On-premises, the edge, the colocation data center, this or another public cloud provider: Simple administration and overview are not a matter of course in the hybrid multicloud. Nutanix’s mission is to change that, for both operational teams and developers.

“There are good reasons to put data in the public cloud, and good reasons to choose a private infrastructure,” says Luc Costers, Nutanix Belux, CIS and Eastern Europe Regional Manager, on the main stage of Cybersec Europe in Brussels. Unfortunately, good reasons do not guarantee good results. “For example, companies have data on-site, in one, two or even three public data centers and in the future at different edge locations,” he notes. “It’s a circus that needs to be managed.”

double problem

Costers argues with numbers. “85 percent of workloads will no longer run in the optimal place in the future,” he says. “It’s bad news, both financially and security-wise.” The problem is twofold, and so is the solution.

85 percent of workloads will no longer run in the optimal place in the future.

Luc Costers, Regional Manager Nutanix Belux, CIS and Eastern Europe, Nutanix

On the one hand, there are many different environments in the hybrid multicloud. The more synergy there is in managing these environments, the better the IT team can keep the corporate infrastructure functioning and secure.

On the other hand, this difference in the environments themselves is detrimental to the mobility of applications and data. Costers: “Hyperscalers have sticky services, which means applications hang.” In other words, vendor lock-in ensures silos remain intact even in a well-managed hybrid multi-cloud environment.

main frame

Costers and Nutanix have a mission: to break down the walls in this hybrid, multicloud environment. This also happens in two ways. At Cybersec Europe, Costers focuses on the Nutanix DNA: Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI).

“You can actually compare HCI to an AS/400,” says Costers, who recognizes that mention of IBM’s 1980s mainframe evokes as many nostalgic sighs from the public as it does youthful quizzical looks. “With HCI, all of the building blocks of your infrastructure are in one box, and you can buy that box anywhere. You are free to choose the hardware. Also, the boxes are elastic: adding an HCI server increases the capacity and performance of your environment by 100 percent, not 95 percent.”

Block box with even top layer

We’ve already explained in detail what exactly HCI is, but the gist is simple. With HCI, the 3-tier infrastructure with hardware for network, computing power and storage disappears. This is replaced with a homogeneous infrastructure to which you can add networking, processing power and storage as needed. A virtualization layer runs on top of this block box, allowing you to provision exactly the capacity needed for any workload.

Nutanix offers such an environment both on-premises and in the public cloud. Costers: “You put your services, applications and data on top of this layer.” The layer is the same on-premises as in the public cloud and can also be centrally managed across all physical environments. “This allows you to put workloads where you want, and even ensure that peak demand for an on-premises application is temporarily absorbed in the public cloud.” Management is centralized through the recently launched Nutanix Central.

The Nutanix layer offers simplicity in management, but also in security. “The environment is the same, so the security is consistent,” Costers clarifies. “The abstraction layer above the hardware allows management by a single pane of glassYou can tie security to workloads, you can isolate environments from each other… You can even get visibility into everything that’s running, where it’s running, what problems you’re having, and how to fix them.”

Down with the circus

Costers and Nutanix are trying to organize the hybrid multicloud circus. Convenient, but wouldn’t it be better if your IT environment wasn’t a circus? The HCI specialist is convinced of this and therefore relies heavily on the second pillar: vendor lock-in.

Finally, the fact is that cloud-native workloads in the cloud with hyperscalers such as AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform offer advantages. These workloads are often tied in some way to some exclusive features of a particular cloud provider, making it difficult or impossible to move them to another provider or on-premises environment. Nutanix can do little to change that with the Nutanix Cloud and central management.

A beacon of hope

At its .Next conference, the company announced another solution: Project Beacon. Behind this name hides a great ambition. Nutanix wants to enable cloud-native applications without vendor lock-in. The technology for this actually already exists, as applications use standard components such as databases for the data and containers for the application code. Hyperscalers offer these components in their own flavors, which contributes to vendor retention.

Nutanix aims to solve this problem by offering hyperscalers cloud-native solutions that work across the hybrid multicloud. The first solution as part of Project Beacon is the introduction of Nutanix Database Services (NDS) as a native managed service with public cloud providers. By offering all components everywhere as a native service, it is suddenly possible for developers to run apps without any changes elsewhere.

This is how the Nutanix story begins to take shape. The company not only wants to bring order to the circus, the entire circus can actually be scrapped. That won’t happen until tomorrow, though: Project Beacon is a multi-year plan, and even then, the whole world won’t suddenly embrace the system. Nutanix is ​​now fighting for central management of the entire hybrid multi-cloud environment, with the most uniform infrastructure possible, as few walls as possible and, above all, an overview.