Nutanix Era leverages Nutanix snapshotting technology to allow easy management of multiple copies of databases, easily provision fully configured database services, and select specific point-in-time copies they want. Developers are a prime target.
NEW ORLEANS – Today, at their .NEXT customer event here, Nutanix is announcing Nutanix Era, a new Platform-as-a-Service [PaaS] offering to simplify database automation. It’s something that the company thinks is particularly likely to appeal to the developer market. The first release of Nutanix Era is around copy data management services.
“With Nutanix Era, we are expanding our software stack beyond core infrastructure, to PaaS,” said Greg Smith, Nutanix’s Vice President of Product Marketing. “This PaaS capability will significantly reduce the time it takes to provision a fully configured database service.”
The service is designed to reduce the management problems created by multiple copies of each database.
“With organizations using more and more copies of each database, it is becoming a nightmare to manage,” Smith said. “IDC says that 60 per cent of storage is simply copies of data. Era addresses this acute customer problem, and equips partners to provide relief for this complexity customers encounter in managing many copies of databases.”
The key to solving this problem in this copy data management service will be based on Nutanix’s snapshot technology.
“While this first capability will leverage some of our existing technology, like space-efficient snapshotting, it also introduces new time management, and point-in-time capabilities, so that users can easily select a specific point-in-time copy that they need,” Smith said.
The plan is to ultimately extend Era to include full database provisioning, delivering a complete lifecycle management solution for all databases in an organization.
Out of the gate, Nutanix Era will initially support the Oracle and Postgres database engines.
“These are two of the top three, and we have the extension of support to others on the roadmap,” Smith said. “We will support MySQL and SQL Server in a future phase of the product.
Smith said that Era is getting major exposure at the .NEXT event because Nutanix expects this is an offering for which a large pent-up demand exists.
“We are expecting high velocity from this, and the big announcement at .NEXT demonstrates our keen focus on it,” he said. “This will enhance our channel partners’ business, and will also allow them to sell to dev/ops teams as well by providing these higher-level services.”
Appealing to developers is a major objective here, said Sudheesh Nair, Nutanix’s President.
“To deliver capabilities for developers, you have to offer a rich platform, and that’s what Era does,” Nair said. “We want to get database players to come and play with us, and we think that solving a common problem for developers is a good way to do that. Era delivers agility to database management. It simplifies the management of databases. Developers can now look at production and how the databases are being consumed, and do all this with an appealing couple of clicks.”
Nair emphasized that Era helps fulfil another key objective of Nutanix, of giving users the kind of delightful experience that they are used to from their consumer experiences in dealing with companies like Apple or Amazon.
“This will simplify the storage and licensing part of things for them,” he said. “All those things are made invisible, and that provides a major delight for users.”
It will still be a little while before they will be delighted, however. Nutanix Era is currently in the phase of being tested by selected customers. General availability is planned for the second half of 2018. Pricing details will be released closer to general release.
