What is Nutanix?
According to Techzine, Nutanix is a so-called hyper-converged Infrastructure (HCI) solution. A software platform (cluster) that runs on top of different kinds of individual servers (nodes). All these servers are linked together through this HCI software platform. All processors, internal memory, hard disks (storage), and network interfaces are bundled in one cluster to run virtual machines.
What is Hyper-converged Infrastructure (HCI)?
Hyper-converged Infrastructure simplifies the deployment, management, and scaling of datacentre resources by combining x86-based server and storage resources with intelligent software.
Why is Nutanix the best hybrid and multi-cloud platform?
No need for third party intervention
The ability to deploy and configure your cluster, without any third party managing it keeps you in control of the most critical infrastructure powering your applications and data. The self-service nature of Nutanix Clusters allows for just-in-time deployment, which aligns well with most cloud consumption models. Regardless of cluster size, deployments times are about the same
Use your software licenses across clouds
Nutanix Clusters provides Nutanix Software licensing flexibility across clouds, which is a big advantage over competitive solutions. Cluster resource management can be integrated into Prism Element and only needs one Prism Central instance to manage multiple clusters. By doing this you are saving your resources for your workloads instead of using them for management tasks.
No need to re-engineer your network
Nutanix Clusters is a hybrid and multi-cloud solution that provides native AWS cloud IPs for your workloads that migrate from on-prem into AWS. This means that you do not need to deploy, manage, or consume the additional overhead of another network overlay on top of the one the cloud provider is already using. After you deploy your cluster, you can simply create a new subnet from the AWS console and add it to Prism, and then it’s ready to use with Nutanix Clusters.
Built-in security groups improve data protection
The built-in management security group contains all of the necessary ports to operate your Cluster. The security group gets applied to every management Elastic Network Interface (ENI) on the bare-metal EC2 instances. The security group deployed for workloads is the same as the management security group deployed to every ENI used by the workloads running on your cluster. Without spending any additional money, time, or resources, inbound and outbound traffic is protected. If you need to get more granular protection, you can use your existing on-prem Prism Central for management and enable network and VM micro-segmentation.
Deactivate and reactivate instances to control cloud costs.
The Hibernate feature of Nutanix Clusters (currently in tech preview) allows you to shut down your bare-metal EC2 instances running Nutanix AOS and move all of the Clusters storage to AWS S3 buckets. When you want workloads to return to where you left off, you can simply resume your cluster, and then storage is recovered from S3. In scenarios where you only need to compute to exist in spurts, like Dev-Test or seasonal workloads, but are still best served in traditional environments, the Hibernate feature provides the option of moving to a dynamic instance based model of public cloud, rather than static infrastructure on-prem. In addition to the cost savings from reducing infrastructure, this feature also optimizes operations and time, given that you can start and stop Cluster instances with just a few clicks.
A lot of people thought everything would become cloud-only, now it is clear that from a cost perspective this is not feasible. Hybrid cloud seems to have the future. Also, Nutanix has a working product and a great list of customers, while others are still in the process of developing their hybrid and multi-cloud platform.