Rajiv Ramaswami’s Nutanix stays the course. freedom of choice and simplicity are once again central themes. all innovations contribute to Nutanix’s ambition to give organizations freedom in where they run workloads. The hybrid multicloud is slowly but surely shedding its complexity.
How refreshing: ai is not a central theme at Nutanix’s .next conference. This time, the company heads to Washington D.C., where on the convention center stage, it sets aside the vision of neighbor Trump and advocates for openness and simple migration. At least: when it comes to workloads. Nutanix wants you to be able to run everything everywhere, on-premises, with AWS in the US, in a colocation data center, or with Google in the EU: moving is possible and allowed.
At .Next in 2023, Nutanix announced the ambitious Project Beacon.W ith this long-term project, the company aims to allow customers to run applications anywhere by making platform functionality universally available.
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Furthermore, Nutanix is actively working on breaking down the walls of the hybrid multicloud in a traditional way. Nutanix envisions a future where applications can run anywhere, without needing to tinker with the underlying infrastructure.
Universal Platform
This is not self-evident. “The higher you are on the stack, the harder it is to offer freedom of choice,” Induprakas Keri clarifies. “Moving storage is relatively simple. For a platform, things become much more complex.”
However, Nutanix wants to offer a uniform platform to the end customer, allowing them to run an application just as easily on-premises as in Azure or GCP. “This means that storage, security, and networking need to work in the same way,” Keri explains. “To achieve this, we need to work very closely with the providers. We have developed our offering together with Microsoft and deeply integrated it into Azure’s control layer, and last year we started a similar collaboration with Google.”
Free Migration
Microsoft Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud are Major Sponsors at .Next, and That’s No Surprise. Nutanix Brings Workload Mobility, Which Not Only Implies That Users Can Migrate Their Applications Back from the Cloud, but Also That They are Able to Move to the Cloud When it’s Beneficial.
“Migrating apps is difficult,” Keri adds. “The real opportunity for many is the ability to migrate to the cloud with Nutanix.”
Refactored for Cloud Native
The big announcement for .Next this year is Cloud Native AOS. “All applications you run need storage,” says CEO Rajiv Ramaswami. “That’s why we’ve completely reworked AOS to run cloud-native, everywhere.”
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“Rebuilding applications to convert them from a VM architecture to containers is usually not interesting,” explains Dan Ciruli, Cloud Native Product Leader at Nutanix. “It takes years, and when you’ve broken down a monolithic app and distributed it across microservices, the functionality remains the same. There’s usually no business case for that. For AOS, there was.”
“AOS is the core of Nutanix,” Ciruli continues. “By reworking the storage platform into a cloud-native architecture, we’ve made the product future-proof.” Cloud Native AOS allows customers to move containers between different cloud providers and regions, and on-premises infrastructure, while keeping the data layer available.
Project Beacon in Action
The launch fits well with the introduction of the Nutanix Kubernetes Platform at .Next 2024. With NKP, Nutanix has brought together a set of open-source technologies into a bundle that it controls itself, allowing customers to centrally manage containers across the entire hybrid multicloud environment.
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NKP and cloud native AOS are two very concrete examples of what Project Beacon means, and how Nutanix effectively wants to ensure that you can run everything everywhere.
Bare Metal and AI
Everywhere, which in the case of AOS also means on bare metal servers. “The need for this is not very great,” Ramaswami himself indicates, “but there are applications where it is very relevant.” He then refers to AI. Keri clarifies. “AI is an interesting problem that changes the expectations for infrastructure. You need to get data to the GPU fast enough to saturate it. We’ve been lucky in that regard: our architecture is extremely well-suited to accomplish that task.”
This is how AI still gets its moment in the spotlight. Nutanix works (how could it be otherwise) together with Nvidia and integrates their Enterprise AI suite into its own offering. This allows customers to create agents and, according to Nutanix’s promise, run them where they want: close to the data. This is much more efficient than pumping all data from edge locations to the cloud, they say.
Feature Parity
Kubernetes, Cloud Native AOS, AI: Nutanix is ready for the future, but is also winning hearts in the present. Broadcom is not on the list of sponsors, but since the acquisition of VMware in 2023, it has been responsible for the necessary migrations to Nutanix.
Lee Caswell, Senior Vice President for Solutions Marketing: “Previously, customers came to Nutanix when it was time to renew their hardware. Now they come based on their Broadcom license cycle.” On the sidelines of the conference, Nutanix is therefore organizing a panel where various customers share their migration stories.
Now customers come to us based on their Broadcom license cycle
Lee Caswell, Senior Vice President Solutions Marketing
They do this without demonizing the other party too much, but there is consensus on one thing. Even those who don’t necessarily want something new, but mainly don’t want to give up existing functionality, are in the right place with Nutanix. None of the customers have given up functionality since migrating from VMware. “I even think the functionality in terms of security is better,” says Mike Taylor of the U.S. Navy, where he is in charge of IT for the hospital ships Mercy and Comfort.
“Some things might be in a different place,” he says. “But all capabilities are there. Moreover, we need fewer racks.”
Nothing New
Furthermore, at .Next 2025, Nutanix mainly shows nothing new on the big keynote screen, and does so several times in a row. NC2 (Nutanix Cloud Clusters) now also runs on Google Cloud, for example, and during a demo, it looks exactly the same as on AWS or Azure. We also see how Nutanix Central will become available on-premises from autumn, and this too is visually unimpressive.
Next, we see the deployment of a Kubernetes cluster on a Dell Powerflex server, and then on Pure Storage hardware. Powerflex compatibility has been generally available since the event, and the collaboration with Pure Storage was just announced. During this demo too, the oohs and ahs from the audience remain absent.
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Thomas Cornely, Senior Vice President Product Management, proudly summarizes: “There’s nothing new to show, because everything is still just as it was.” That’s the core of the whole story: run what you want, where you want, in one environment. At .Next, the compatibility of that environment has grown again, but the complexity for the end user doesn’t grow with it.
“Management at scale is not simple,” Ramaswami summarizes on stage. “But we bring everything together and make it simple. The solutions are just as simple in the cloud and on-premises, because they are the same product.”
“Every year we take steps in Project Beacon,” he summarizes. “And we bring you more and more capabilities.” Nutanix has a clear goal, and closely follows the path towards it. Cornely concludes: “Two years ago we announced things, last year we delivered them and promised new ones. We delivered those this year. There is momentum.”