Say ‘Yes’ to Hybrid Multicloud: The Top New Need-To-Know Features
By Arjoyita Roy, Marc Trouard-Riolle
As organizations from across the world say “yes” to hybrid multicloud at the Nutanix .NEXT 2024 conference, three important new product releases coincide in bringing new value to customer deployments: the AOS 6.8, Nutanix Central (NC) general availability, and Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) 5.0 releases.
These three releases contain indispensable features applicable across public clouds, on-premises data centers, and the edge. The new capabilities help organizations build and operate hybrid multicloud environments in a more efficient and optimized way instead of managing each cloud and location as a separate silo.
This blog covers the latest key features that make managing your hybrid multicloud a snap.
We often hear about data management complexities from our customers and prospects in their efforts to optimize performance, security, cost, and compliance. Many cloud deployments have grown organically, sometimes as point solutions, with target clouds and configurations defined by a variety of factors. This often results in siloed cloud infrastructure operations and the need to acquire special personnel, skills, and toolsets.
The difference between these siloed cloud environments and a unified hybrid multicloud is the simplicity and efficiency of cloud operations. In a hybrid multicloud environment, clouds are interconnected and managed consistently across a common management plane. The same IT processes, procedures, skills, and toolsets enable organizations to increase their efficiency across their entire cloud operations.
Public cloud services play a big role in the modernization of IT. The 2024 Enterprise Cloud Index report revealed that almost half (46%) of the organizations surveyed use a hybrid cloud or hybrid multicloud infrastructure, with expectations for this figure to double in the next 1-3 years. Enterprises using multiple public clouds face challenges in reducing complexity, improving efficiency, and workload relocation.
The Nutanix Cloud Platform (NCP) solution enables organizations to address these challenges and makes it easier for customers to build and operate hybrid multicloud environments. Recent improvements include:
Improvements in delivering consistent IT operations across hybrid multiclouds
Consistent mechanism for virtual networking across on-premises, AWS, and Azure:
Organizations that continue to extend hybrid multicloud environments across on-premises, the edge, and the public cloud are striving to enhance workload and data security. These enhancements include isolating network traffic to critical workloads, securing cloud environments, and finding more efficient ways to ensure compliance.
The Nutanix Flow Virtual Networking (FVN) software-defined solution combines advanced network security, visibility, automation capabilities, and other advanced virtual networking capabilities, now works with the AWS public cloud. The seamless integration makes it easier than ever for cloud administrators to run workloads across the hybrid multicloud, implementing network isolation, and supporting multitenancy agnostic to the underlying substrate
In large-scale deployments, connecting multiple VPCs involves setting up VPC peering, AWS transit gateways, and troubleshooting connectivity issues. Each VPC requires its own subnets, route tables, security groups, and access control lists (ACLs), adding complexity and inconsistency in network management across AWS and on-premises. A common application for this feature can be seen with MSPs using multitenant networks to deliver managed services to multiple clients.
FVN across hybrid multicloud environments also facilitates application mobility and failover between on-premises and cloud deployments while retaining the IP network configuration.
Comprehensive network security capabilities for hybrid multicloud environments
Achieving consistency in enforcing security measures across hybrid multicloud environments is crucial to ensure uniform application of security policies, identity management, access controls, encryption, and compliance standards to all workloads and resources.
With the Flow Network Security (FNS) validation & support feature on Azure, customers running workloads on NC2 on Azure can leverage microsegmentation to secure workloads.
Bulk operations support for Flow Network Security (FNS)
The new Address Groups Bulk Operations feature improves hybrid multicloud operations and minimizes the operational overhead for cloud operators. It automates the addition of IP addresses and subnets in bulk via the UI or an imported CSV file to streamline network security operations and reduce time and effort.
Automatic Cluster Selection
Minimize operational management overhead with the new Automatic Cluster Selection feature. By intelligently establishing the best cluster for VM deployment based on resource availability, host affinities, and more, IT teams will have a consistent, cloud experience that improves common lifecycle operations from deployment to resource optimization.
Increasing efficiency of hybrid multiclouds
AWS Direct-Attached Elastic Block Storage (EBS)
Cluster resources are defined by the nodes they contain. However, when deploying some storage-intensive applications or use cases, the need for a higher proportion of storage capacity relative to other resource groups can result in the need to add more nodes. This is an issue that is exacerbated by databases, AI and ML workloads, and other storage-heavy applications.
With AWS Direct-Attached EBS, IT teams can now size their clusters primarily on their compute and memory requirements, then create Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) instances on AWS clusters with additional EBS to increase the storage capacity. Nodes are now able to address up to 212 TB of storage made up of local node NVMe and EBS storage. This eliminates cloud inefficiencies associated with unused compute and memory resources and reduces the number of nodes to increase cost efficiency.
Take for example the following Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) solution. Protecting applications and workloads with a higher service level agreement (SLA) may require a faster recovery time objective (RTO).
To ensure these apps and workloads have the minimum recovery friction in a disaster recovery failover, there must be sufficient compute, memory, and storage in the target cluster. This is essential to handle the ingestion of data for protection and to run workloads in a failover situation.
If the amount of data to replicate exceeds the storage capacity required by a cluster to run the workloads, IT teams previously would have been compelled to add additional nodes to accommodate the storage requirements. NC2 on AWS with EBS eliminates this requirement ensuring a fast workload recovery time with improved control over BCDR solution costs.
