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This is a guest post for the Computer Weekly Developer Network written by James Sturrock in his position as director of systems engineering, UK&I at Nutanix.

Sturrock writes as follows in full…

As they look out across the topographies that today describe modern enterprise software stacks, systems and solutions, they can clearly see that Artificial Intelligence (AI) – whether that be predictive, reactive or generative AI – has now become a core mandate.

With generative AI coming to the fore and now promising to bring accelerating automation advantages to every conceivable application they use, it may appear to be a case of boiling the ocean, drinking from a firehose and moving heaven and earth for IT departments that have yet to really embark on this journey. It can certainly seem like a daunting task, so where should they start?

Firstly, let’s remind ourselves how AI should be implemented.

A before AI

Getting AI running in an already-operational business is a team effort. This means working with both data scientists and developers (plus of course business stakeholders) to bridge the gap between their worlds and be able to use AI via platforms that deliver cloud-like operations to enable seamless access to workloads and data…

Nutanix’s Sturrock: Focus on key foundational structures at the infrastructure level for AI foundation models.

… and, as a secondary but no less fundamental point here, if they had to add another A before the AI in AI, it would be accessibility, adaptability and application applicability. This means that AI-empowered applications should be accessible and adaptable from the start. Organisations need to be able to buy, build, or modify AI models and data from any source; they should then be able to run them anywhere that their business requires the injection of AI to manifest itself.

But as much as they have said thus far (and to further validate their A for accessibility) they must also remember that using generative AI should not require a fully-blown subscription to a Cloud Services Provider (CSP) hyperscaler.

Our own CEO Rajiv Ramaswami reminds us that because many IT teams are still in a prototyping phase with AI, they are almost ‘playing’ with it in terms of discovering how its benefits can be captured, harnessed and indeed monetized. But they know that AI requires solid infrastructure and there is already a shortage of GPUs. It may be easy enough to build an AI model in the public cloud, but implementation is much more cost-effective in a hybrid cloud.

CRN breaks down the seven biggest launches Tuesday at Nutanix .NEXT—from new hyperconverged infrastructure software to Kubernetes and security offerings.

Nutanix .NEXT 2020

See the latest entry: Nutanix .Next 2021: 5 Huge Launches You Need To Know

Nutanix’s virtual .NEXT conference kicked off Tuesday as the hyperconverged and hybrid cloud software standout launched a slew of new products and as-a-service offerings ranging from hyperconverged infrastructure software to Kubernetes and security offerings.

“There’s a lot of room for growth in hyperconverged, and channel partners have a huge opportunity right now with Nutanix,” said Nutanix CTO Rajiv Mirani in an interview with CRN. “We’ve made significant investments in R&D to advance their core software stack as you can see with these releases. We’re continuing to set the bar for innovation.”

Thousands of people are expected to participate in Nutanix’s free .NEXT Digital Experience conference, which runs from Sept. 8 to Sept. 11.

CRN breaks down the seven biggest product news and announcements unveiled at Nutanix .NEXT.

Karbon Platform Services: Kubernetes PaaS

One of Nutanix’s biggest launches at .NEXT is its new Karbon Platform Services, a Kubernetes multi-cloud Platform as a Service (PaaS) with automated system-managed security. The new cloud-native PaaS gives software developers a turnkey managed services experience on-premises, in the public cloud or at the edge to build and run cloud-native applications. Karbon Platform Services also lets developers decouple applications from the underlying infrastructure.

“Our Karbon Platform Services is a full PaaS offering that essentially takes some of the most common cloud-native services and makes them available on-premises. So capabilities like Containers as a Service, but also Functions as a Service, serverless applications, support for monitoring with Prometheus, as well as advanced networking and data services,” said Mirani. “Few applications today are just self-contained inside a container, they do use all these other PaaS services as well. … They wanted to make Karbon very simple.”

Karbon Platform Services builds on the core Kubernetes life-cycle management capabilities with Karbon as an integrated component of the Nutanix HCI software. This new offering brings automated system-managed security and multitenancy to run a wide range of microservices-based applications across multiple cloud infrastructures, said Mirani.

“It’s a great opportunity for the channel because as people monetize their applications, they look for new ways to build them,” said Mirani. “This is something that could be a great value-added service that their partners can provide.

Nutanix Karbon Platform Services is now available.

HCI Software With New Blockstore Technology And Intel

Nutanix has revamped its flagship HCI architecture by injecting NVMe-based SSDs and Intel Optane SSDs, delivering up to 50 percent faster performance for I/O-intensive workloads such as large databases.

