Introduction
Cost Governance comes home—re-architected for the secure, air-gapped private cloud.
For years, Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) has delivered a unified control plane for Build (Self-Service) and Operate (AIOps) directly within the Prism interface. Govern (Cost & Security), however, relied on a SaaS-based control plane. While effective for connected enterprises, this architecture introduced friction for our most security-conscious customers—defense, public sector, and banking institutions operating "dark sites" or strictly sovereign clouds.
With NCM 2.0, we are changing the architecture of governance. We have decoupled Cost Governance from the public cloud and re-platformed it to run natively in your datacenter on the NCM next-generation platform.
Architectural Shift: Closing the Perimeter
The most significant change in NCM 2.0 is the data path. We have replaced the external SaaS tether with a local, high-performance NCM Data Platform that ingests, processes, and analyzes telemetry without it ever leaving your perimeter.
Architecture diagram comparing the legacy internet-dependent SaaS model to NCM 2.0's secure, air-gapped on-premises design
The On-Prem Governance Stack For the platform architects and SEs designing these environments, the new stack delivers SaaS-grade analytics using a modern, cloud-native architecture deployed directly on your infrastructure:
Cost Governance On-Prem: Day 0 Value
NCM 2.0 delivers the full proprietary TCO Metering Model to your private cloud. This engine automatically discovers hardware, amortizes costs, and calculates a unit rate (per vCPU/GB RAM) for your on-prem resources, enabling:
- Showback & Chargeback: Automated cost allocation to Cost Centers and Business Units.
- Self-Service Integration: Developers see the exact daily cost of a Blueprint before they click "Launch" in NCM Self-Service, driving accountability at the source.
- Dark Site Support: Full metering and reporting functionality for environments with zero internet connectivity.
NCM 2.1: Precision Metering & Recovery Points
Following the platform re-architecture in NCM 2.0, the upcoming NCM 2.1 release sharpens the metering logic for technical accuracy.
- Snapshot Metering via Recovery Points: We are deprecating the legacy "Protection Domain" logic in favor of a Recovery Point (RP) model. This measures reclaimable space at the granular VM level so that the storage cost of data protection is accurately attributed to the specific workload owner, not a general infrastructure bucket.
- Term-Based Cost Modeling: We’re replacing complex depreciation schedules with a simplified Term-Based Model. Admins simply define a validity period for the cluster hardware, and the system derives the daily cost. This allows for immediate "Day 0" value in Proof-of-Concept (PoC) environments without requiring deep financial data entry.
The Future is Private and Unified
NCM Next-gen marks a pivotal evolution in how we deliver cloud governance. By bringing Cost Governance directly into the datacenter, we are empowering our most security-conscious customers to Build, Operate, and Govern their environments with autonomy. This is more than an architectural update; it is a unified, intelligent control plane designed to remain as secure and private as the infrastructure it manages.
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