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Nutanix wants to smash siloes in IT teams

Matthew Burbidge
By Matthew Burbidge
Johannesburg, 23 Sept 2021

Nutanix this week unveiled a number of new services which it believes will go some way in making it easier to use its products in what it calls the ‘hybrid multicloud era’.

Speaking at the company's online .NEXT conference, CEO Rajiv Ramaswami admitted that it was becoming harder to manage and track the 15 or so products the company offers, ‘sometimes even for our partners’. It was now rationalising these into five areas: cloud infrastructure and management, unified storage, and database and desktop services.

He said the rejigged portfolio will offer a single platform for the hybrid multicloud era, and that workloads can be in a private or public cloud, or with a managed service provider or telco.

Firstly, he announced a new version of its HCI software AOS, now in its sixth release. Ramaswami said enterprises will now get virtual networking, enhanced disaster recovery, zero trust security, all of which would otherwise require additional specialised hardware, software and skills. The virtual networking part will be called Flow Networking, and will be used to create virtual private clouds, which will bring less dependency on hardware switches and routers.

Business continuity and disaster recovery features have also been built into AOS 6, including end-to-end encryption for disaster recovery traffic. Ramaswami said it also brought the ability to use a public cloud as a second DR site, and there was also a new DR dashboard.

Turning to security, he said Nutanix was automating the creation of flow policies with machine learning, and was integrating its cloud platform with patching from security company Qualys. He said it will also provide ransomware protection against 4 000 known attack signatures.

The cloud platform can deliver up to 2x increase in storage performance for database workloads, and 3x for big data workloads compared to previous releases. It also offers unified storage for unstructured data. The company also launched a product called Nutanix Data Lens, an unstructured data governance service.

Ramaswami said one of the most oft-requested things customers want is the convergence of their experience across on-prem and public clouds, and Nutanix’s goal is to offer a single console to view and manage hybrid cloud deployments. He says the Nutanix platform aims to break down siloes within IT teams.

“Our focus in the 6.0 release has been on creating a simple and open hybrid multicloud platform and offering the requested data services for all workloads.”

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