Nutanix Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure Now Available on Amazon Web Services

Nutanix announced the general availability of Nutanix Clusters on AWS, extending the flexibility and ease of use of the company’s hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) software, along with all Nutanix products and services, to bare metal Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

With this announcement, Nutanix delivers hybrid cloud infrastructure — one that allows businesses to accelerate their digital initiatives and optimize spending, priorities further amplified in the age of COVID.

Nutanix 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 multicolored 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 the flexibility to choose the right cloud for each workload.

With this announcement, Nutanix extends the simplicity and ease of use of its software to the public cloud. This eliminates the cost and management complexity of hybrid environments and enables seamless mobility across private and public clouds without any rearchitecting of the apps due to built-in networking integration with AWS.

Customers now have the flexibility to choose the right cloud environment for each application with the added 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 full software stack on the private and public clouds. This includes unstructured storage solutions Files, application orchestration solution Calm, database administration and automation solution Era, and more.

“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 at Amazon Web Services, Inc. “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: Nutanix Clusters solves a significant pain point for enterprises on their cloud journey by providing a seamless way to move legacy apps and data to the cloud. It enables mobility without needing to re-architect apps, something that can be extremely costly and time-consuming.

Streamlined Operations with Unified Cloud Environment: Nutanix 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, Nutanix Clusters extends this to the private and public clouds. This single stack removes the need for a separate team to manage each environment, or the re-skilling of teams, and also enables seamless app mobility across clouds.

Built-In Networking Integration with AWS: Thanks to built-in integration with the AWS networking layer, Nutanix 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 truly 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 significant 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 easily hibernate public cloud clusters with just 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: Nutanix 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 on-premises licenses or select a pay-as-you-go or Cloud Commit models.

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

Lift and Shift: Customers looking to move applications to the cloud, or consolidate their data centers, can simply “lift and shift” them without any change.

Clusters eliminate the need to re-architect applications, resulting in very 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: Now customers can quickly scale capacity or expand to different regions in minutes by bursting into public clouds to support seasonal demands, changing priorities, and more.

This is especially beneficial when speed is of the essence and adding capacity is a lengthy process, like expanding VDI resources.

Business Continuity: Customers can now leverage AWS for high availability and disaster recovery without adding complexity arising from managing cloud environments or a stand-alone disaster recovery solution.

Cloud-Native Services: Customers can use cloud-native services with existing on-premises applications without expensive re-architecting.

This results in easily modernizing existing applications by taking advantage of cloud-native services like artificial intelligence, machine learning, 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 at Nutanix. “As the industry evolved, our focus has expanded beyond the data center 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.”

“Nutanix Clusters on AWS enables seamless mobility within hybrid and multi-cloud environments, giving customers much-needed freedom of choice. Our focus through the pandemic has been to provide India’s enterprises with the least complex path to a cloud environment that works for the unique needs of their organization.

This solution provides scalability, significant cost, and time savings, and optimizes existing infrastructure - which is exactly what enterprises need at this time,” said Balakrishnan Anantharaman, Vice President and Managing Director of Sales, India, and SAARC, Nutanix.

Nutanix customers shared:

“Wipro has extensive industry experience in managing and running business-critical applications in a cloud-agnostic architecture. We have leveraged Nutanix Clusters as the underlying cloud infrastructure platform to deliver our technology services.

It provides us with a critical component of hybrid cloud - a truly unified management plane across private and public clouds. Nutanix Clusters provides us the flexibility of running applications in the cloud while reducing the networking overhead by using our existing AWS setup making our deployment quick and efficient.

Together with Nutanix, we are confident of offering the best in class technology services in a hybrid cloud environment for customers’ digital transformation.” Satish Yadavalli, Vice President – Cloud and Infrastructure Services at Wipro Ltd

“To offer the latest and best in cloud computing, we are excited to partner with Nutanix. This far-reaching partnership will enable Yotta to offer the latest and innovative cloud solutions for Enterprises to run their critical workloads on and off-premises,” said Sunil Gupta, managing partner and CEO of Yotta Infrastructure Solutions.

“The general availability of Nutanix Clusters on AWS gives our customers a flexible and secure Hybrid Cloud solution that leverages the technological prowess and experience of three industry leaders.” Sunil Gupta, Managing Partner and CEO of Yotta Infrastructure Solutions

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