Magic Quadrant for Hyperconverged Infrastructure 2018

Nutanix has been recognized by Gartner as a Leader in 2018 inaugural Gartner Magic Quadrant for Hyperconverged Systems.

Nutanix believes its placement in the Leaders quadrant is a strong validation of its leadership in the market it pioneered and in its vision to become the next generation operating system for the enterprise cloud.

Read More: Magic Quadrant for Hyperconverged Infrastructure 2018

My Experience Attending Nutanix .Next Europe 2017!

I was lucky enough to attend Nutanix .Next Europe 2017 in Nice, France. Really, it went beyond my expectations as a technology conference. Starting with the name of the venue “Acropolis Conference Center”, Opening Keynote with more than 2,200+ Cloud Builders, Recognizing of NutanixNTC, Live Demo by Steven Poitras (Writer of The Nutanix Bible) followed by very inspirational presentation by Fabien Cousteau & Rob Lloyd (CEO Hyperloop One), Ending with an remarkable closing keynote by Mick Ebeling “Founder NOT IMPOSSIBLE”.

Also, witness the passion for the technology & innovation between all attendees, including Nutanix Top Management, Staff, Sponsors and Customers.

Moreover, it was a good opportunity to hear all the latest announcements including “Acropolis Object Storage Service, Nutanix Calm & XI Cloud Services” and upcoming features in AHV 5.5 (e.g. Support for vGPU & Citrix PVS)

If you missed .Next Europe 2017, You still have the chance to watch the recorded Morning Keynote Day1, Afternoon Keynote Day1 & Keynote Day2

Or, register for .Next On-Tour to hear the highlights and hottest announcements from the .NEXT Conference.

Nutanix X-RAY

Nutanix X-Ray is an automated testing framework and benchmarking application for enterprise grade datacenters. With X-Ray, teams can simulate how applications are impacted during common events and scenarios, including system failures, spikes in application use, software upgrades, and more. Run multiple workloads in the same environment, while ensuring that heavy demand of one application does not negatively impact performance for other workloads.

The following areas are covered in the X-Ray test scenarios:

• Availability X-Ray tests how a hyperconverged solution tolerates a node failure during a workload. Consistent performance and stability test the system's availability and the management fabric's failure tolerance.

• Realistic Performance X-Ray tests the system's solution to handle mixed workloads. The solution can include running databases on a single node, simultaneously running VDI workloads on multiple nodes, mixing VM snapshot, VDI boot storms, VM provisioning, and multiple workloads or stability over an extended period of time.

• Feature Set  Ideal features include clones for VM provisioning, deduplication, compression, VAAI support, native VMlevel replication, Cloud Connect, 1-click software and hypervisor upgrades, BIOS/drives, compatibility with multiple hypervisors and the ability to migrate and convert between hypervisors with the same solution.

• Data Integrity X-Ray tests the data's safety during power outages or component failures.

Download Nutanix X-Ray and Docs

Nutanix Xtract

Nutanix Xtract provides a simple method for businesses to migrate existing VMs & Databases from VMware ESXi clusters to Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS.

Xtract for VMs has been designed for all workload types, providing an efficient method to onboard a large number of VMs very simply and quickly. Its architecture is designed with performance and efficiency in mind, and starts with a deployed virtual appliance. IT admins follow a 3-step process in the Xtract administrator console to configure and run migrations.

Where Xtract for VMs takes a “lift and shift” approach to migration, Xtract for DBs, operates at an application-level to handle the migration, and importantly, transformation of Microsoft SQL Server databases.From the initial discovery and scans of SQL Server environments, performance and configuration information is used in-conjunction with Nutanix best practises to create a design template. Xtract uses this template to create a new SQL Server deployment on Nutanix, migrating only the data within the databases into the newly created VM. The application of Nutanix best practices ensures the database instance is right-sized during the process.

Key Benefits:

• Streamlined VM migrations with one-click simplicity
• Agentless infrastructure discovery and migrations
• Flexible VM network mappings
• Control over the cutover process with near-zero downtime
• Cost efficient – included with all Nutanix software editions
• SQL migrations from any source platform (hardware, virtual or cloud)

Read More: VM Migrations and Database Transformations for Simple Enterprise Cloud Adoption

Nutanix Xi Cloud Services

Nutanix Xi Cloud Services provide a native extension to the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform, delivering an integrated public cloud environment that can be instantly provisioned and automatically configured.

Xi Cloud Services will be operated by Nutanix and delivered from datacenters in the U.S., located in Northern Virginia and San Francisco Bay Area. We have also teamed up with Google to Fuse Cloud Environments for Enterprise Apps and deliver Xi from Google Cloud Platform datacenters.

