The Pandemic has Accelerated Cloud Adoption

In the time of the pandemic the top drivers for transformation have been agility, resiliency, and cost optimization. Not surprisingly, many IT organizations have pivoted to the cloud for rapid and easy access to IT infrastructure. This allows them to respond dynamically to changing requirements and automate many routine administrative tasks while charging you for only what you consumed. At the beginning of the pandemic, Gartner reported that cloud spending rose 37%, despite the decline of overall IT spending by 8%, in the first quarter of 2020.

While many of these organizations took a significant step forward to start or accelerate their cloud journey to achieve their digital transformation, the next big question is how to maximize the value of their cloud investment. First and foremost, consideration should be given to your IT operating model, and how your datacenter modernization and cloud adoption can support that. In the annual Enterprise Cloud Index (ECI), 86% of 3,400 IT leaders surveyed worldwide consider hybrid clouds the ideal IT operating model.

Map Your Cloud Journey–to a Hybrid Cloud

Hybrid cloud infrastructure provides you with the best of each cloud infrastructure: the agility, flexibility, and scalability that public clouds provide and the control and governance that a private cloud ensures. Imagine you can develop and run applications in the optimal cloud at all times, with no interoperability concerns. A true hybrid cloud lets you do this without refactoring the application or reskilling your IT staff. Read more about hybrid cloud and the path to get there. 

To build a truly functional hybrid cloud, it is crucial to do it right from the beginning. If you are still on a legacy 3-tier infrastructure, consider rebuilding your foundation by removing the silos that separate storage, compute, and network services. You can achieve this by standardizing on hyperconverged infrastructure, a software-defined platform that unifies infrastructure management and enables strategic placement, portability, and lifecycle management of apps and workloads. This does not mean rip and replace, but rather reincorporate and consolidate your existing resources into a software-defined platform that unifies management. 

Modernize your Infrastructure with Hyperconverged Infrastructure 

Let’s dive into hyperconverged infrastructure. The HCI-powered platform takes advantage of storage capacity on conventional servers and other storage resource inputs to create a data fabric, pooled resources that can be allocated as needed. By bringing compute, networking, and storage into a single, virtualized system, HCI platforms optimize infrastructure utilization and performance while simplifying operations for administrators.

As one of the earliest hyperconverged infrastructure pioneers, Nutanix provides a purpose-built platform that is open and hardware agnostic. All components in the datacenter stack are integrated and driven by an intelligent software layer that can run any application in any location. Nutanix HCI is made up of two components. 

• A distributed plane that deploys control software to distribute operating functions across a cluster of server nodes, which deliver the storage, virtualization, and networking services needed by guest applications, both VM and container. You can eliminate separate SANs, bring storage closer to workloads, virtualize storage controllers, and combine storage into a logical pool for more dynamic distribution.
• A management pane that allows users to easily administer HCI resources from a single pane of glass, eliminating the need for separate management solutions for each datacenter element. You will gain an app-centric view of operations with monitoring down to the VM level, AI-driven analytics on a range of performance and usage metrics, role-based access control, and REST APIs to automate workflows end to end.

Although VDI deployments were the first enterprise use case where hyperconverged infrastructure shined, Nutanix HCI supports many environments and the full gamut of enterprise use cases today, including:

• Databases, including Oracle, SAP HANA, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL, IBM DB2, and many others.
• Virtualized server applications, including Oracle E-Business Suite, SAP Business Suite, Microsoft Dynamics, Epic, Meditech, and more, which may be supported by AHV or other major hypervisors.
• Big data solutions, including Splunk, MongoDB, Elastic, Hadoop, and more.
• Cloud-native applications, using Kubernetes, Docker, Puppet, and Chef.
• Virtual desktop infrastructure, offered by Citrix or VMware Horizon.
• Remote Office and Branch Office (ROBO), including print and file servers, office services, and custom applications.

You can learn a lot more about our HCI here. If you are interested in seeing how it works, take a Test Drive for Nutanix HCI. 

Five Easy Steps to Transform Your Datacenter

Datacenter transformation is a big undertaking, and here are five key steps that will enable you to quickly deploy and manage complex virtual environments with Nutanix.  

Step 1: Size and purchase

Simplify scoping of your requirements with Nutanix’s unified, scalable system. In traditional environments, IT purchases involve guess work around future capacity requirements. Nutanix’s scalable architecture eliminates the need to plan years in advance. You can purchase for the next quarter or the next year, adding capacity as the business grows. 

Try an automated sizing calculator that you can upload with workload requirements. The sizer will help you understand current infrastructure needs and generate configuration recommendations.

Because the Nutanix system is unified, you will no longer need to piece together an infrastructure design from multiple vendors that would need to be integrated. Licensing is more straightforward with one vendor to buy from, and Nutanix’s subscription licensing is based on capacity, so you only pay for what you need, when you need it. As business needs scale, you can just add more licenses.

While other HCI solutions are tightly integrated with a specific hypervisor, Nutanix provides an open solution that supports VMware, Microsoft, and its own free, built-in hypervisor–AHV. Nutanix is 100% software, but also offers appliances from industry leading vendors such as Lenovo, HPE, and Dell among many others, in addition to a Nutanix-branded unit, or you can bring your own hardware from your favorite server vendor.  

Step 2: Deploy clusters

Deploy your clusters. Nutanix deployment is automated, quick, and easy. Using the Foundation tool, you can deploy a bare-metal cluster in a matter of minutes. Foundation automatically configures IPMI, hypervisors, and controller VMs. With a few clicks, you can deploy and configure infrastructure before lunch and spend the afternoon migrating applications.

Nutanix’s software approach also enables remote installation. For hardware appliances that may need to be deployed in a remote office or datacenter, HCI administrators can load the Nutanix stack and configure clusters without going onsite, as well as VMs and applications. As long as the hardware is plugged in, it’s also possible to add nodes to expand capacity from a remote location.