Achieving Success as a Service Provider in a Hybrid Multicloud World
Nutanix helps service providers increase efficiency and accelerate the introduction of profitable new services
Hybrid multicloud has become the preferred operating model for companies seeking to gain and maintain a competitive advantage. While this opens new opportunities for services, the complexities introduced by this new operating model also create significant challenges for Service Providers as they seek to expand and modernize their service portfolios, including more complicated operations, struggles with vendor lock-in, and difficulty containing costs.
At Nutanix, service providers are a key pillar of our hybrid multicloud strategy, and we are committed to the creation of a vibrant ecosystem to serve the unique needs of service providers and their customers.
Nutanix enables service providers to modernize their portfolios to provide:
Superior computing capabilities, including support for demanding VM and container workloads running on the latest CPUs and GPUs.
Advanced data services, including block, structured (RDBMS and NoSQL) and unstructured (file and object) data services, all from a single platform.
Value-added platform services, including data protection and disaster recovery, storage-as-a- service, desktop-as-a-service (DaaS), and more.
With Nutanix, service providers are well-positioned to help customers embrace hybrid multicloud operations. For example, digital infrastructure provider U.S. Signal partnered with Nutanix to offer next-generation infrastructure and a variety of innovative multicloud services, including DaaS that scales via cloud-based infrastructure, disaster recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS), storage-as-a-service, and software-defined file and object storage services.
With built-in security and a full suite of data services, Nutanix is an ideal platform for service providers that want to offer secure sovereign clouds. Many enterprises now recognize that public cloud is not an ideal fit for every application. By combining differentiated services built on Nutanix with support tailored to customers’ needs, service providers can address these emerging opportunities.
Simply put, the Nutanix infrastructure has delivered everything we expected and more. From delivering an immediate performance lift to rock solid availability. The solution was designed with appreciation that hardware fails, however with the level of resiliency and redundancy built in, such incidents have been handled without service interruption.
Nutanix for Service Providers
With a single platform for all apps and data anywhere, Nutanix enables service providers to build out service portfolios that address today’s hybrid multicloud needs while increasing profitability. The Nutanix Elevate Service Provider Program delivers the support your business needs to get started and build even greater success.
Starting with the Right Platform
Our core offering, Nutanix Cloud Platform (NCP) is designed using an industry-leading software-defined infrastructure approach. The most common deployment model is a hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), which converges compute, storage, and networking to streamline infrastructure deployment and simplify management.
Because NCP can be deployed in customer or service provider datacenters, bare metal-as-a-service cloud providers or at the edge, it greatly simplifies hybrid multicloud deployments. A single operating model spans all environments, enabling service providers to better support their customers’ hybrid multicloud requirements.
Figure 1. Nutanix Cloud Platform: One platform includes essential building blocks for IaaS, PaaS, and other value-added services.
The Nutanix stack gives service providers freedom of choice across hardware platforms, clouds and hypervisors so you can work with your preferred hardware vendor and in your preferred public cloud.
Nutanix Elevate Service Providers can leverage NCI to utilize the full-featured Nutanix AHV hypervisor to maximize profitability while concurrently supporting VMware for situations that require it. The rapidly expanding Nutanix-Ready ecosystem features hundreds of partners, including ISVs, data protection and security, operations and automation, networking, and platform vendors.
Additionally, service providers can leverage NCI Compute, an enterprise virtualization platform that integrates with qualified external storage partners to run demanding mission-critical applications. With support for leading platforms like Dell PowerFlex and Pure Storage FlashArray, NCI Compute lets service providers integrate Nutanix more easily with existing investments and also creates new service opportunities.
The Right Services Portfolio
NCP provides the foundation for a diverse and profitable portfolio of services, including:
IaaS deployed as private, shared or edge clouds that support VMs and containers,
Storage-as-a-service delivering files and objects,
DRaaS for a wide range of applications and workloads,
DaaS,
Database-as-a-service, and
Enterprise AI.
With Nutanix, service providers can immediately support the dedicated and shared deployment models requested by customers across a variety of locations, such as in hosted and cloud datacenters, at the edge – such as retail sites or manufacturing facilities – or any combination.
Service providers can take advantage of our broad portfolio, including Nutanix Unified Storage, Nutanix Kubernetes Platform, Nutanix Database Service, and Nutanix Enterprise AI to expand their offerings over time.
Figure 3. Services delivered by Nutanix Elevate Service Provider.
Profitability from Day 1
Cost is often a major concern for service providers seeking to modernize and expand services. Nutanix helps service providers achieve greater profitability by reducing OpEx and CapEx and improving cash flow. NCP offers as much as 42% lower three-year cost of operations and up to 41% lower infrastructure costs than traditional approaches.
Nutanix Elevate Service Provider Program
The Nutanix Elevate Service Provider program is designed to help new service providers quickly onboard and hit the ground running. The program is also designed to ensure that established Nutanix service providers can continue to grow their businesses and services portfolios.
The program consists of different service provider tiers: Authorized, Professional, Champion, and Premier. Each tier comes with specific business and training requirements, and higher tiers offer greater benefits ranging from incentives and rebates to joint go-to-market. See nutanix.com/partners/service-providers for more details.
Flexible consumption
Nutanix offers service providers a unique cloud-like purchasing model that aligns software licensing costs with cash flow. This consumption model enables service providers to commit to a certain amount of prepaid software spend, typically on a monthly basis.
The consumption of software services is metered, and any overage is invoiced the following month. This aligns cash outflow with cash inflow, with everything based on a predefined rate card and billed at a fixed $/hour rate. (See the Service Provider Consumption Brief for more details.)
Figure 3. Nutanix Service Provider Consumption Model
What Success Looks Like
Here is what a successful service provider journey looks like with Nutanix:
Start with a private or shared cloud offering for VMs and containers in your datacenter and the customer’s premises as an edge deployment.
Target organizations moving primary workloads out of the datacenter or to accommodate the ability to burst as needed.
Help clients modernize edge deployments with a distributed cloud offering.
Accommodate any virtualized workload plus unstructured data (file and object).
Add DRaaS for the Nutanix installed base.
Expand to cloud-native workloads leveraging Nutanix Kubernetes Platform, Nutanix Data Services for Kubernetes (NDK), and Nutanix Database Service.
Migrating to Nutanix
Many service providers migrate existing services and customers to Nutanix. This can include migrating from VMware to Nutanix. Whatever your migration path, Nutanix simplifies the process with tools for data collection and sizing. Nutanix application migration tools including Collector and Move simplify the migration process and minimize disruption. The Nutanix ecosystem of services partners and Nutanix Professional Services can assist with any aspect of migration if help is needed.
Services to Help You Succeed
Nutanix Professional Services empowers service providers to build differentiated hybrid multicloud solutions. Our experts work as strategic partners to help design, implement and optimize full-stack environments tailored to your needs while accelerating time-to-market through proven methodologies and hands-on delivery.
We can help you architect repeatable service offerings and drive operational excellence. From Kubernetes adoption to AI integration and multicloud governance, Nutanix professionals bring deep product and infrastructure expertise that bridges strategy with execution while focusing on enablement. We’ll train your teams, transfer the essential knowledge and enable you to reduce the need for long-term consulting engagements.
See our full range of service offerings.
Getting Started as a Nutanix Elevate Service Provider
Contact Nutanix Elevate SP Aggregators or us to schedule a complimentary workshop. Our subject matter experts will walk through how Nutanix can help you modernize and expand your business. Start the process to become a partner at nutanix.com/partners/service-provider or email us at elevatesp@nutanix.com.