A hybrid multicloud world can still be seamless

Sponsored Feature Every cloud provider will tell you that they can make your life easier. And that may well be true, if you stick with their version of the cloud, and theirs alone.

But the reality is usually a little more complicated. Almost one in two companies have already implemented a hybrid cloud or hybrid multicloud infrastructure model, according to the most recent Nutanix-sponsored Enterprise Cloud Index report. And the proportion expecting to use hybrid multicloud models is set to more than double over the next three years.

It’s clear that companies are embracing a range of platforms to run their applications and businesses on.

Regulatory factors might force the use of multiple clouds for redundancy purposes or mean that some applications or workloads must be kept on-premises or within certain geographies. And hybrid setups might result from challenges moving legacy applications or infrastructure to the cloud – or simply reflect a waypoint in a long-term digital transformation strategy.

But companies are also looking for flexibility and performance, particularly as they begin to consider the demands that AI will place on their infrastructure. Simply deciding which cloud works best for which workload in which geography requires careful thought, as does deciding which functions to keep on-prem.

Beyond that, as Nutanix VP of Products Anindo Sengupta explains, when it comes to the hyperscalers that will account for many workloads, each one is subtly, or not so subtly, different. “Each has built their environment, they have their own interface, they have their own APIs. There is no common standard”, he says. The same applies, of course, to on-premises infrastructure.

Drilling down further, he continues, “Each of the hyperscalers has hundreds of fine-grained services. And you have to manage that complexity and scale and a different operating model. It is a key problem.”

Those services include the management tools each vendor provides. As much as they aim for ease of use, those different operating models, and ultimately different corporate philosophies, mean there will always be differences from one vendor to another. And these have a cumulative effect. Tech teams supporting multiple clouds will need to develop skills across multiple platforms. This can create organizational silos, eventually leading to increased inefficiency.

Meanwhile, as Sengupta explains, “governance and policy management will never be the same across these choices.” This might be less of a headache for some functions – deploying storage for developers perhaps. But if it starts to undermine identity management or regulatory compliance, senior tech leaders will be getting nervous.

It can also make it difficult for an organization to establish visibility across its entire estate. Companies may turn to a multitude of tools to try and construct an integrated view of their cloud and on-premises operations. This compounds complexity, both from the personnel point of view, and in terms of licensing and cloud costs. That complexity can mean more mistakes as tech teams get to grips with multiple tools, each of which can require subtly different skill sets. Even then, that portfolio of tools might not deliver every feature, or address every use case, they really need.

Bridging the gap

Nutanix Cloud Platform aims to bridge that gap between the cloud and on-premises environments and make managing those different infrastructures seamless. It’s a software defined architecture that provides customers with a comprehensive and consistent set of data services and identical operations, whether it’s deployed on-premises, in the public cloud, at the edge, or, critically, across all three.

A key element of Nutanix Cloud Platform is Prism, a unified interface which allows customers to manage their physical infrastructure through a single console. It can scale to hundreds of clusters but going beyond that technical limit could mean customers with many domains find they need to run multiple instances of Prism. Things are further complicated as customers run other Nutanix products or services, for example for networking, VM management or storage.

So, Sengupta explains, “A few years back, we said, okay, we want to take the same simplicity of managing in a data center, and we want to kind of take it at a global scale.”

The result is Nutanix Central, which provides a single unified control plane, and a single console that allows customers to manage their complete infrastructure, whether on-premises or in the public cloud. It doesn’t replace Prism; rather it provides what Sengupta calls “a layer of value add on top of Prism.”

“When you are working on a cloud platform at scale, you want the ability to have security access control, making sure you can set up common consistent policies, and manage that disparate infrastructure,” he explains.

This gives customers the ability to manage and unify the lifecycle of their different Nutanix products, whether existing ones, or upcoming ones such as the Nutanix Kubernetes Platform which will become generally available this quarter.

It also gives them a common view of the key metrics they need to manage the entirety of their infrastructure, a key demand from customers, Sengupta says. “In terms of challenges in managing disparate, large global locations, there’s always a team that is managing how to help the overall state and health and kind of capacity of where we’re at with our full global infrastructure.”

This requires “some very quick visual views and kind of table views” he adds. Then, if that team needs to drill down into more detail on a particular piece of infrastructure or domain, they can switch into the appropriate Prism view.

Managing from the center

This is where Admin Center comes in, says Sengupta, providing the ability to manage the entire stack, including multiple Prism and product deployments. That’s the key difference between building out a Nutanix hybrid multicloud environment, where the customer is in control, “versus when customers just use a hyperscaler, which owns the full stack and the software.”

Similarly, when it comes to role-based access control, once users and active directories are set up, Admin Center allows these to be reused across the entire global deployment, along with the relevant access information.

The immediate benefits to a tech team seem clear. The common unified model means customers’ teams only need to be trained on two interfaces – Nutanix Prism and Nutanix Central. “That gives them the ability to scale their cloud services, infrastructure service and platform as a common operating model.”

And Nutanix manages the interface with cloud providers such as AWS and Azure, as well as with firmware and hardware partners who support Nutanix in datacenter infrastructure.

“So, we don’t need to have our customers actually learning new operating models, because they can still operate the way they operate their private cloud using Nutanix software,” says Sengupta.

A few teams responsible for initial setup and bootstrapping or planning software to run on hyperscalers may need to be aware of the intricacies of the public cloud. But the “consumers of the cloud” may not. Likewise, there may be some teams or applications that must run on a public cloud, Sengupta acknowledges, “But we’re able to help our customers build capabilities to deploy and run apps on these dark clouds.”

It’s worth remembering that while Prism is deployed within customers’ own estate, Nutanix Central itself is delivered as a SaaS offering which means customers don’t need to deploy and manage it. But given that some organizations, typically for regulatory reasons, don’t or can’t deploy on hyperscalers, Nutanix is also working on an on-premises implementation for delivery in 2025, “We’ll also get that same capability of a single pane of glass to manage their full deployments through an on-premises setup,” promises Sengupta.

For the business more broadly, they are saving “an enormous amount of time just by solving the visibility problem” he says. And tech leaders know that time, and licenses, and under-utilized resources, all cost money.

It’s clear that whatever the hyperscalers might desire, in the real world, customers are going to increasingly opt for hybrid multicloud architectures, because it absolutely makes sense for their business. But marrying this with a platform that supports a hybrid multicloud operating model will make managing this infrastructure seamless, allowing them to gain the maximum value from the outset.

Sponsored by Nutanix.