Nutanix updates its vision for hybrid and multi-cloud

Project Beacon is about develop once, run anywhere, HCI vendor says

Nutanix revealed on Tuesday its latest vision of how organisations can manage data services, applications, storage and recovery across environments, be they in the data centre, at the edge or on public clouds.

It also announced some new services on the road to that goal.

The first of those is Nutanix Central, a centralised cloud-based control service that works anywhere that Nutanix software can run and also natively in the two biggest public clouds AWS and Azure. The idea, said Lee Caswell, SVP product and solutions marketing at Nutanix on a press call, is that "you have an identical management model for Azure, for AWS, and for on prem."

To achieve this, data and application services that are part of the Nutanix stack are being more platform-agnostic, allowing them to be moved wholly or partially between environments according to requirements.

Caswell also mentioned two new elements. Users of Nutanix data services can now specify VMs optimised for storage, compute or both, allowing organisations to cater for unpredicable demand; and there are new data services for Kubernetes (initially Red Hat OpenShift).

From now, data and application services will run natively on AWS and Azure, rather than requiring the Nutanix hypervisor to be hosted on those services first. This will be extended to other major public cloud provider at a later date, said Carswell.

In combination, managed via Nutanix Central, these developments will make it easier for customers to move data services between diverse endpoints and avoid getting locked into any one vendor, Caswell claimed.

Another development is multi-cloud snapshot technology, which will enable application and data recovery to whichever environment the user chooses, rather than being restricted to that on which the application is currently running.

"The idea is you can take snapshots off of your primary storage, put them directly into a lower cost object store and then recover them wherever Nutanix runs," Caswell said.

The company also announced new integrations with Snowflake's cloud data warehouse, allowing queries initiated by Snowflake to apply to object storage running on Nutanix across the multi- and hybrid-cloud environment.

These developments are part of a newly announced multi-year plan called Project Beacon, which aims to "enable developers to build applications once and run them anywhere," through service decoupling, portable licencing, developer self-service, and built-in security and governance for cloud operations teams.

Data services are the first to be decoupled from Nutanix cloud services, because databases are ubiquitous, but Carswell said the company is keen to learn which other services customers want to split off to be managed and deployed separately as PaaS. Future options could include caching, messaging and search.

Nutanix began life as a supplier of appliances that virtualised compute, network and storage and offered it in one box. Later it dropped the hardware element and offered its software for use in other vendor's boxes, and later still on the public cloud. Now, said Carswell, presenting the new developments as a natural evolution, it is decoupling its services from its own stack so they can run where they are best suited.

"This relaxes the constraint that you have to be using our hypervisor, which we think for customers extends the reach and the relevance of Nutanix from thousands of customers to potentially millions of cloud users. That's the impact of what we're talking about over the next two to three years."

Nevertheless, Carswell was careful to use the caveat "over time." Certain factors mean that environments cannot be abstracted away, and cloud vendors still hold many of the cards. Project Beacon is not about automatically shifting workloads to new environments or instant failover between clouds - the holy grail of the multi-cloud paradigm. Rather, its aim is to reduce the friction and cost of planned migrations.

"We're not solving for the egress charges of the cloud. I do have to say that," he said. "We don't control the egress charges."