What IT leaders should know from Nutanix .NEXT

Over the past year and a half, almost three-quarters of IT organizations have reported experiencing a price increase due to changes in their primary hypervisor’s licensing model. In response, IT teams have been placed at a crossroads. Do they increase investment with VMware? Accelerate container-based modernization with Red Hat? Shift more investment to the public cloud? Pursue an alternative? All of the above?

At this year’s .NEXT conference, Nutanix took several significant steps forward in bringing to life its vision of simplifying modern application environments that span both virtual machines and containers, anywhere across the public cloud, data center or edge. Any organization harboring concerns over hypervisor costs or lock-in and seeking alternative options should be paying attention to what Nutanix announced and what it means for the virtualization space moving forward.

Some highlights from the announcements include:

1. Nutanix Kubernetes Platform (NKP) Metal — Nutanix announced the addition of bare metal support for containers with NKP. Despite the potential efficiency benefits, enterprises have been slow to deploy containers on bare-metal infrastructure due to the high complexity, often opting instead to run containers within virtual machines. Nutanix’s approach claims to deliver a consistent Day-0 and Day-2 operational experience for bare-metal deployments that matches that of existing Nutanix…