Nutanix expands capabilities to span distributed sovereign clouds
Nutanix continues to expand its multi-cloud strategy, platform and tools with a diversity of interests and capabilities.
The organisation’s latest moves see it detail a new enterprise infrastructure strategy. Known and branded as “Distributed Sovereign Cloud”, the service is designed to help organisations build and operate securely in complex hybrid multicloud environments.
As enterprises scale regionally, nationally, even internationally, their cloud complexity increases unprecedentedly – especially when it comes to meeting sovereignty and continuity requirements. Through new enhancements to its Nutanix Cloud Platform, Nutanix says it helps customers optimise their infrastructure across these complex, distributed environments.
These are new capabilities in its Nutanix Cloud Platform (NCP) solution designed to give enterprises greater flexibility to deploy and govern their infrastructure across distributed environments running traditional, modern and AI applications, including fully disconnected environments, with cloud providers that offer sovereign services, or across a combination of both – without sacrificing unified management or operational simplicity.
Sovereignty continuity expectations
As enterprises expand across multiple regions and cloud environments, many face increasing complexity in meeting sovereignty and business continuity expectations. At the same time, they must maintain operational flexibility without being tied to a single cloud vendor ecosystem – a key principle for resilience and sovereignty.
New capabilities in NCP give customers more choice in how they run and govern infrastructure – across their own environments and with cloud providers that offer sovereign services – enabling focus on resilience, security and control and global management. These updates are also promised to strengthen the platform’s ability to support secure, governed cloud native and AI workloads through new security capabilities in the Nutanix Kubernetes Platform (NKP) and Nutanix Enterprise AI (NAI) solutions.
“As sovereign cloud architectures become a defining priority for enterprises, we’re introducing several enhancements to the Nutanix Cloud Platform that help customers meet these needs without giving up the advantages of a distributed cloud infrastructure,” said Thomas Cornely, executive vice president of product management at Nutanix. “These new capabilities give customers the clarity and control needed to draw their own sovereign boundaries across distributed environments and leverage the resiliency and flexibility that distributed clouds provide.”
NCP now provides orchestrated lifecycle management of multiple dark-site environments, along with on-premises deployment options for governance and control planes.
Ransomware resilience
The Nutanix Central solution, which simplifies distributed cloud management, can now run in customer-controlled on-premises environments. Additionally, Nutanix Data Lens, which simplifies unstructured data security, governance and ransomware resilience, will also soon run in customer-controlled on-premises environments.
The Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) solution on Google Cloud is also now generally available, offering users in 17 regions worldwide ways to modernise their infrastructure.
“Distributed sovereign cloud is becoming a priority for organisations that must meet regulatory obligations without disrupting operational consistency. Models that preserve local control while supporting cloud scalability are attractive to organisations undergoing application and infrastructure modernisation and Nutanix’s response to this appetite is to operationalise distributed and sovereignty-aligned architectures, looking to assist with compliance, privacy and governance needs,” said Dave Pearson, VP for infrastructure systems, platforms and technologies group, IDC.
NKP will include a FIPS 140-3–validated and STIG-compliant Ubuntu Pro image option that is currently under development to strengthen the platform for organisations with strict security and compliance requirements, including those running sensitive or regulated AI workloads.
Nutanix is also extending VPC-based isolation, network load balancing and microsegmentation capabilities to containerised workloads to give customers consistent control across VMs and containers.
Enhanced resilient distributed operations
New capabilities for NCP strengthen resilience by enabling customers to maintain application availability across sites and regions during outages, essential for sovereignty-aligned environments that must avoid single-site or single-vendor dependency and manage risk of exposure to actions by foreign jurisdictions.
Teams can now apply sophisticated tiered disaster recovery options that match protection levels to each workload, for additional fault tolerance and cyber recovery resilience.
New capabilities help ensure business continuity even in the event of up to three site or region failures. Integration of multicloud snapshots into the tiered approach ensures an added layer of protection for cyber-resilience objectives. Security policies stay consistent during failover and live migration, reducing operational gaps when workloads move.
Enhanced features of the Nutanix Data Services for Kubernetes solution extend tiered synchronous and asynchronous disaster recovery protections to containers with both block and file data, enabling organisations’ governance and compliance objectives for modern Kubernetes applications, including AI-native applications.
Global management across environments
NCP now offers stronger management capabilities that streamline how distributed environments are deployed and operated, giving customers more consistent control across their own sites and sovereignty-aligned cloud providers. Nutanix Infrastructure Manager, a new automation tool, streamlines deployments using validated, fully tested design patterns, making it easier to stand up and maintain data centre environments.
A unified network control plane provides a single view of VLANs, virtual networks, and microsegmentation policies, giving administrators centralised visibility and control across the entire network, including on-premise and public cloud environments.
Management of Kubernetes and AI environments will also become more seamless, since the NKP clusters will automatically register into Nutanix Prism Central for immediate infrastructure-level visibility. NAI also adds a new LLM metrics dashboard that provides great insight into request and token activity, helping teams better monitor and manage AI workloads.
Rajiv Ramaswami, president & CEO of Nutanix.