The provision of new object storage, compute and marketplace services to developers is part of a continuing Nutanix strategy to elevate itself from providing HCI infrastructure to providing the whole stack.
Greg Smith, VP of Product Marketing at Nutanix
Today at their sold-out .NEXT Europe event in Nice France, Nutanix will be announcing a series of new-developer oriented services, although availability is still some time off. They will also announce that Veritas is the latest backup and recovery provider to fully support Nutanix.
While the new services are each important on their own, more critical is the overarching strategy that guides them.
“We are continuing the journey to deliver an enterprise cloud to our customers with the same simplicity, scalability and services as public clouds, but with the security and control needed in the data centre with the private cloud,” said Greg Smith, VP of Product Marketing at Nutanix. “The three new services we are announcing are targeted at application developers, to better help them create, publish and run their apps in an optimal environment. Part of our strategy here is also to elevate Nutanix from being a hyper-converged infrastructure provider to a full stack provider, by providing services for the application teams.”
These services are Acropolis Object Storage Service, Acropolis Compute Cloud [AC2) and Nutanix App Marketplace services.
The addition of object storage to Nutanix’s data management services is intended to make the Nutanix private cloud more attractive than the public cloud as an option for developers working on apps for large unstructured datasets, like Big Data analytics, data warehouse applications and large-scale Internet of Things deployments.
“The Acropolis Object Storage Service provides a cloud-like model to store large volumes of data objects, such as videos, photos or anything else that falls into unstructured data sets,” Smith said. “It uses an AWS S3-compatible interface so that all developers using cloud storage today will be able to run their workloads on the Nutanix private cloud, as an on-demand service.”
Smith emphasized that this service isn’t just for infrastructure managers, but for developers who want to be able to leverage object storage as a native service.
“We believe that this is a big opportunity for us,” Smith said. “Object storage has had rapid adoption in public cloud services. That’s why we have object storage as part of Nutanix. With this new service, companies don’t have to have multiple cloud operating models for it.”
The new Acropolis Compute Cloud service is designed to facilitate the delivery of CPU-intensive applications like distributed analytics workloads, large scale front-end web services, Citrix XenApp deployments and advanced in-memory analytics.
“The new Compute Cloud service seamlessly uses AHV to provide capabilities to customers who need more compute resources,” Smith said. It lets them more easily scale up and scale down their infrastructure, and do so more cost-effectively.
The third new offering, Nutanix App Marketplace services, are being added to Nutanix Calm, Nutanix’s multi-cloud application automation and orchestration solution. Nutanix App Marketplace defines applications as standards-based blueprints, and then published to a marketplace, to enable self-service consumption.
“Nutanix App Marketplace is focused on empowering application developers, providing them with tools to build applications and to publish those apps quickly,” Smith said. “We have also validated and will publish blueprints for developer tools like Jenkins, Puppet, Chef and Kubernetes. Developers will get near-instant access to tools they need to develop cloud native apps through the Nutanix marketplace.”
Smith said that Nutanix is providing an important value-add by making these apps easily deployable through blueprints.
“Many of these apps are open source, but configuring and deploying them is often very laborious and complex,” he said “Kubernetes for container management is very complex, and the build guide is dozens of pages long. We remove that, and make it possible to deploy these workloads in a single click.”
So when will these cool new services be available?
“We are being cautious on availability,” Smith said. “Marketplace will be available this calendar year. Everything else is in development and will be beyond this calendar year.”
Finally, Smith indicated that Veritas is announcing that their Veritas NetBackup will now support Nutanix AHV.
“We are proud that Veritas NetBackup will offer full validated support for Nutanix,” he said. Veritas becomes the fifth backup and recovery vendor to do so, along with Commvault, Comtrade, Veeam and Zerto.