Disaster Recovery (DR) Service

The first Xi Cloud Service that will be available is Xi Disaster Recovery (DR), a turnkey and integrated service that rapidly and intelligently protects the applications and data in your Nutanix environment without the need to purchase and maintain a separate infrastructure stack. Customers will be able to simply select VMs for protection, choose one of several subscription plans and setup protection – all from within Prism! The VMs will then be replicated in the background, ready to be recovered in the public environment in the event of a site failure.

Read More:

• Xi Disaster Recovery (DR) Service 
• Xi Disaster Recovery – A New Approach to Cloud Services

Nutanix Calm!

Nutanix Calm provides application automation and lifecycle management for the Nutanix and public clouds. Calm orchestrates the provisioning, scaling, and management of applications across multiple environments to make the entire IT infrastructure more agile and application-centric.

Calm defines applications via simple blueprints that administrators can easily create and instantly deploy. IT managers can either utilize pre-integrated blueprints or create their own, then publish them to the Nutanix Marketplace. 

Organizations can now fully automate hybrid cloud architecture deployments, scaling both multitiered and distributed applications across different cloud environments, including AWS.

Calm’s policy-based governance and reporting show the overall utilization and true cost of your public cloud consumption at a glance so you can base application provisioning decisions on business needs and budget requirements.

Read More:

• Application Automation with Nutanix Calm
• App Centric Infrastructure for Any Cloud

HYCU - The only backup and recovery purpose-built for Nutanix

HYCU  (Haiku: a traditional form of Japanese poetry valued for simplicity, openness, depth lightness) is the first data protection solution powered by ‘Comtrade Software’ that is fully integrated with Nutanix AHV. HYCU makes data protection easy to deploy and manage with automated application discovery. 

Features:

• Native & Reliable data protection for VMs and mission-critical applications. 
• 3 minutes to deploy through Nutanix Prism web console. 
• 4 minutes to learn and protect virtual machines and applications. 
• 2 minutes to restore VMs & Applications. 
• Predefined backup policies (Gold, Silver, and Bronze) that simplify the data protection implementation. 
• Automatic backup scheduling provides data protection based on your recovery point objectives (RPOs). 
• In-built application awareness provides application discovery and application-specific backup and restore. 
• Multiple data storage targets, including cloud services (Amazon, Azure) also local storages using NSF & SMB. 

Licensing:

HYCU comes with a prebuilt Instant-on license that expires automatically after 45 days and cannot be reused. HYCU license is based on the number of CPU sockets on all Nutanix clusters.

Perpetual license:

•Nutanix SX series: USD $999/socket

•Nutanix NX series: USD $1500/socket

Subscription:

•USD $75/month/socket

Resources:

Press Release: Comtrade Software Introduces the First Data Protection Solution Purpose-built for Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform

The Register: Software 'submarine' surfaces data protection for the Nutanix hypervisor crowd

Trial: http://tryhycu.com

Comtrade SCOM Management Pack for Nutanix Version 2.0

Comtrade SCOM MP for Nutanix V 2.0 designed to integrate end-to-end service monitoring of Nutanix' award-winning Enterprise Could platform into Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM).

What's new?

• Easy Configuration Wizard.
• Optimize the performance of Microsoft Exchange Server and  SQL Server on Nutanix.
• Troubleshoot Microsoft SharePoint Server issues faster, more accurately.
• An insightful lens into your bare-metal server health.
• Free 1-year subscription to Comtrade OMS Solution for Nutanix.

Free Trial

Nutanix Go!

The Nutanix Go Program allow the customers to rent Nutanix NX appliances when they need to scale up their data center to meet peak demand, while scaling down the infrastructure to reduce expenses. IT projects no longer need to be locked into the typical three to five-year IT refreshes cycles or moved to a public cloud just to gain financial flexibility.

Nutanix NX appliances could be rented as short as six months, and up to 5 years as long term agreements.

Nutanix allow the Customers to use a hybrid model by mixing between owned & rented NX appliances in the same cluster. Also, guarantee the security of customer data if NX appliances returned at the end of the agreement by wiping out the data before returning to Nutanix.

Nutanix Go pricing is available now for certain Nutanix NX appliances to qualified U.S. customers, with international availability coming at a later date.
Read More.

New Hardware Options for Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform

Nutanix announced that its Enterprise Cloud Platform will be available as a term-based license for deployment of Hewlett Packard Enterprises (HPE) ProLiant rackmount servers and Cisco UCS B-series blade servers, adding to previously announced support for the Cisco UCS C-series platform.

These new supported hardware options will broaden the deployment of Nutanix beyond newly purchased appliances from the company or its global OEM partners, Dell and Lenovo, to the millions of HPE ProLiant and Cisco UCS servers already in use in corporate and cloud data centers.

