.NEXT, Chicago – Nutanix CEO Rajiv Ramaswami is preparing the company and its nearly 24,000 customers for an impending “app avalanche” that will transform the way enterprises will build and run new and existing workloads in the cloud.
Ramaswami spoke to Silverlinings during a one-one-one briefing at the company’s first in-person customer event since 2019 where approximately 2,000 attendees gathered at the McCormick Place convention center on Lake Michigan to learn about data center evolution and modernization, workload migration, what Ramaswami called “new frontier of Kubernetes” and how to cope with the expected onslaught of apps slated to pop up in the next five years.
“There's going to be more apps built in the next few years than the last 40 years,” said Ramaswami, quoting December 2022 research from IDC. “This app explosion, clearly an avalanche, as we call it, is happening. And a lot of these tend to be newer apps, modern apps, digital apps,” and they are operating in a hybrid, multi-cloud world.
Enterprises need to “figure out how to manage it, how to deal with the complexity, cost, portability of applications, talent — all of these are issues for them. And that's our forte,” he said.
Today Nutanix’ forte included a slew of announcements focused on helping enterprises cope with surviving a multi-cloud world, including Nutanix Central, which provides cloud-delivered unified management and reporting of the Nutanix environment distributed across private, public and edge clouds from a single place.
Observability across multiple clouds is a must-have for enterprises Lee Caswell, SVP of product and solutions marketing for Nutanix, told us during a press briefing on the company’s news. “[Nutanix Central] gives you that federated view across endpoints, multi-site data centers and hyperscaler endpoints,” he said.
The company also launched new capabilities in the Nutanix Cloud Platform which allows customers to integrate data management of containerized and virtualized applications on-premises, on public cloud and at the edge. This includes comprehensive data services for Kubernetes applications as well as cross-cloud data mobility.
These capabilities are key because, “50% of data will be generated at the edge because it turns out sensors can generate data faster than people, and the AI-enabled edge allows you and forces you to have distributed data,” said Caswell. “It's not practical to centralize. … Customers are growing into this hybrid, multi-cloud world, and it's very important for them to start thinking about how they will optimally locate applications and data over time.”
The new service called, Nutanix Data Services for Kubernetes (NDK), will give customers control over cloud-native apps and data at scale, according to the company announcement.
In the vein of cross-cloud data mobility, the company introduced MultiCloud Snapshot Technology to deliver cross-cloud data mobility. This technology will extend Nutanix hybrid multi-cloud data services by enabling snapshots directly to cloud native object stores, starting with AWS S3, according to Caswell. This will allow enterprises to seamlessly protect and migrate stateful Kubernetes applications and data across cloud infrastructures, he added.
Finally, Nutanix went with a big vision on its last piece of news — a multi-year effort called Project Beacon. Project Beacon is glimpse into where not only the company is headed but also the industry as a whole — a future where an enterprise can “build an app once, use the set of services and really be able to run them anywhere, on any substrate and it'll be completely portable,” Ramaswami said.
For Nutanix, the project aims to deliver a portfolio of data-centric platform-as-service- level services available natively anywhere, including on Nutanix or on native public cloud. It’s a vision of decoupling the application and its data from the underlying infrastructure.
“That's the long-term vision —having this vision of multi-cloud really simplified — not just at the infrastructure layer, but also in terms of how you build and run applications.”
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