Test Drive

Bridge between Clouds for Nutanix Partners

Some of the most beautiful destinations in the world can often also be the most remote. For example – the Florida Keys were transformed over time by 42 bridges, connecting an 113-mile chain of islands to allow us access to a tropical wonderland.

Similarly - the IT partner community has been waiting for the right platforms to start bringing operations together into one beautiful experience. IT is going through a seismic shift that has been accelerated by the pandemic. Initially the goals were to simply meet the challenges of rolling out remote work – but this more broadly exposed the need for much greater agility and flexibility to react to business needs as they rapidly evolve. Ideally that would be delivered with a strategy with maximum flexibility and support for a hybrid environment. In a recent Enterprise Cloud Index survey, 86% of respondents consider hybrid their ideal operating model -- but nearly all of them (96%) are facing hurdles in managing applications and data across both on-prem and public clouds.

That’s where Nutanix Clusters comes in.

Nutanix Clusters for AWS and Nutanix Clusters for Azure address a huge gap that we know you have been trying to solve for your customers for some time. Customers want to adopt public cloud but don’t quite know how to begin. Proprietary on-prem applications were not built cloud-native and hence require refactoring to move. Customers spend years refactoring or rewriting applications and take on significant business risk doing so. What’s more, the refactored solution may work on one cloud, but not on another, and businesses need to shift rapidly based on changing needs. Nutanix customers already run their on-prem mission-critical workloads on a reliable, performant, and scalable software stack. Nutanix Clusters runs that same software stack inside of the AWS or Azure Cloud, enabling customers to leverage the same technology (using the same skills set) inside the public cloud ecosystem without risk or the need to refactor. Nutanix Clusters creates an abstraction layer between clouds, yet natively integrates into the cloud environment so that it acts like it’s an AWS or Azure native service.

Key Use Cases

  • On demand elasticity for cloud bursting. One of our early customers leveraged Nutanix Clusters for AWS during their census collection to spin up and burst Citrix VDI into AWS, then pulled it back into the datacenter. This allows customers to size their datacenter for day to day operations while supporting seasonal or burst demand when needed.
  • Business continuity. The idea of running DR on public cloud has long been a desire of many organizations, but few have figured out how and to do so in a cost-effective manner. Due to the integrations referenced above and some cool technology features like the ability to hibernate and resume on demand, your customers can move workloads into the public cloud seamlessly as they need it to respond to disasters (we’ve seen more than our share in 2020).
  • I/O-intensive workloads. Some customers are finding that when they go cloud native for these workloads they are incurring significant costs. They are finding much more cost-effective execution enabled by leveraging Clusters on the public cloud.

Benefits to Partners

  • Expand your addressable market into public cloud use cases, without an extra process tax (same exact quoting and licensing processes!)
  • Expand consumption use cases – ensure your Nutanix AOS licensing includes potential consumption for seasonal or DR capacity your customers will need
  • You and your customers retain full control. As with the rest of the Nutanix portfolio, Clusters is sold through a channel model

Your Next Steps

  • Take a few minutes to listen to a short podcast or webcast on the Partner Portal
  • Understand your customers’ direction in their multivendor, multicloud strategies
  • ld in future hybrid / on-demand capacity demands for your customers with Nutanix Clusters

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