“It improves performance on some of the most complex workloads that they have by up to 50 percent. Things like latencies when you have sustained operations or IOPS [Input/Out Operations Per Second] when you have sustained operations. The way they did this was to rearchitect AOS,” Nutanix’s Mirani told CRN. “Obviously, it lets us go after the most critical applications like SAP HANA, Epic, etc. So that’s always extending the reach of what they can do.”

Nutanix’s new Blockstore technology self-manages storage with greater efficiency than traditional file systems. In addition, Nutanix HCI software adds support with the Storage Performance Development Kit, an open-source library developed by Intel that enables applications to access NVMe capacity directly in order to avoid any OS or kernel-level overhead and drive even faster workload performance.

“The net result is that with these improvements in performance, they continue to extend their lead,” said Mirani. “It really makes us well positioned for some of the newer hardware technologies that they just started working with.”

The enhanced Nutanix HCI software is now available.

Flow Security Central

Nutanix is launching a new centralized SaaS-based management plan, Flow Security Central, which provides compliance monitoring, network visibility and security operations across Nutanix-powered private clouds and public cloud environments. The offering also provides new micro-segmentation security planning as well as security audit and remediation.

“Flow Security Central is not just networking, it’s a lot more than that. It provides a view into your security posture, into your compliance requirements as well as doing networking monitoring. Think of it as single pane of glass from which you can monitor your Nutanix infrastructure, look for compliance violations, you can get recommendations on how to fix them—but on top of that, you can look into your network traffic, get recommendations on micro-segmentation rules and so on,” said Mirani.

Flow Security Central provides customers with a hub for their security operations so they can assess their overall security posture of Nutanix deployments and generate detailed recommendations to bring environments into compliance. In addition, it offers the network visibility and context needed to secure cloud networks and applications, according to Mirani.

Flow Security Central is now available.

Prism Ultimate

Nutanix is taking its infrastructure and hypervisor management offering, Prism, to the next level with the launch of Prism Ultimate, a cloud-based SaaS service.

Prism Ultimate adds advanced application insight and automation for troubleshooting application-related infrastructure bottlenecks. It also offers visibility into cloud IT resource consumption for targeted IT cost reductions and more accurate budgeting.

Nutanix Prism can also monitor non-Nutanix environments, including popular virtualization stacks, to deliver Nutanix customers a single pane of glass for their entire infrastructure.

“Prism Ultimate is mainly based around analytics and monitoring, but instead of running on-premises this will run as a SaaS service in the cloud,” said Mirani. “We can apply a lot more resourcing in terms of CPU memory and so on, and provide even deeper insight into what’s happening. Plus, over time, you’ll be able to do cross-customer analytics.”

Prism Ultimate is currently available.

Nutanix Flow Networking, New VPC Technology

Built into Nutanix’s AHV virtualization, Nutanix Flow delivers advanced networking and security services to provide visibility into a virtual network as well as application protection and automation of common network operations.

At .NEXT, Nutanix introduced Flow Networking, aimed at simplifying the tasks of creating, isolating and managing software-defined networks that connect applications running in private data centers and in public clouds. The goal is to significantly simplify networking for hybrid and multi-cloud deployments. The new offering is based on virtual private cloud (VPC) constructs used by the leading public cloud providers and is a result of the company’s multiyear investment in Nutanix Xi Cloud that powers Nutanix’s cloud-based offerings.

“We have their own Xi offering, which lets you do disaster recovery as a service. We’ve developed the technology in the context of that so when people fail over to the Nutanix cloud, they don’t have to change their IP addresses to get their own virtual cloud which they can operate. We’re making that technology available on-premises,” said Mirani. “So people can now create on-premises multiple virtual private clouds completely isolated from each other and enable networking multitenancy within their on-premises infrastructure.”

The new software-defined networking capabilities of Nutanix Flow Networking are currently in development and will become available in late 2020, according to Mirani.

Calm as a Service

Nutanix also unveiled Calm as a Service, a hosted version of its application management and orchestration offering to support DevOps teams.

“Calm itself used to run only on a Nutanix AOS cluster. We’re now making it available as a service. You’ll be able to orchestrate and automate your environments from the cloud,” said Mirani. “So now there’s no dependency at all on Nutanix. Of course, you’ll still be able to orchestrate and automate Nutanix environments as well, but if you’re using it for VMware or cloud environments you can do that straight from the cloud.”

Nutanix Calm automates provisioning, scaling and life-cycle management for the cloud. Calm as a Service is now available.

New Elevate Partner Program

On the channel partner front, Nutanix launched its new Elevate Partner Program that for the first time brings together all of Nutanix’s partner ecosystem from VARs, systems integrators and distributors to service providers and hardware vendors.

