Test Drive

The Power of Choice: What True Hybrid Multicloud Freedom Really Means

By Mat Brown - Senior Technical Marketing Engineer

September 5, 2025 1:37 am |
min

The promise of the cloud has always been about flexibility, efficiency, and running your business on your own terms. While license portability is a valid part of that conversation, it's only one piece of a much larger puzzle. True cloud freedom isn't just about being able to move a license; it's about having genuine choice in how you procure, consume, and protect your workloads, wherever they run.

At Nutanix, we believe that putting customers in control means offering a platform that adapts to their needs—not the other way around. This means providing flexible commercial models that align with business realities and technical solutions that deliver resilience without breaking the bank.

Choice in Consumption: Your Cloud, Your Commercials

A true hybrid multicloud platform must accommodate a variety of consumption needs. A one-size-fits-all subscription model simply doesn’t reflect the dynamic nature of modern business. Nutanix offers a multi-faceted approach to licensing that provides unparalleled flexibility.

  • Bring-Your-Own-License (BYOL): We empower you to maximize the value of your existing investments. Nutanix license portability allows you to move your term-based licenses for the Nutanix Cloud Platform solution between your on-premises datacenters and the Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) offer running in the public cloud.

This means you don't have to completely repurchase software for migration or disaster recovery, ensuring a cost-effective transition.

  • Cloud Marketplace Procurement: For organizations aligning their spending with cloud provider commitments, Nutanix is available through the AWS and Azure Marketplaces.

    This allows you the opportunity to use your committed spend, like AWS Enterprise Discount Programs (EDP) or Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitments (MACC), to purchase Nutanix software.

    This streamlines procurement and could help you burn down cloud commitments faster.

  • On-Demand, Pay-As-You-Go (PAYG): Crucially, Nutanix continues to offer a true, on-demand PAYG consumption model.

    This is the epitome of cloud flexibility, allowing you to pay for what you use, when you use it. It’s the ideal model for temporary or unpredictable business needs like seasonal workload bursting, dev/test environments, mergers & acquisitions, or on-demand disaster recovery.

    While others are moving away from this model, we see it as a fundamental component of customer choice.  

You can even combine these models, using your existing licenses for steady-state workloads and leveraging PAYG for any overages or temporary capacity bursts.

That's true flexibility.

Unified Hybrid Cloud Operations

Diagram 1: Nutanix Cloud Platform

Resilience Without the Cost: Low-Cost DR with Nutanix

Of course, flexibility extends beyond licensing to architecture. There are many NC2 capabilities that showcase Nutanix’s commitment to giving our customers true flexibility, including on demand scaling, heterogeneous (different node types), EBS attached (in AWS) and using Object Storage for snapshot retention using NMST (Nutanix Multicloud Snapshot Technology).  Nowhere is this flexibility more pertinent than with the Disaster Recovery (DR) use case.

Traditional disaster recovery often involves maintaining a secondary site on-premises with expensive, idle infrastructure as well as the costs of managing and testing the failover process.  That’s not even to mention additional replication and orchestration solution costs that some vendors license on a per VM basis that can lead to unexpected cost overruns or compromising protection.

These are costs that many organizations are finding harder to justify, especially in a world where on demand, pay per use services are increasingly prevalent.

Nutanix provides a powerful and cost-effective alternative to a fixed DR position with the Nutanix Multicloud Snapshot Technology (NMST). NMST is a Nutanix native capability that allows you to replicate snapshots from your primary Nutanix clusters directly to low-cost object storage in the cloud, such as AWS S3 or Azure Blob.

This unlocks some highly efficient DR strategies:

  • Zero-Compute DR: For ultimate cost savings, you can replicate your data to a cloud object store without any compute resources running at your DR site.

    In the event of a disaster, you can spin up a Nutanix Cloud Clusters instance on-demand to recover your workloads.

    This approach is perfect for cost-sensitive organizations with workloads that can accommodate a longer recovery time objective (RTO).

  • Pilot Light DR: For a faster recovery, you can maintain a small "pilot light" cluster in the cloud of your choice and rapidly scale it up when needed.

NMST with Pilot Light

Diagram 2: NMST with Pilot Light

The synergy between our PAYG licensing and NMST-powered DR is a game-changer. You can protect your workloads in low-cost object storage and only pay for the cloud compute infrastructure when you're actively testing or failing over. Best of all, NMST is an integrated part of the Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) license, not a separately priced add-on.

Furthermore, Nutanix’s native DR capabilities, including NMST, support multi-site configurations, enabling you to easily send a third copy of your data to an object store for compliance or as an additional layer of protection alongside existing replication.

The Final Word: Cloud on Your Terms

True hybrid multicloud freedom is about more than just a portable license. It’s about the power to choose the right commercial model and the right technical architecture for every workload. While others are simplifying their offerings by limiting your options, Nutanix remains committed to expanding them.

With Nutanix, "on your terms" means the freedom to use your existing licenses, procure through cloud marketplaces, or pay as you go. It means the freedom to build a cost-effective, on-demand DR solution that doesn't require a massive upfront investment. It means true control over your cloud journey.

For more information on Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) and its DR use case see:

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