Nutanix NC2 – Direct to Cloud Value – Part 1

Nutanix “Cloud Clusters” a.k.a “NC2” was designed to enable customers to quickly and easily migrate from on premises environments into public cloud providers such as Amazon EC2 and Microsoft Azure and benefit from these offerings long list of business, architectural and technical advantages.

Two of the advantages which stand out to me are:

  1. Well understood standard architecture
  2. Global availability

The well understood architecture of both the Amazon and Azure offerings is incredibly valuable as organisations are largely protected from the underestimated cost & impact of “tribal knowledge” being lost with inevitable employee turnover.

The standard architecture is also highly valuable as both Microsoft and Amazon have extensive training and certification programmes to ensure customers can validate skills of potential employees and enable their existing staff.

The standard architecture also reduces many of the risks & cost of bespoke or custom designed environments where it’s almost impossible for customers (and even many vendors) to match the amount of architectural and engineering rigour as large companies such as Microsoft and Amazon can invest due to their incredible scale.

Now looking at the global availability of resources from both Amazon and Azure, this is extremely attractive as it enables customers to potentially deploy anywhere in the world and in a timely manner and reduce the risk of supply chain issues delaying projects and/or restoring resiliency to production environments after hardware failure/s.

Lets switch gears and look at NC2 and where it fits in.

For a long time now, I’ve be championing Nutanix HCI as the “standard platform for all workloads” as it allows customers to benefit from a well understood architecture which simplifies the traditional datacenter. This reduces the risks & cost of bespoke or custom designed environments and Nutanix training programmes ensure existing and future staff have or can develop the required skills.

However the problem with any on premises focused product/s are they’re all constrained by commercial challenges such as CAPEX, supply chain as well as organisational challenges such as change requests/approvals/windows and ultimately all of these negatively impact the time to value no matter how simple the deployment it’s once the equipment is delivered.

However with the introduction of NC2, customers benefit from the best of all worlds being Nutanix NC2 as the standard platform for all workloads which can be spanned from new/existing on premises deployments to public clouds providers such as Amazon and Azure.

Leveraging NC2 on Amazon and Azure effectively eliminates the commercial challenges (CAPEX & supply chain) and ensures the fastest possible time to value with new NC2 environments being able to be deployed in under 60 minutes. This partnership also enables customers have a true global reach available at their fingertips.

The ability to scale resources which provide increased performance & capacity to all workloads cluster wide) in minutes is also extremely valuable.

Summary

Nutanix NC2 provides a highly complimentary offering to AWS and Azure which enables customers to enjoy a simple, standard platform for all workloads across private and leveraging multiple public cloud providers and even operate across and migrate/failover between providers.

NC2 can also deliver higher performance, increased resiliency (business continuity) with lower risk, typically a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) while providing a genuine and relatively simple public cloud provider exit strategy.

In Part 2 we will dive into a detailed cost comparison of NC2.

Why Nutanix Acropolis hypervisor (AHV) is the next generation hypervisor – Part 7 – Agility (Time to value)

Deploying other hypervisors and management solutions typically requires considerable design effort and expertise in order to ensure consistent performance and to help minimize risk of downtime while enabling as much agility as possible. Acropolis management requires almost no design at all as the In-built-in management is optimized and highly available out-of-the-box. This enables much faster deployment of AHV than any other hypervisor and associated management components.

Regardless of the starting size on an AHV-based environment, all management, Analysis, Data Protection and BC/DR components are automatically deployed and suitably sized. Regardless of the AHV cluster, no management design effort is required. This results in a very fast (typically <1hr for a single block deployment) time to value.

AHV also provides numerous features which ensure customers can deploy solutions in a timely manner:

  • In-Built Management & Analytics

The fact that all tools required for cluster management are deployed automatically with the cluster means time to value is not dependant on design/deployment/validation of these tools. There isn’t even a need to install a client to manage AHV, it is simply accessed via a Web Browser.

  • Out of the box hardened configuration with In-Built Security/Compliance Auditing

Being hardened by default removes the risk of security flaws being introduced during implementation phase while the automated auditing ensures in the event security settings are modified during business as usual operations that the setting/s are returned to the required security profile.

  • Intelligent cloning

The Distributed Storage Fabric combined with AHV to allow near instant clones of a Virtual Machine. This feature works regardless of the power state of the VM, so it’s not restricted to VMs which are powered off as with other hypervisors.

For a demo of this capability see: Nutanix Acropolis hypervisor acli cloning operations

Note: Cloning can be performed via Prism or acli (Acropolis CLI)

Summary:

  1. Minimal design/implementation effort for AHV management is required
  2. Where Multi-cluster central management is required, only a single VM is required (Prism Central) which is deployed as a virtual appliance
  3. No additional appliances/components to install for Analytics, Data Protection, Replication or Management High Availability
  4. No Subject Matter Experts required for an optimal Acropolis platform deployment

Back to the Index

Why Nutanix Acropolis hypervisor (AHV) is the next generation hypervisor – Part 1 – Introduction

Before I go into the details of why Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV) is the next generation of hypervisor, I wanted to quickly cover what the Xtreme Computing Platform is made up of and clarify the product names which will be discussed in this series.

In the below picture we can see Prism which is a HTML 5 based user interface sits on top of Acropolis which is a Distributed Storage and Application Mobility across multi-hypervisors and public clouds.

At the bottom we can see the currently support hardware platforms from Supermicro and Dell (OEM) but recently Nutanix has announced an OEM with Lenovo which expands customer choice further.

Please do not confuse Acropolis with Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV) as these are two different components, Acropolis is the platform which can run vSphere, Hyper-V and/or the Acropolis Hypervisor which will be referred to in this series as AHV.
nutanixxcp2

I want to be clear before I get into the list of why AHV is the next generation hypervisor that Nutanix is a hypervisor and cloud agnostic platform designed to give customers flexibility & choice.

The goal of this series is not trying to convince customers who are happy with their current environment/s to change hypervisors.

The goal is simple, to educate current and prospective customers (as well as the broader market) about some of the advantages / values of AHV which is one of the hypervisors (Hyper-V, ESXi and AHV) supported on the Nutanix XCP.

Here are my list of reasons as to why the Nutanix Xtreme Computing Platform based on AHV is the next generation hypervisor/management platform and why you should consider the Nutanix Xtreme Computing Platform (with Acropolis Hypervisor a.k.a AHV) as the standard platform for your datacenter.

Why Nutanix Acropolis hypervisor (AHV) is the next generation hypervisor

Part 2 – Simplicity
Part 3 – Scalability
Part 4 – Security
Part 5 – Resiliency
Part 6 – Performance
Part 7 – Agility (Time to Value)
Part 8 – Analytics (Performance & Capacity Management)
Part 9 – Functionality (Coming Soon)
Part 10 – Cost

NOTE:  For a high level summary of this series, please see the accompanying post by Steve Kaplan, VP of Client Strategy at Nutanix (@ROIdude)