Nutanix (NASDAQ: NTNX), a leader in enterprise cloud computing, today announced general availability of Nutanix Clusters on AWS, extending
the flexibility and ease of use of the company’s hyperconverged 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 optimise 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 organisations will have deployed a multicloud 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 flexibility to choose the right cloud for each workload.
With this announcement, Nutanix extends the simplicity and ease of use of its software to 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 optimisation.
Additionally, customers will be able to take advantage of the company’s full software stack on private and public cloud.
This includes unstructured storage solutions Files, application orchestration solution Calm, database administration
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 private and public cloud. This single stack removes the need for a
separate team to manage each environment, or re-skilling 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 Optimisation: 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, though Xi Beam, allow businesses to optimise 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 the 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 datacentres, can simply “lift and shift” them
without any change. Clusters eliminates 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 modernising 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 datacentre to help our
customers manage the complexity of multiple clouds, whether private or public. Nutanix Clusters on AWS is the
realisation 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 customers shared:
“The Australian Bureau of Statistics is Australia's national statistical agency, responsible for, among other things,
the Australian Census. The Census is Australia's largest peacetime logistical operation and the increased IT demand
needed to support this Census project is one of the main reasons we looked at hybrid cloud platforms. They provide the
flexibility and agility needed to adapt to significant spikes in demand,” said Julian Doak, CISO at the Australian
Bureau of Statistics. “We were already Nutanix customers, running our VDI and analytical workloads in our datacentre,
and also use AWS. A single cloud solution to manage multiple clouds will make it easier to scale our IT needs. Nutanix
Clusters provides a seamless way to burst capacity into public clouds to increase our VDI workloads when needed to
support Census activities, while knowing all our apps will just work – without needing to repackage or rearchitect
them.”
“At Penn National Insurance, we were looking for a new solution to support our VDI workloads to ensure business
continuity if our primary datacentre suffers from a disaster event. Nutanix Clusters allows us to easily create a hybrid
and multicloud environment spanning our Nutanix datacentre and AWS, so that we can very rapidly burst capacity in AWS
when we need to quickly restore our workloads from a backup,” said Craig Wiley, Senior Infrastructure Systems Architect
at Penn National Insurance. “On top of the flexibility that this solution provides, the ability to use our existing AWS
networking setup made the Nutanix Clusters deployment very easy while delivering the expected performance. Now we know
we can expand VDI capacity with one-click and hibernate our hybrid cloud workloads when not in use, so we only pay for
the capacity we need.”
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.
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1 Source: Gartner, Inc, Market Insight: Cloud Imperative — Embrace Hybrid Cloud and Multicloud Architecture and
Services, October 2019About Nutanix
Nutanix is a global leader in cloud software and a pioneer in hyperconverged infrastructure solutions, making computing
invisible anywhere. Organisations around the world use Nutanix software to leverage a single platform to manage any app
at any location at any scale for their private, hybrid and multicloud environments. Learn more at www.nutanix.com or follow us on Twitter @nutanix.
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