In recent years, Nutanix grew into a provider of a veritable platform, but it lacked a bit of overview because of its many products and solutions. The hyperconverged specialist is now restructuring its offering based on five pillars.
Nutanix restructures its Cloud Platform based on five solutions. The company evolved in recent years from a niche player in HCI to provider of a total platform for hybrid multicloud environments based on hyperconverged technology. That platform emerged from the interplay of a wide range of solutions. On several occasions we had the pleasure of watching a specialist explain the entire portfolio with the help of a whiteboard, but still found that the lineup was on the complex side.
One platform, five components
The updated Nutanix Cloud Platform bundles functionality into five pillars, rebuilt around HCI as its foundation: Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure, Cloud Manager, Unified Storage, Database Service and End User Computing.
- Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is the key component. NCI includes compute, storage and networking to run virtual machines and containers on an HCI environment, whether in the public cloud or in a private data center. As before, the focus is on hybrid environments where NCI ensures that various underlying infrastructure works as one.
- Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) builds on that by combining monitoring, insight and recovery automation into a single solution, regardless of cloud environment. The centralized view allows administrators to more easily manage applications and gain better insight on those workloads generating. Environmental security is also part of NCM.
- Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) consists of a central management environment for all storage resources. Volume storage, object storage, classic file systems, both in private and public environments: all come together in NUS. Nutanix is committed to simplicity and states that even non-experts are able to perform general storage and management tasks. Built-in analytics further ensures that administrators have visibility into their data and its security.
- Nutanix Database Service (NDB) encompasses another historic strength of the Cloud Platform. Under this heading, Nutanix plugs its database management for hybrid multicloud environments. The solution automates provisioning, scaling, security and even patching of PostgreSQL, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle Database, among others. The intent of NDB is to make database management considerably easier and provide an as-a-Service experience that is database and cloud agnostic.
- Nutanix End User Computing does not get an official abbreviation in parentheses, presumably because (NEUC) can lead to chuckles in the Dutch-speaking world. Nutanix’s VDI solution lives under this heading. It allows companies to bring desktops but also applications to users from their data center or the cloud. Nutanix offers a per-user licensing model tailored to the NCI base.
Welcome simplification
Nutanix’s new way of going to market fits better with the story the software specialist has been telling for some time. Simplicity is central to it. Nutanix’s ambition is to sculpt complex environments into a manageable whole via HCI and software. With the restructuring of the Nutanix Cloud Platform, that intent is much clearer.
read also