Nutanix Delivers a Uniform Experience Across Datacenter, Edge and Cloud

For enterprises, hybrid multicloud operations have become the norm. Almost three-quarters (74%) of IT teams expect to leverage more than one IT infrastructure, and 72% are planning to increase edge computing investments. Unfortunately, as your IT operations expand across more and more distinct environments, the complexity of your operations grows, leading to challenges that include:

• A need for additional IT staff with specialized skills siloed around each cloud
• Inability to get a unified view of your IT operations
• An expanded attack surface and increased risk
• Application mobility challenges

To tame this complexity, enterprise IT teams need a way to provide a more unified hybrid multicloud experience. 

Platform 

The main reason that challenges arise in a typical hybrid multicloud environment is that there are different platforms in each location. The AWS platform is not the same as Azure, which is not the same as Google Cloud—and all are different from your on-premises (datacenter and edge) operations. Each environment has different infrastructure, and — although there may be similarities — different functionality and services. This is why moving an application from one environment to the next often requires replatforming. Depending on how different the target environment is, you may even need to refactor the application to deliver the desired performance or control the cost of operations. 

Nutanix solves the platform consistency challenge by delivering the same platform everywhere. More than five years ago, we took our unique hyperconverged architecture—with a long track record of benefits for datacenter and edge computing—and extended it to create the Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) solution running on bare metal instances in AWS, Azure, and now Google Cloud (sign up for a preview).

With Nutanix, you can run the same platform across datacenter, edge, public cloud, and Nutanix service provider environments without getting locked in anywhere. Having the same operating environment everywhere minimizes the need for re-skilling while enabling your team to leverage unique services in a particular environment when you want or need to, such as Amazon S3 or Azure SQL Database. 

Nutanix Versus the Competition

When you think about IT platforms, another solution that may come to mind is VMware by Broadcom. However, Nutanix has emerged not only as a leading VMware alternative for companies concerned about their VMware investments but also as a modern platform that provides great consistency across environments. Our unified hybrid multicloud experience is a key differentiator.

Nutanix delivers an experience that is nearly identical to the on-premises experience in the three leading public clouds: AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud (currently in public preview). While VMware services are also available in these clouds, with the exception of VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC), VMware cloud services are resold and managed by each cloud provider. Because all (including VMC) are managed services, the result is an operating model that is distinct from the on-premises VMware experience. Due to changes Broadcom has made since it purchased VMware¹, AWS recently launched its own separate Amazon Elastic VMware Service as an alternative to VMC.

Broadcom’s post-acquisition changes to VMware have prompted AWS to launch its own standalone Amazon Elastic VMware Service, creating fragmentation and uncertainty for customers. This shift underscores the growing complexity of managing hybrid and multicloud environments in VMware environments.

For edge computing environments, Nutanix customers benefit from our platform’s compact footprint, breadth of hardware choice, zero-touch provisioning framework (the topic of blog 3 in this series), and enterprise-grade AHV hypervisor. VMware’s shift to subscription-based licensing, increased minimum core counts, and its move to product bundles can make VMware licensing more expensive for edge sites. As you’ll learn, Nutanix also offers significant benefits for remote management.

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Management 

In a “typical” hybrid multicloud environment, as the number of operating environments increases, so does the number of management tools. Increasing complexity typically necessitates additional manpower — if not completely separate teams.

In a perfect world, you’d have a unified control plane that enables you to view and manage your IT operations at a glance—with the ability to surface critical alerts and drill down to understand and resolve issues. That control plane would scale to encompass everything across your hybrid multicloud, with built-in intelligence to help you quickly understand what’s happening in each location, identify anomalies, and take corrective actions. This is exactly what Nutanix Cloud Platform delivers. 

• Prism Element is the local management interface embedded in each Nutanix cluster. It provides cluster-specific administration, monitoring, and configuration for compute, storage, and networking resources. Because it is distributed across every node in the cluster, there are no external management servers or databases needed. This reduces resource needs and has significant benefits, especially in edge environments.
• Prism Central extends the functionality of Prism Element to manage multiple clusters holistically, providing a higher-level, centralized control plane. It enables advanced capabilities crucial for enterprise deployments, such as microsegmentation, overlay networking, disaster recovery, and lifecycle management.
• Nutanix Central integrates many Prism Central instances to provide centralized management, telemetry, and support services. An integrated marketplace for one-click application and service deployment makes it fast and easy to manage apps and services across your hybrid multicloud. This makes Nutanix Central ideal for organizations managing globally distributed IT operations. 

These tools are organized hierarchically and interconnected so you can start at the highest level (Nutanix Central) and move seamlessly through Prism Central and Prism Element as needed, or you can start at Prism Central or Prism Element—with access everywhere governed by role-based access control.

This video demonstrates how Nutanix Central provides centralized management for organizations with multiple Prism Central instances.