Elevate includes new front-end margins, mechanisms to help deliver margin-rich services, better rebate levels for bringing in new business, and a new rebate that rewards Elevate Cloud Champion partners for selling across the entire Nutanix portfolio.

Nutanix also created a new partner portal with greater access to information and insight across the partner ecosystem through custom-branded marketing materials, training tools and personalized insight, allowing for more effective data-driven decisions. Another new enhancement is Nutanix’s new Performance+ Deal Registration, designed to increase incentive potential and opportunity protection. The deal registration program provides increased partner discounts, more predictable deal margins and enhanced opportunity protection.

Nutanix also launched a new Americas Partner Support Center – a team of dedicated channel sales, systems engineers and marketing resources—who will deliver an enhanced partner experience and will be available to usher the partner community through the transition along with ongoing presales support. The Elevate Partner Program emphasizes partner capabilities and competencies to sell and support Nutanix’s portfolio rather than revenue thresholds.

A new strategic relationship between Nutanix and Google is aimed at making it easier for Nutanix-based hyper-converged infrastructure workloads to easily migrate to the Google cloud.

The relationship, unveiled at Nutanix's .NEXT conference, being held this week in Washington, D.C., builds a bridge between on-premise and cloud deployments, said Venugopal Pai, vice president of business development and alliances at San Jose, Calif.-based Nutanix.

It is part of a wider Nutanix effort to bring its hyper-converged infrastructure technology to hybrid clouds.

[Related: Nutanix Introduces Multi-Cloud Capabilities, Extends Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Across The Data Center To Cloud]

Nutanix Wednesday also unveiled Xi Cloud Services, which extends data center services to the cloud, either an upcoming Nutanix cloud or the Google Cloud Platform, via the company's Prism centralized data center infrastructure management software. The first service will be Xi Cloud Disaster Recovery.

Nutanix also unveiled the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS software, an application that extends the Nutanix hyper-converged infrastructure environment to the cloud.

In addition, the company introduced Nutanix Calm, a single software fabric that lets customers define and publish applications in the form of blueprints that can then be provisioned across different cloud environments.

Nutanix and Google are partnering in two ways to bridge the two worlds, Pai told CRN.

The first is Nutanix support for Kubernetes, the container technology pioneered by Google before being released to open source, Pai said. Nutanix customers can now run applications built in Kubernetes containers on-premise and in the Google Cloud Platform.

"So now they can bridge customers looking for Kubernetes in the cloud or on-prem," he said. "We allow the seamless transportation of containers to the Google Cloud Platform with a single click."

The other part of the Nutanix and Google relationship is the ability to run native Nutanix services and Kubernetes container applications both on-premise and in the Google Cloud Platform via the new Nutanix Xi Cloud Services, Pai said.

The first Nutanix Xi Cloud Service is disaster recovery. "With their new relationship, customers can easily move virtual machines for disaster recovery purposes to Google via Xi Cloud Services," he said.

The Nutanix and Google partnership is important as clients increasingly move part, but not all, of their IT to the cloud, said Jeff Guenthner, director of solutions architecture at CMI, a Mill Valley, Calif.-based solution provider and Nutanix channel partner.

"Every client they talk to has a cloud-first strategy, yet has legacy ties and is on a journey to being a hybrid enterprise," Guenthner told CRN via e-mail. "We understand the driving forces pushing this client paradigm. It was a main tenet in their decision to make them their [hyper-converged infrastructure] go-to market partner. Regardless of the current point [for] their clients on the hybrid enterprise journey, Nutanix is complementary."

Crossref Citations

McLennan, Matthew R. Hintz, Benjamin Kiiza, Vicent Rohen, Jacqueline Lorenti, Georgia A. and Hockings, Kimberley J. 2021. Surviving at the extreme: Chimpanzee ranging is not restricted in a deforested human‐dominated landscape in Uganda. African Journal of Ecology, Vol. 59, Issue. 1, p. 17.

Andrasi, Balint Jaeger, Jochen A.G. Heinicke, Stefanie Metcalfe, Kristian and Hockings, Kimberley J. 2021. Quantifying the road‐effect zone for a critically endangered primate. Conservation Letters, Vol. 14, Issue. 6,

Galea, Benjamin and Humle, Tatyana 2022. Identifying and mitigating the impacts on primates of transportation and service corridors. Conservation Biology, Vol. 36, Issue. 1,

Ascensão, Fernando D’Amico, Marcello and Barrientos, Rafael 2022. No Planet for Apes? Assessing Global Priority Areas and Species Affected by Linear Infrastructures. International Journal of Primatology, Vol. 43, Issue. 1, p. 57.