsequent events or circumstances.
© 2017 Nutanix, Inc. All rights reserved. Nutanix, AHV, Acropolis Compute Cloud, and the Nutanix logo are registered trademarks or trademarks of Nutanix, Inc. in the United States and other countries. All other brand names mentioned herein are for identification purposes only and may be the trademarks of their respective holder(s).