Nutanix Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure Available on AWS

Nutanix, Inc. announced availability of its Clusters on AWS, extending the flexibility and ease of use of its HCI software, along with all its products and services, to bare metal Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances on AWS.

With this announcement, the company delivers hybrid cloud infrastructure – one that allows businesses to accelerate their digital initiatives and optimize spending, priorities further amplified in the age of Covid-19. It offers a single stack that integrates compute and storage, provides unified operations across private and public clouds, integrated networking with AWS, and license portability from private to public clouds, thus addressing key technical and operational challenges of the hybrid cloud era.

According to Gartner, by 2021, 90% of organizations will have deployed a multicloud or hybrid cloud model for their IT needs¹. Companies require the flexibility of multiple clouds while they continue to struggle with the complexity, operational silos, and costs of managing private and public clouds. A unified solution that provides a consistent experience, tooling, and operational practices across clouds will allow companies to break down silos and reduce inefficiencies while enabling the advantage of flexibility to choose the right cloud for each workload.

With this announcement, Nutanix extends the simplicity and ease of use of its software to public cloud. This eliminates the cost and management complexity of hybrid environments and enables mobility across private and public clouds without any re-architecting of the apps due to built-in networking integration with AWS. Customers have the flexibility to choose the right cloud environment for each application with the benefit of license portability across clouds, which has a direct impact on cost and resource optimization.

Additionally, customers will be able to take advantage of the company’s software stack on private and public cloud. This includes unstructured storage solutions files, application orchestration solution Calm, database administration and automation solution Era.

“We are excited to support an extension of a customer’s private cloud environment into AWS with the launch of Clusters on AWS. This provides customers the flexibility to get the most out of both their AWS and Nutanix environments,” said Doug Yeum, head of worldwide channels and alliances, AWS. “Customers now have an opportunity to take advantage of Nutanix Clusters on AWS to deploy adjacent to their cloud-native applications in AWS and fast track their digital transformation.“

Key features in Nutanix Clusters include:

Apps and Data Mobility: Clusters solves a pain point for enterprises on their cloud journey by providing a way to move legacy apps and data to the cloud. It enables mobility without needing to re-architect apps, something that can be costly and time consuming.
Streamlined Operations with Unified Cloud Environment: Clusters allows customers to create, manage, and orchestrate their infrastructure, as well as their applications, across private and public clouds, all through a single interface. Unlike competitive solutions that only offer siloed cloud management, Clusters extends this to private and public cloud. This single stack removes the need for a separate team to manage each environment, or the re-skilling of teams, and also enables app mobility across clouds.
Built-In Networking Integration with AWS: Thanks to built-in integration with the AWS networking layer, Clusters delivers benefits in terms of ease of deployment and performance. The networking integration also allows customers to use their existing AWS accounts, including unused credits, virtual private clouds, and subnets. This enables a unified management plane across private and public cloud, and hugely simplifies the customer experience of managing a hybrid cloud environment.
Cloud Cost Optimization: In addition to addressing key technical and operational challenges with hybrid cloud environments, Clusters can provide cost savings to customers. This is achieved by removing the need for different teams to manage each cloud environment, eliminating the need for costly migrations for legacy applications, and providing a way to hibernate public cloud clusters with one-click to help eliminate waste. Additionally, available portable licenses, flexible payment models, and increased visibility in cloud spend, through Xi Beam, allow businesses to optimize their cloud investments and truly choose the right cloud for each workload, without lock-in.
Freedom of Choice: Clusters on AWS gives customers the choice to either reuse existing on-premises hardware or AWS credits when building out a hybrid environment. In addition, customers can also choose to bring the on-premises licenses or select a pay-as-you-go or cloud commit models.

Based on research with customers, key use cases for Nutanix Clusters include:

Lift and Shift: Customers looking to move applications to the cloud, or consolidate their datacenters, can simply lift and shift them without any change. Clusters eliminates the need to re-architect applications, resulting in significant cost and time savings to customers. Additionally, Nutanix Move provides application mobility between non-Nutanix solutions and clusters to further simplify the process.
On-Demand Elasticity: Customers can scale capacity or expand to different regions in minutes by bursting into public clouds to support seasonal demands, changing priorities, and more. This is beneficial when speed is of the essence and adding capacity is a lengthy process, like expanding VDI resources.
BC: Customers can leverage AWS for HA and DR without adding complexity arising from managing cloud environments or a stand-alone DR solution.
Cloud Native Services: Customers can use cloud-native services with existing on-premises applications without expensive re-architecting. This results in modernizing existing applications by taking advantage of cloud native services like AI, ML, analytics, and more to advance customers’ digital initiatives.

“On behalf of our customers, we have always worked to make IT so simple that it’s invisible,” said Tarkan Maner, chief commercial officer. “As the industry evolved, our focus has expanded beyond the datacenter to help our customers manage the complexity of multiple clouds, whether private or public. Nutanix Clusters on AWS is the realization of this vision. This enables complete flexibility by allowing businesses to write code once and use it anywhere, taking advantage of scale, location, integration, and pricing of multiple options – this is the true vision of hybrid cloud.“

“At Penn National Insurance, we were looking for a new solution to support our VDI workloads to ensure BC if our primary datacenter suffers from a disaster event. Nutanix Clusters allows us to easily create a hybrid and multicloud environment spanning our Nutanix datacenter and AWS, so that we can very rapidly burst capacity in AWS when we need to quickly restore our workloads from a backup,” said Craig Wiley, senior infrastructure systems architect, Penn National Insurance. “On top of the flexibility that this solution provides, the ability to use our existing AWS networking setup made the Nutanix Clusters deployment very easy while delivering the expected performance. Now, we know we can expand VDI capacity with one-click and hibernate our hybrid cloud workloads when not in use, so we only pay for the capacity we need.“

“The Australian Bureau of Statistics is Australia’s national statistical agency, responsible for, among other things, the Australian Census. The Census is Australia’s largest peacetime logistical operation, and the increased IT demand needed to support this Census project is one of the main reasons we looked at hybrid cloud platforms. They provide the flexibility and agility needed to adapt to significant spikes in demand,” said Julian Doak, CISO, Australian Bureau of Statistics. “We were already Nutanix customers, running our VDI and analytical workloads in our datacenter, and also use AWS. A single cloud solution to manage multiple clouds will make it easier to scale our IT needs. Nutanix Clusters provides a seamless way to burst capacity into public clouds to increase our VDI workloads when needed to support Census activities, while knowing all our apps will just work – without needing to repackage or re-architect them.“

Nutanix Clusters on AWS is available to customers in 20 AWS regions. In addition to being able to use their existing portable Nutanix licenses, customers will be able to choose between Cloud Commit and pay-as-you-go models.

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