The Nutanix management ecosystem simplifies hybrid multicloud management with a unified interface that spans datacenter, edge, and public cloud infrastructure. It also supports management of VMware environments running on the Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure platform through vSphere integration, workload migration, and policy enforcement. 

For edge environments, Nutanix offers a unified, single pane of glass management experience, simplifying remote operations and updates. In contrast, VMware's management is typically handled by a suite of separate tools like vCenter for virtualization, vSAN for storage, and other products for networking, which can increase complexity for remote administration (they have only now started to introduce a consolidated UI with VCF 9). 

Licensing costs for VMware’s ecosystem remain a major concern. As you’ve already learned, the available VMware cloud environments are offered as managed services, which may result in a less unified hybrid multicloud management experience. 

Governance 

With cyber threats and industry regulations continuing to grow, governance and compliance are more important than ever, and cost control is critical for organizations seeking to reduce and sustain IT costs and increase investment in new digital services and AI.

Providing security and cost governance across a hybrid multicloud environment without centralized management tools is complicated due to differing tool sets, security controls, cost models, and data protection practices.

The Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) solution provides policy-driven management, cost governance, and security compliance to address hybrid multicloud governance challenges. NCM capabilities extend to VMware environments and public cloud services beyond NC2. 

• NCM Cost Governance provides visibility, optimization, and control over spending across on-premises and public cloud environments.
• NCM Security Central provides a unified dashboard to monitor security posture, automate compliance checks, and plan microsegmentation. 
• NCM Intelligent Operations optimizes capacity, detects anomalies, and automates tasks.
• NCM Self-Service offers one-click self-service with centralized role-based control, enabling infrastructure and application automation and orchestration across on-premises and cloud.

Watch this video to see how Nutanix Cloud Manager helps you create a cloud operating model.

How to Enable Application Security

Without a doubt, the best, most robust application security starts at the code. Otherwise known as security by design, this approach is crucial to get right. Application vulnerabilities, in many cases, start with a compromised architecture riddled with design flaws. This means that application security must be woven into the development process—i.e., code. 

A security-by-design approach means your applications start off with a clean, well-protected slate. But beyond this method, there are several other application security best practices businesses should keep in mind as they finetune their strategy.

1. Treat your cloud architecture, whether public or on-prem, as insecure. Defaulting to this mindset eliminates complacency and comfort in assuming the cloud is secure enough. 
2. Apply security measures to each component of your application and during each phase of the development process. Be sure you include the appropriate measures to each unique component.
3. A crucial but time-consuming strategy is to automate the installation and configuration processes. Even if you have already completed these processes previously, you’ll need to re-do them for your next-generation applications.
4. Simply establishing security measures is not enough. Be sure to frequently test and retest them to ensure they are working properly. In the event of a breach, you’ll be thankful you detected and remediated any faults. 
5. Take advantage of SaaS offerings to offload time-consuming security tasks and refocus your scope to more high-value projects. SaaS is both relatively affordable and doesn’t require a dedicated IT team to configure products.

VMware offers functionality similar to NCM through its VMware Aria (formerly vRealize) Suite. However, published reports indicate that this suite has seen significant changes since the Broadcom acquisition (they have just introduced VCF Operations and VCF Automation as part of VCF):

• SaaS versions of applications have been discontinued.
• Most of the Aria Suite is only available as part of the more expensive VCF bundle.

Reportedly, many existing customers view these changes unfavorably. For VMware Aria customers seeking alternatives, NCM provides a powerful suite of capabilities and a simple transition with optimal time to value.

Unifying Your Hybrid Multicloud Experience

The key to getting the most out of your hybrid multicloud environment is delivering a uniform experience. This allows  anyone on your team with the skill to perform a task in a particular location—like deploying a critical application —can perform that task everywhere, making your team and your company more efficient.

With a unified platform, unified management, and unified governance, Nutanix Cloud Platform provides the unified hybrid multicloud capabilities you need today. And, we make it simple. 

All license tiers of the Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) solution include Prism Element and Prism Central. Nutanix Central is included with all NCP, NCI, and NCM licenses. For the latest licensing information, visit Software Options page. Because we think security governance is so critical, we include Security Central with the top NCI tier. NCM capabilities are offered in three simple licensing tiers. The result is: You have consumption flexibility and aren't forced to consume extended management capabilities if you don't currently need them, and you can easily add them later. Nutanix takes the pain out of enterprise IT modernization.

This is just the beginning. In our next post, we’ll explore how Nutanix delivers built-in security from platform to data to network to application.

Have questions or insights? Feel free to reach out—we’d love to hear how your team is tackling hybrid multicloud complexity.

Explore the IDC study to see how Nutanix customers are cutting costs and boosting efficiency. Or, discover how Nutanix can simplify and de-risk your migration with a free Test Drive. See firsthand how your workloads run on our platform and plan your move with less complexity and more confidence.

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