2018 .NEXT Conference Recap and Product Highlights from Nutanix
A week ago, Nutanix held the fourth .NEXT conference in New Orleans. What started as a small gathering of a few hundred people in Miami, has grown to about 5,800 attendees from all corners of the world. The exponential growth of the conference reflects the popularity of the Nutanix platform. The Nutanix platform resonates well because it dramatically simplifies IT infrastructure management and provides significant capabilities that were out of reach of many organizations. In a nutshell—it changes how technology is deployed and gives the ability to run applications how you want them. It’s like Burger King’s slogan ‘Have it Your Way’ but for computing and technology.
Several of us from Edge Solutions attended the conference. While learning and connecting with our peers was a big focus, we were honored to have David Able, Edge Solutions COO/CTO and Managing Partner, obtain a NCSX. The NCSX, or Nutanix Certified Sales Expert, is a special certification held by only a handful of people around the world and reflects a deep expertise in the Nutanix platform.
There were many announcements from Nutanix at the .NEXT Conference. Here are some of the notable items:
Beam
SaaS providing optimization of Nutanix resources (Oct. 2018) and public cloud resources (AWS, Azure) from a security, cost, and governance perspective. An integrated part of Prism, Beam brings cloud costing, governance, planning, and security into a single pane of glass; uncovering real cost expectations for the convenience of public cloud. With Beam you can easily understand how your resources are being consumed and have the data to determine where they should run.
Flow
Simplifies network and policy management, Flow is fully integrated into and can be seamlessly accessed from Prism. This software defined networking solution provides capabilities such as microsegmentation, automation of network configuration based on policies, and other events and enhanced visibility of network performance of applications.
Calm
Calm gives the ability to create templates for provisioning applications. The templates can be ran as code to build out application environments in an automated fashion across a variety of destinations including AHV, vSphere, AWS, and GCP. Using Calm templates can let your organization leverage an ‘App Store’-like experience for your enterprise.
Era
PaaS providing ability to automate deployment and management of databases. Era includes features such as Time Machine and DB-clone, which allow for multiple copies of databases to be created from any point in time, with the ease of using your DVR. The technology automates the copy process as well as all of the database specific functions to make the data available for use.
Enhanced Storage Capabilities
Added NFS v4 support to AFS (Acropolis File Services) as well as support for Object Storage (S3, HTTP/REST). These features extend Nutanix’s storage capabilities to allow for more opportunities for consolidation as well as addressing new application use cases.
AIX Support
Nutanix has partnered with IBM on a series of systems built on top of the IBM Power architecture. Nutanix runs on Prism/AHV providing VMs that can run Linux and AIX Unix. This is especially interesting for scale-out environments or those running applications under AIX looking for operational optimization and enhanced capabilities provided by Nutanix.
Xi Cloud
Through Xi Cloud, Nutanix is making the most complex items of disaster recovery simple: networking. Without fail, all traditional application owners want the names and IP addresses to stay the same. Xi Cloud enhances Nutanix by adding a built-in disaster recovery service, allowing you to simulate recovery plans around your protection goals, application dependencies, etc. Additionally, it extends your network via VPN to Xi, which is running on GCP. As you create your recovery plan you can customize the networking, recovery order, and many other details. It can dramatically simplify your DR plan.
.NEXT Final Thoughts
Nutanix\’s vision is very ambitious and exciting: A simple to use, flexible hybrid-cloud compute solution. Providing you the ability to dynamically relocate workloads between your data centers and public cloud based on your application\’s performance, budget goals, and more. We are excited to work with our clients on how these technologies can truly transform how they approach technology within their businesses and the new capabilities it can provide them.
See you .NEXT year in Anaheim, California, 2019!