At a .NEXT 2017 conference today, Nutanix unveiled a cloud operating system based on its hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) software capable of unifying public and private clouds under a common hybrid cloud computing architecture.
Sunil Potti, vice president of engineering for Nutanix, says Nutanix Calm, due out by the end of the year, extends the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS multi-cloud strategy by making it possible to deploy applications at a higher level of abstraction employing a common stack of software that can be deployed at the edge of the network, in a local data center, in a hosting service, or on a public cloud. To underscore that latter point, Nutanix today also announced a partnership with Google to make Nutanix Calm available on the Google Cloud Platform.
That capability is being complemented by Nutanix Xi Cloud Services, which is a turnkey cloud service due to be available under an early access program in the first quarter of 2018. It can be employed to both provision Nutanix infrastructure as well as provide additional capabilities such as disaster recovery services.
Based on the stack of software that Nutanix developed as an alternative to the implementation of VMware that Nutanix also supports, Nutanix Calm is an ambitious effort to make hybrid cloud computing an everyday enterprise norm.
Potti says, ultimately, Nutanix expects to automate almost every aspect of a hybrid cloud computing.
“If we can’t do that, it will be a missed opportunity,” says Potti.
In the meantime, Potti says, Nutanix is committed to making the process of lifting and shifting of workloads between clouds invisible. Of course, Nutanix isn’t the only IT vendor with similar ambitions. But it’s arguably the only one with an existing footprint in both the public cloud as well as its own and other third-party platforms from Dell EMC, Lenovo and others. The challenge and opportunity now is to turn that reach into a federated environment that effectively erases the lines between one cloud platform and another.
