Nutanix: The new calm harbor in the troubled cloud and virtualization market?
At its in-house exhibition, Nutanix presented itself as a secure bank for enterprise cloud and virtualization, including a new Kubernetes platform.
(Image: Nutanix)
- Jens Söldner
In addition to announcing innovations in the "Nutanix Cloud Platform" and the new version 6.8 of its "Acropolis Operating System", Nutanix used its in-house exhibition .NEXT to present additional services such as a Kubernetes platform, a curated GPT service, an AI partner program, a partnership in the PaaS environment and extensions to its Project Beacon. The manufacturer's motivation is clear: to show customers in the virtualization and enterprise cloud market who are willing to switch that Nutanix can also serve other requirements in addition to pure hypervisors and hyperconverged storage services.
The area of containerized applications is a major construction site for the manufacturer. For many years, competitor VMware has offered VMware Tanzu, a comprehensive platform with which Kubernetes and other development-related services can be integrated directly into the VMware stack. Nutanix has so far not played in this field - the new Nutanix Kubernetes Platform (NKP), with which the manufacturer provides a CNCF-compliant Kubernetes service, is now set to do so. It is based on the acquisition of D2iQ and its D2iQ Kubernetes Platform (DKP) in December 2023.
Fleet management for large Kubernetes environments
D2iQ is no stranger to the scene; the company was originally founded in 2023 as Mesosphere and was one of the pioneers of the container scene. Since its acquisition by Nutanix six months ago, D2iQ has not been idle and has since released versions 2.7 and 2.8 of DKP. Already, the acquisition is helping Nutanix to position itself as a relevant vendor in the Kubernetes space and take the complexity out of deploying and operating Kubernetes environments for its customers.
For the future, Nutanix wants to expand its operating model from virtual machines to Kubernetes services with the emerging NKP. In addition to functions for deploy, secure and upgrade, the company also hopes to be able to provide fleet management for large Kubernetes environments. In addition to the existing users, the "cloud admins", the manufacturer now wants to tap into another target group: the "platform engineers" who operate modern and highly automated development platforms.
Own Kubernetes platform comes to hyperscalers
In its keynote speech on the second day of the conference, the manufacturer also outlined further steps that are to follow in the near future. Nutanix intends to make its Kubernetes platform available in common hyperscalers (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud) and expand its own hyperconverged storage system for Kubernetes applications. In the medium term, the provider is planning a platform in which, in addition to virtual machines and containers, other services such as databases, data services for Kubernetes and file and object storage services can be managed consistently both on Nutanix's own infrastructure and in the public cloud services.
The next announcement at the keynote, the new version 2.0 of the GPT-in-a-Box offering, was more of a signal and less of an independent innovation. With this, Nutanix provides a turnkey environment for operating GenAI applications in its own data center. This requires a combination of servers with GPUs and a stack provided by Nutanix consisting of AOS, the hypervisor AHV, Kubernetes, PyTorch, Kubeflow and a selection of foundation models as well as integration with the file and object storage services of the AOS platform. Users will benefit from a unified user interface that makes it easy to manage foundation models, API endpoints and user access management.
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AI partner program with Nvidia and Co.
With the introduction of an extensive partner program for AI, the manufacturer wants to position its platform as a basis for the use of AI services directly in its own data center instead of in the cloud. In the keynote, Nutanix therefore particularly emphasized the integration of Nvidia NIM (Nvidia Inference Microservices) with its own AI services as well as a partnership with the AI community Hugging Face. The aim of both partnerships is to simplify and accelerate the use of generative AI applications in the company. In addition to Nvidia and Hugging Face, the AI partner ecosystem that Nutanix presented to over 4,000 conference attendees includes twelve other companies, including AMD, Intel and DataRobot.
The PaaS service Nutanix Database Service is also being expanded through a partnership, which will be extended to support PostgreSQL databases thanks to the newly introduced cooperation with EnterpriseDB (EDB).
"Build Once, Run Anywhere"
The last major announcement at the in-house exhibition was an expansion of Project Beacon, which was presented in 2023 and with which the provider aims to decouple the operation of applications and the data they require from the administration of the underlying infrastructure such as VMs and containers. The benefit for customers should lie in being able to migrate applications much more easily between the cloud and the data center.
Under the motto "Build Once, Run Anywhere", Nutanix presented extensions to Project Beacon in the area of operating containerized applications and integrating data services. To this end, Project Beacon will be married to the in-house Nutanix Kubernetes platform to keep the Kubernetes management experience consistent, regardless of whether the public cloud or the local data center is the execution location. In the future, Nutanix will also continue to develop its AOS platform to be able to operate containers without a hypervisor. The next step in this direction is the development of Cloud Native AOS, which will initially be available for the AWS EKS container service. Nutanix has set the second half of 2024 as the date for this, when customers will be able to test an early access version in EKS.
The coming months will show how things will develop in the market for data center cloud services and virtualization, which has been very turbulent since the VMware takeover by Broadcom. Nutanix was at least able to convincingly demonstrate that the manufacturer is prepared to offer a new port to customers willing to switch.
(dahe)
