Nutanix’s hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) software is now available as a service on AWS. Due to the move, Nutanix will be better able to compete with competing VMware, allowing data center customers to more easily switch customers to a hybrid cloud model.
The Nutanix Clusters on AWS solution, announced last year and made widely available this week, lets companies move applications from their private clouds to AWS without having to redesign their apps. They can even deploy cloud instances and manage the hybrid cloud infrastructure with a single interface, said Nutanix’s Prism management software, Monica Kumar, senior VP of marketing at Nutanix.
“They can create a hybrid cloud in less than an hour,” she told Data Center Knowledge.
Nutanix, which got its start with the sale of hyperconverged infrastructure devices, is now a top player in the HCI software market. It still sells devices, but several years ago it changed its strategy, and began a push to get its software into as many hardware platforms as possible. It ended striking deals with the likes of Dell EMC, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, and Lenovo.
Nutanix’s HCI software, which includes the Acropolis hypervisor, software-defined networks, and database management software, allows companies to build private clouds and manage their computing, storage, virtualization, and networking through a single window.
Today, Nutanix ranks second behind VMware in the hyperconverged infrastructure software market. The new partnership with AWS expands the market for Nutanix software, said Bob Laliberte, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group.
Software and cloud companies are all pushing for a piece of the lucrative hybrid cloud market. Software vendors such as Nutanix and VMware offer companies to help companies migrate to hybrid cloud from the data center up, while public cloud providers AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud approach it via a ‘cloud down’ approach, he said.
AWS, for example, has developed AWS Outposts, enabling companies to use AWS-designed hardware to perform AWS on-premises computing and storage services and is fully integrated with AWS’s public cloud. AWS also has a close partnership with VMware, enabling VMware to run and sell services with its own software stack on bare metal hardware in AWS data centers. It’s called VMware Cloud on AWS.
Microsoft Azure offers Azure Stack, which runs on its partners’ own hardware. Google Cloud provides the Anthos platform to help organizations go through hybrid cloud.
“It is clear, as further demonstrated by this Nutanix AWS offering, that the world will become hybrid,” Laliberte said.
But why would AWS partner with Nutanix if it could take potential sales away from both its VMware partnership and Outposts? The Answer: It opens AWS to the installed base of Nutanix of about 16,580 customers.
“They are the leader,” Laliberte said, referring to AWS. “For them, this is just another way of getting companies to consume their services.”
Nutanix Clusters on AWS
Nutanix Clusters on AWS is available in edge metal Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances in 20 AWS regions. Nutanix Clusters offers built-in integration with the AWS network layer, which removes network latency and ensures good performance, Kumar said.
The network integration also simplifies deployment by allowing customers to use their existing AWS accounts, including unused credits, virtual private clouds, and subnets, the company said. Customers can also use Nutanix’s Xi Beam tool to gain visibility into public and private cloud computing, allowing them to choose the most cost-effective environment for their needs, the company said.
Existing Nutanix customers have multiple ways to pay for the new Nutanix Clusters on AWS service. They can port their existing Nutanix licenses to the cloud on the farm, use a pay-as-you-go model, or a cloud commit model, in which customers pay for what they use, but are required to pay a minimum amount that they plan to spend, Kumar said.
Nutanix executives said they expect four headline cases after the new well service:
- Customers who want to “lift and move” applications from their own data centers to the cloud.
- Customers who need scaling or need to expand to new regions to support seasonal requirements or changing priorities. One use case is expanding settings for Virtual Desktop Infrastructure.
- Customers who want to use AWS as a secondary site for disaster recovery.
- Customers who want to pair AWS ‘cloud-native services, such as artificial intelligence or analytics, with their local applications.