Customers will enjoy the optionality of deploying newly licensed Nutanix software-only entitlements on qualified HPE or Cisco servers while also retaining the option to transfer their software-only entitlements to another qualified third-party platform, including additional x86 servers anticipated to be validated at a later date.
Nutanix plans to make its Enterprise Cloud Platform software available for new and existing HPE ProLiant servers by Q4 calendar 2017. Specific models and supported server configurations will be announced at the time of availability. Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform software for Cisco UCS B-Series Blades is available now as a tech preview with general availability this quarter.

Read More.

Enterprise Cloud for Dummies

The Enterprise Cloud for Dummies eBook sets out to demystify the concept. Discover how leading organizations are moving beyond hyperconvergence to an enterprise cloud strategy, bringing the benefits of the public cloud to their own datacenters—and find out how you can do the same thing.

In this eBook you’ll learn how you can:

• Prepare your organization for the new era of IT infrastructure
• Get the frictionless benefits of public clouds without sacrificing the control of on-prem infrastructure
• Leverage the newest best practices for enterprise storage, virtualization, and cloud technologies

Download

Citrix XenServer and Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform

Together with Citrix, Nutanix will be adding support for industry leading Citrix applications including XenApp, XenDesktop, NetScaler VPX and NetScaler running on Citrix XenServer on the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform. Starting with the Nutanix Asterix release, XenServer customers will be able to run XenServer 7 as a tech preview on the Nutanix solution.

Once the capability is released, Citrix XenServer users will find that the move to the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform will bring the benefits Nutanix customers are seeing to their own environment. These can include:

• Faster upfront deployment and ongoing 1-click expansion
• Linear scaling of users without performance bottleneck
• Lower costs and operational overhead

Read More ...

Nutanix Again Named a Leader in 2016 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Integrated Systems

Gartner, Inc. has positioned Nutanix as a leader in the 2016 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Integrated Systems for the second consecutive year. Nutanix believes its continued placement in the Leaders Quadrant is strong validation of its vision to deliver a true enterprise cloud platform which can support the increasing demands of modern businesses.

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Monitoring Nutanix with Comtrade Management Pack for SCOM

Comtrade natively plugs into Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) to monitor Nutanix enterprise clouds including hosts, systems, storage, virtual machines (VMs), data protection And replication.

The application awareness feature discovers business critical applications, such as Citrix XenApp/XenDesktop hosted on Nutanix enterprise clouds.

IT can now visualize from the applications to the metal, and monitor and understand how the Applications are using compute, storage and virtualization resources.

Read More ...

Test Drive Nutanix

Test drive Nutanix enables you to try Community Edition within minutes, with no hardware, no setup, and no cost for two hours.

Community Edition is a 100% software solution enabling technology enthusiasts to easily evaluate the latest enterprise cloud platform at zero cost. Users can now experience the same Nutanix hyperconverged technology that powers the datacenters of thousands of leading enterprises around the world.

Test Drive Nutanix

Test Drive Nutanix - Getting Started Guide

Nutanix Expands Relationship with Microsoft

Nutanix announced the expansion of its relationship with Microsoft Corp. through collaboration on a jointly-engineered integrated system designed to provide customers a comprehensive hybrid cloud offering.

The new offering brings together the Microsoft Cloud Platform System (CPS) Standard and Nutanix enterprise cloud platform to deliver a Microsoft Azure-consistent environment within an enterprise datacenter.

The system is ideal for enterprise applications like Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SharePoint, and Microsoft Dynamics, which require high performance and availability.

Read More...

7 Reasons Why Acropolis is the Next Generation Hypervisor

After first disrupting the legacy SAN and NAS architecture of the virtualized datacenter, Nutanix is now transforming virtualization itself. Nutanix’s software-defined infrastructure enables a new approach to the stand-alone hypervisor model, already 12+ years old.

Read More ...

Nutanix Community Edition On-Demand

Community Edition can now be deployed as an on-demand service running on AWS or Google Cloud Platform. Community Edition on-demand is enabled via technology integration with Ravello Systems, the leading provider of nested virtualization solutions. With a flexible, time-based pricing model that costs approximately $1 per hour.

Available on Ravello Repo

Nutanix Xtreme Computing Platform

The Nutanix Xtreme Computing Platform is a 100% software-driven infrastructure solution that natively converges storage, compute and virtualization into a turnkey appliance that can be deployed in minutes to run any application out of the box. Datacenter capacity can be easily expanded one node at a time with no disruption, delivering linear and predictable scalability with pay-as-you-grow flexibility. Nutanix eliminates complexity and allows IT to drive better business outcomes.

Xtreme Computing Platform Specifications

Nutanix Community Edition

Community Edition is a 100% software solution enabling technology enthusiasts to easily evaluate The latest hyperconvergence technology at zero cost. Users can now experience the same Nutanix Technology that powers the datacenters of thousands of leading enterprises around the world.

Register Now.
Getting Started with Nutanix CE