Announcements from Nutanix .Next 2017: Here Comes Nutanix Cloud Services
Three New Offerings From Nutanix announced at .Next
Officially announced today at the .Next Keynote, Nutanix is entering the realm of cloud services providers with their newest product Xi. Xi will come in two offerings: Xi Cloud Services, and Xi Disaster Recovery Service. Early indications on positioning for Xi Cloud Services appear to be a native cloud extension to the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform, while Xi Disaster Recovery Service looks to leverage rapid and intelligent protection of your Nutanix environment without the need to purchase and maintain separate infrastructure. Nutanix looks to offer these products for early release in November 2017, with GA coming in 2018.
Nutanix will start out with 4 data centers across the United States and expand over time. Long term plans include sites globally as well
Management of the solutions will be done through Prism. Nutanix has stated their goal is to offer an "iCloud like ease of use" when it comes to disaster recovery and Xi given that there is no new software to install and clients can experience "instant" provisioning of a recovery site. Enterprise Cloud OS will act as the go between for the local sites and Xi DR hosted locations.Xi DR also offers non-disruptive fail over testing for readiness & compliance purposes, as well as site to site encryption of data. Subscriptions will be available based on RPO, with RPOs as low as 1 hour.
Coming off of last year's acquisition of Calm.io, Nutanix also announced Nutanix Calm. Rather than just re-branding Calm.io, the product has been integrated into Prism. Much like Xi, calm has two initial offerings. Nutanix Calm provides application automation and life cycle management for the Nutanix Cloud Platform as well as public cloud offerings. Nutanix Marketplace allows organizations to fully automate the provisioning of hybrid cloud architectures, scaling both multi-tiered and distributed applications across different cloud environments.
Blueprints will be offered against varying cloud providers, and will also be managed through Prism. Pricing & licensing is currently being worked out, but early indications are that will be be on a per VM basis and scale out. To start out it's life, Calm will exist next to Marketplace, but eventually will be merged. Calm 1.0 will be released summer of 2017, with a 1.1 & 1.5 release expected about every 8 weeks respectively. 1.0 is going to offer support for AWS & AHV, with ESXi being added in 1.1. Look for Hyper-V, Azure, and Container support with Calm 1.5.
The final major announcement coming from .Next is Xtract. Xtract is a one click experience to simplify the on-boarding of VMware VMs to AHV. Xtract for VMs will be made public beta on June 30th, with full GA expected in Q1. Xtract for DBs will go GA on Friday June 30th as well. Nutanix states that Xtract offers agentless migrations with near-zero downtime. The migration will retain network configurations and automatically insert AHV drivers into the VMs.
If you'd like to join the conversation about Nutanix's new offerings, have any show ideas, or would like to be a guest on my podcast, reach out to me on Twitter (@ExploreVM), Email, or on Facebook.
