While hyperconvergence inside the data center is all the rage these days, Nutanix wants to remind IT organizations that it is really only a means to achieving a true private cloud. With that goal in mind, Nutanix has unveiled an update to its namesake hyperconvergence platform that is not only four times faster, it takes advantage of machine intelligence and IT automation to make managing the overall environment simpler.
The Nutanix update can scale to over 1 million storage IOPS in 4U of data center space, which for many IT organizations addresses application scalability issues many of them have encountered when embracing hyperconvergence.
At the same time, Nutanix is adding an ability to automatically switch the hypervisor running on a Nutanix system from VMware vSphere to the Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV) that Nutanix launched last year. Suda Srinivasan, director of product marketing for Nutanix, says that capability will make it much less expensive to ultimately build and deploy a private cloud. In the future, Srinivasan says, Nutanix expects to deliver the same capability for Microsoft Hyper-V environments.
Finally, Nutanix is adding tools that make it simpler to recover from a system failure using different hypervisors.
While there’s no doubt that large numbers of application workloads have moved into the public cloud in the name of agility and perceived costs, the emergence of hyperconverged systems based on all-Flash storage especially are starting to transform data center infrastructure economics. For many IT organizations, that means that not only will it be simpler and less expensive to deploy applications on a private cloud, all the network latency issues introduced by public clouds go away. That doesn’t necessarily mean that application workloads won’t still wind up in public clouds, but it does guarantee that the future of enterprise IT in the age of the cloud is by definition going to be hybrid.
