Nutanix: The Platform for the Next 10 Years

When we announced in January that D2iQ had joined forces with Nutanix to deliver a complete Kubernetes® management platform, we made it clear that Nutanix is serious about ensuring that our customers have the tools they need to adapt to the changing landscape of app deployment.

And when we announced the Nutanix Kubernetes Platform (NKP) solution at our .NEXT conference in Barcelona in May, customers began to realize exactly how Nutanix is simplifying the deployment of modern, containerized applications.

This month, as we ship the first version of NKP, our customers will have every piece in place to set themselves up for success with containers, VMs and data services over the next 10 years.

There are two major transitions happening simultaneously in enterprise applications – both well underway and showing momentum for the foreseeable future.

The first transition is the move from siloed on-premises and public cloud infrastructure toward integrated hybrid multicloud deployments. What began as a cloud-first mindset has become more nuanced as customers re-evaluate the optimal location of apps and data across performance, cost and data sovereignty metrics.

Cloud continues to grow by nearly every measure, with even the Big 3 vendors continuing to grow at over 20% a year, even while other vendors like Oracle Cloud, Alibaba and Salesforce are establishing themselves as major forces to be reckoned with.

However, even as that growth continues, we are seeing many enterprises expand datacenters and even look to repatriate workloads from the cloud to the datacenter to control costs, optimize performance and protect private data. This transition to distributed hybrid cloud is consequently leading to dramatic growth in edge computing environments.

All of this points to the fact that, for the foreseeable future, enterprises will be dealing with a distributed deployment landscape that will benefit from a common operating model across all cloud, datacenter and edge deployments.

The second transition is the move from traditional virtualized applications toward containerized applications. Kubernetes celebrated its 10th anniversary this year, and all signs point to it being the dominant platform for modern application deployment.

It doesn’t matter which analyst you listen to, they all point to steady increases in Kubernetes adoption – some even predicting that there will be more workloads running in Kubernetes than in VMs by the end of this decade. 

And yet, virtualized workloads aren’t going away and in many cases containers run in VMs to bring the benefits of resilient infrastructure to the agility of containerized applications.    

Where does this leave enterprise IT? It means that for the next decade, they’ll have a tall task. They’ll be expected to support traditional virtualized applications, legacy containerized apps and new cloud native applications across private datacenters, cloud resources and even infrastructure at the edge. At the same time, they’ll be dealing with a diverse set of workloads to deploy across that infrastructure, some of which is modernized and containerized and some of which continue to run in VMs.

Simple solution for a complex landscape

This is where Nutanix can help. Our product portfolio now includes tools like the Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) platform that lets you manage clusters in the cloud exactly as you manage clusters in the datacenter. This gives you one operating model for VM-based workloads across on-premises and public cloud.

Adding those virtualization tools and the container-based tooling in NKP, you get a very powerful set of technologies that ensure customers are able to have a consistent operating environment wherever they need one – whether it’s in the cloud, in the datacenter or at the edge.

A consistent environment delivers true portability, which means that teams can place workloads where they need to be. They can optimize for data locality or they can optimize for cost. They can keep precious data on-premises where it needs to be but use the cloud for rapid expansion. Or maybe they’ll just use the cloud for disaster recovery. They can start AI development projects in the cloud, where there is quick access to GPUs, but run models on proprietary data on-premises.

Natively cloud native

Adding the Nutanix Kubernetes Platform to our product lineup ensures that Nutanix customers are ready for the transition to modern, cloud native applications. NKP builds on the years of maturity of the D2iQ Kubernetes Platform.

With this release of NKP 2.12, NKP fully supports the Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) software, adding critical features like autoscaling, automated provisioning, load balancing, RBAC and SSO integration, and more. And NKP will continue to support other environments where customers have been using it for years – on all three major clouds, on VMware VSphere and on bare metal. 

Powerful fleet management capabilities will give platform engineering teams the ability to keep clusters healthy and consistent no matter where they are running.

Integrating Nutanix data services with NKP is a key differentiator

The Nutanix industry-leading storage tier AOS software stack underpins all of the company’s virtualization and container management products. When designing a distributed deployment environment – whether it is multiple clusters on-premises, a hybrid deployment, a multicloud deployment, or even an edge deployment – the data elements inevitably represent a distributed storage environment. 

Nutanix now offers offers common snapshot, replication and disaster recovery data services for containers and VMs across edge, datacenter and public cloud.

When designing a distributed computing environment, it’s often a challenge to manage the storage that underpins it. Nutanix has spent 15 years delivering data services for enterprise applications as well as companion products, starting with Nutanix AOS and extending up the stack with products such as our Nutanix Data Services for Kubernetes, Nutanix Database Service and Container Storage Interface products. Collectively, they ensure that the capabilities inherent in AOS and the Nutanix Unified Storage solution – including performance, efficiency, resilience, and security – are useful for cloud native applications and traditional applications alike.

Future-proof

With its complete set of technologies for virtualized and containerized applications, the Nutanix Cloud Platform solution is ready for everything you need to deploy today…and in the future.

Ready for action

To learn more about about NKP: https://www.nutanix.com/products/kubernetes-management-platform

About Nutanix

Nutanix is a global leader in cloud software, offering organizations a single platform for running apps and data across clouds. With Nutanix, organizations can reduce complexity and simplify operations, freeing them to focus on their business outcomes. Building on its legacy as the pioneer of HCI, Nutanix is trusted by companies worldwide to power hybrid multicloud environments consistently, simply, and cost-effectively. Learn more www.nutanix.com or follow us on social media @nutanix.

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