A Google Admin's Introduction to Nutanix: What Is It, and Do You Need it?

Nutanix is a revolutionary company in the world of industry-leading technology. They provide an enterprise cloud that takes the next step beyond hyper convergence, to give the IT industry a chance to focus on the services and applications that drive their business forward.

Nutanix is a Gartner-leading company that delivers the economics and agility of public cloud offerings, along with the security of traditional on-premise deployments. Used by some of the most advanced enterprises in the world, Nutanix allows for the combination of storage and computing power, simplifying operations and reducing space and power usage. Integrated with built-in virtualization, Nutanix can create invisible infrastructures for modern-day business.

Recently, Nutanix announced their partnership with Google Cloud. The two companies will come together to fuse cloud environments in the sector, for better and more diverse enterprise apps. The result of the collaboration will be that joint customers will have the option to manage and deploy both traditional, and cloud-based enterprise applications in the public cloud, while blending the Google Cloud Platform with the Nutanix environment.

Bringing Nutanix and Google Cloud Together

The purpose of the Google and Nutanix alliance is to address the tech opportunities that exist for operating and building hybrid clouds that will combine scalable public cloud environments with the best of private architecture. According to the team, enterprise CIOs will be able to enjoy the new collaboration when adapting things like:

• The joint solution combining Nutanix Enterprise Cloud, with Google Container Engine, and Acropolis Container Services. This versatile solution offers an enterprise-grade environment for container-based applications, providing persistent and scalable storage services for application workloads.

• Extended data centres things to Nutanix XI Cloud on the Google Cloud Platform. These combined solutions allow Nutanix customers to extend their datacenter environment naturally into the Google Cloud, delivering a more unified solution for traditional and modern model applications. For instance, Xi cloud disaster recovery settings could be running in GCP, followed by BigQuery analytics.

• One-click Hybrid solutions with Nutanix Calm for Google Cloud Platform, which provides a single control panel for managing the applications running between Nutanix and GCP environments. Both cloud-native and traditional apps can be put into the Nutanix or GCP environments with a single click, and migrated between both environments without any unnecessary strain.

Overall, Nutanix is a solution designed to offer single-click simplicity for managing your multi-cloud infrastructure. Combined with Google cloud, it's possible for CIOs to achieve mobility across all clouds, while remaining as open as possible to new developments in the industry. That means that you have the freedom to choose any payment model, any platform, and any hypervisor with a scalable, flexible infrastructure.

All that, and you get enterprise-level performance with consumer-grade simplicity, with provisioning, troubleshooting, and more. Google and Nutanix are finally coming together to eliminate the problem of technology lock-in in the industry.

Research into Nutanix's Background

Nutanix was found in 2009, which makes it a relatively young company. However, it's clear to see that the organization is doing something right. For instance, the group commissioned an IDC report in 2015, to help them highlight the benefits of a hyper-converged infrastructure.

While it's important to remember that Nutanix funded the study, it also included an independent analysis of 13 different companies running Nutanix appliances. The study found that Nutanix solutions offered significant infrastructure benefits in terms of productivity, cost-savings, and IT staff performance.

The benefits of switching to such a versatile cloud solution make a lot of sense. In this world of constantly-growing cloud computing, new IT resources are constantly emerging. This means that if you can reduce the time it takes to make those resources available, you can improve the productivity of your company instantly. Overall, Nutanix, along with Google Cloud, can provide a huge increase in organizational agility.

Nutanix ensures that customers can combine the advantages of the public cloud for productivity and agility, with the control and low cost that comes with an on-premise environment. Overall, the benefits mean that IT teams within a company can shift their focus to projects that can provide extra value to the business, rather than concentrating consistently on keeping everyday things on track.

Results from The Nutanix IDC Study

To help provide a deeper insight into the potential benefits that Nutanix and Google's Cloud Platform might be able to offer together, it's worth looking a little deeper into the results of the IDC study. According to the researchers, the businesses surveyed saw an increase in productivity and agility savings because of three distinct improvements: higher revenue, better performance, and less downtime.

• Higher Revenues: Performance scaling and application improvement with Nutanix means that employees can be more productive in the workplace. Nutanix can help to deliver the applications you need for your business to grow, combined with Google cloud solutions, to ensure that you can transform your entire company in a matter of days, rather than weeks, or even months. The IDC study predicted an average increase in $499,560 per year for revenues because of more operational efficiency.

• Better performance: According to IDC, the level of application performance in Nutanix was around 50.6% on average.

• Reduced downtime: Simply by switching to Nutanix and the Google cloud for the running of business applications, organizations can see a significant decrease in planned and unplanned downtime. In fact, IDC reported a 99.7% decrease on average in unplanned downtime occurrences.

Why Nutanix and Google Work Together

In the future, Nutanix and Google have agreed to continue collaborating on solutions designed to make infrastructure management easier for CIOs. In fact, they'll even be looking at combining real-time edge intelligence with cloud computing. Customers can now make the most of Nutanix as an intelligent edge solution for Google-based IoT applications.

For now, Google and Nutanix are well in position to disrupt the world of cloud computing and IT. Each solution can help to drive innovation together. After all, Hybrid cloud needs to be a versatile path into the future. Google and Nutanix's strategic alliance demonstrates the commitment made by both companies to simplify business operations across public and private clouds with intuitive design and innovation. Enterprises will finally be able to manage hybrid cloud services, without having to compromise on scalability or security.

The modern day datacenter. For many companies it has become expensive, complex, clunky, and difficult to manage. IT teams need a way to deliver on-premise services with the speed and efficiency of public cloud services.

Enter hyperconverged infrastructure, which combines x86-based compute, storage and virtualization resources through intelligent software to create flexible building blocks that replace legacy infrastructure consisting of separate servers, storage networks, storage arrays and virtualization solutions. The Definitive Guide to Hyperconverged Infrastructure will acquaint you with the technology, and provide you with a path to get started today.