Nutanix introduces Xi Cloud Services for the multicloud era

Nutanix launched Xi Cloud Services, a new suite of offerings designed to create a unified fabric across different cloud environments, that gives IT teams the freedom to run their applications on the optimal platform, not restricted by technology limitations.

Xi Cloud Services is comprised of five distinct offerings at launch, including Xi Leap, a native extension of the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform providing disaster recovery as a service.

A hybrid cloud that allows IT to make workload placement decisions is the goal of many businesses. In fact, according to Gartner, “a multicloud strategy can help a customer gain access to a broader range of capabilities, especially bleeding-edge innovative capabilities.” But identifying cloud deployments and knitting them together for a seamless experience is hard, and too often results in siloes of infrastructure spread out across various on-prem and public cloud deployments. This forces companies to experiment with new workloads in public clouds while keeping traditional enterprise applications in the private cloud datacenter, even if those workloads would be more efficient in the public cloud.

According to the recent Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Index, enterprise workloads running in both private and public clouds are expected to jump nearly 20% in the next two years. Through Xi Cloud Services, Nutanix makes it easier for companies to integrate cloud services into their multicloud deployments, whether by extending their Nutanix environment beyond the boundaries of a traditional datacenter or by finally gaining the visibility and insight into their infrastructure deployments across platforms to monitor costs and ensure compliance.

Xi Leap

Nutanix Leap is a turnkey and integrated service that protects the applications and data in a Nutanix environment without the need to purchase and maintain a separate infrastructure stack. From within Prism, customers can simply VMs for protection and set up protection. The selected VMs will then be replicated in the background, ready to be recovered in the event of a site failure – all within the same management tool as an organization’s infrastructure deployment.

According to Gartner, “disaster recovery (DR) is often technologically tedious, especially handling IP addresses and DNS changes for applications and servers.” The analyst firm states, “the rise in cloud adoption, with deployment models for IaaS, platform as a service, and software as a service, has shown the benefits of rapid provisioning and elastic, on-demand capability for applications and users. Cloud-based DR solutions also provide these benefits.”

Leap reduces the complexity of achieving DR readiness, converging all elements of provisioning, replicating data, defining a DR runbook and configuring security and networking into a single service.

“DR is deceptively difficult and yet critical for any IT organization to manage perfectly so essential data is not lost,” said Dr. Gary Mattei, Director of Technology at Avon Grove. “Nutanix Xi Leap solves all of these challenges for us, allowing us to upload our data directly into the DR solution while providing a single view across our entire infrastructure. Xi Leap gives us confidence that our data is safe no matter what happens.”

Xi Cloud Services

Nutanix Xi Cloud Services is comprised of five distinct services at launch, including Leap, which address the challenges of the multicloud era. These services bring together not only the ability to standardize workflows and harmonize operations across environments, but also the ability to blur the lines between clouds, utilizing applications and data across multiple clouds for a variety of data protection, application delivery and edge locations requirements.

Offered as part of Nutanix Enterprise, customers can take advantage of:

• Xi Leap – cloud-based disaster recovery (DR) services to protect your critical business applications and data. Leap services are enabled directly in Nutanix Prism for a integrated public + private cloud experience.
• Xi Frame – desktop-as-a-service platform built from scratch specifically for cloud deployment, now integrating role-based access control.
• Xi Beam – a multicloud cost optimization and governance tool that allows customers to reduce cost and enhance cloud security across platforms, public and private.
• Xi Epoch – an observability and monitoring solution for multicloud applications that provides a Google Maps-like view of applications to determine performance bottlenecks and availability issues in any cloud environment.
• Xi IoT – an intelligent edge computing platform that performs real-time processing of sensor and device data pipelines, and moves filtered data back to a customer’s cloud platform of choice for long-term decision-making, allowing them to eliminate the complexity of deploying and managing edge locations while deriving more value from data at the edge.

“As we move into the multicloud world, a fundamental challenge for all businesses is running IT applications seamlessly across platforms,” said Dheeraj Pandey, CEO, Nutanix. “It has been our mission since we were founded to make infrastructure invisible to our customers so they can focus on their applications, not where the applications reside. Xi Cloud Services is the next evolution in that journey as we help our customers achieve invisible, together.”

Nutanix Xi Cloud Services are available now. Nutanix Leap is available to customers in East and West availability zones in the United States. Additional availability zones are expected to be available in the UK in calendar Q1 2019.