Increasing IT operational cost-efficiencies for disaster recovery solutions on AWS
In addition to the AWS direct-attached EBS enhancement, Nutanix is releasing a new capability in an upcoming release to specifically target the simplification of BCDR solutions. This improvement will reduce the dependency on secondary or tertiary recovery-site environments, which are a significant capital and operational cost burden.
This new enhancement will allow customers to backup on-premises apps and data into AWS S3 storage via an NC2 pilot light cluster. Designed to reduce operational costs associated with BCDR solutions for workloads fitting a certain RTO, it eliminates the need for many hosts to run live while waiting for a disaster recovery scenario that might not occur. If a failover does occur, the NC2 cluster automatically expands to the number of nodes required to power the apps and snapshot data pulled from AWS S3 storage into the cluster.
This solution provides a good compromise between recovery and cost. Expanding a pilot light cluster can take an hour and time is required to hydrate the cluster from S3 storage, so the solution fits applications with an RTO in this recovery timeframe.
Disaster recovery solutions with NC2 on AWS combine the benefits of EBS storage for business-critical workloads and S3 storage for lower tiers of workloads with a longer RTO. This results in a much more cost-efficient multitiered disaster recovery solution.
NearSync support for Volume Groups (VG) and Consistency Groups (CG):
Organizations that run business-critical apps on-premises that are backed up in the cloud require near-zero data loss and recovery time. The inherent limitations of synchronous replication and metro availability make them undesirable solutions for such organizations.
In comes the NearSync support for VGs and CGs with an RPO ranging between 20 seconds to 15 minutes. This enhancement for VGs along with the existing feature of continuous data protection and autonomous scheduling of VMs forms a powerful backup and recovery strategy for hybrid multicloud environments.
Expanded new regions and instances
An important aspect of cloud deployments is the ability to access the correct resources in the most applicable cloud region to meet your requirements. New AWS regions recently introduced include Canada West, Spain, UAE, Zurich, Hyderabad, Melbourne, and Israel, with Amsterdam, London, Germany, and Japan having been made available to NC2 on the Azure cloud.
The AWS i4i and m6id instance types were also made available to NC2 on AWS customers earlier this year, opening up higher compute and memory node density combined with a newer generation processor that will help drive increased efficiency.
Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) Intelligent Operations
Comprehensive visibility and transparency into one’s environment for real-time updates are instrumental in any hybrid multicloud transformation journey. The latest NCM Intelligent Operations release introduces multiple features that streamline cloud operations and accelerate issue resolution.
Minimizing the friction of mundane tasks
Automate the follow-up to playbooks to eliminate the need for manual intervention. This new feature aims to automate post-action tasks, like verifying the updated VM configuration and sending email notifications about configuration changes to the team. This automation streamlines the process, eliminating the need for manual verification and alerting.
As an example, following the configuration of an automation workflow to decrease a VM’s CPU allocation in NC2 on AWS or Azure, an administrator can append a post-action flow to automate the next steps of validating the change in configuration and notifying their team.
Effortless Report Generation and Sharing
The process of generating and sharing reports has been simplified with the introduction of multiple new predefined system report templates, providing customers with accurate up-to-date insights into their hybrid multicloud environment. This enhancement ensures consistency and operational efficiency across the entire hybrid multicloud infrastructure.
Hybrid multicloud enhancements for developers and platform engineers
Nutanix’s scalable and application-aware data services streamline platform engineering for cloud-native applications across on-premises locations and public clouds. This allows platform engineers and developers to run containerized workloads seamlessly and efficiently, free from concerns about underlying storage management.
Nutanix Kubernetes® Platform (NKP)
The NKP solution, which is under development, enables customers to manage Amazon EKS, Microsoft AKS, and Google GKE clusters in a fully automated way. Customers get a consistent, repeatable approach to managing the end-to-end lifecycle of EKS, AKS, and GKE clusters from a centralized point of control. NKP also adds all the supplementary services required to elevate Amazon EKS and Microsoft AKS to production-ready Kubernetes platforms via an easy-to-deploy turnkey solution.
Organizations can leverage the generally available Nutanix Data Services for Kubernetes solution to provide greater location flexibility for Kubernetes-based applications without complex tools, synchronization, or manual restoration of containers and app/namespace metadata.
Project Beacon update
In addition to all of this, with Project Beacon, Nutanix is investing in decoupling applications and their data from underlying infrastructure to enable true portability across clouds for PaaS and IaaS-level data services.
In a containerized world, where containers and Kubernetes have made applications portable across environments, the platform services used to manage, process, and analyze the data associated with applications must also be transferable for portability to be truly usable.
The vision includes providing the same enterprise-grade data services and enterprise-grade files services that Nutanix is known for across different types of clouds, through running AOS natively in the public cloud, as well as running Nutanix Files natively in the public cloud.
Conclusion
As you consider your cloud strategy, think about how a Nutanix hybrid multicloud with the above new capabilities could further provide your organization with increased efficiency and consistency of IT operations. This can be your year to “go cloud” and make big things possible.
Further details on all these new features can be found in these three launch blogs:
Further reading:
- Nutanix: https://www.nutanix.com
- Nutanix hybrid multicloud: https://www.nutanix.com/solutions/hybrid-multicloud
- Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2): https://www.nutanix.com/nc2
About Nutanix
Nutanix is a global leader in cloud software, offering organizations a single platform for running apps and data across clouds. With Nutanix, organizations can reduce complexity and simplify operations, freeing them to focus on their business outcomes. Building on its legacy as the pioneer of HCI, Nutanix is trusted by companies worldwide to power hybrid multicloud environments consistently, simply, and cost-effectively. Learn more at www.nutanix.com or follow us on social media @nutanix.
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