One of the dreams I had in my life was to work for a major technology company. I would have never imagined it being a company like Nutanx, well, because they didn’t exist when I first had this dream.
Being on the job for a week has been like drinking from a fire hose. Even with the deluge of information, I was given I will say it’s been the smoothest new employee onboarding of any company I’ve ever worked for.
Not an accurate depiction of the Nutanix nubie onboarding process but it kinda felt like it
Why would I work here? Well, I want to change the way we do information technology. The most dangerous phrase in business is “we’ve always done it this way”. A company like Nutanix is the kind of place that doesn’t accept the status quo.
Think about it: Why do we need to have long tumultuous outage windows when we could push out updates and be done in 15 minutes. My time is valuable and it certainly is for many IT professionals out there. Why do we need to run ESXi or Hyper-V? There are other choices out there. Why do we need a NAS or SAN that needs special networking hardware and is expensive to maintain? Software-defined anything is the future and many people are looking at the value of it.
Even better is working for a company that feels that it doesn’t have to knock out incumbent hypervisors or virtual desktops. We play along with those as well. AOS can run on vSphere or Hyper-V. We love Citrix for VDI if you don’t want Xi Frame. Either way, we can provide value and get away from the mundane tasks and allow IT pros to get their weekends back.
I’m on a mission to do that. Hopefully, we can all make IT great again with Nutanix.
If you asked me five years ago what I thought about hyperconverged systems, particularly Nutanix, I probably would have dismissed it. Most of the players then were niche, startup companies all vying for the attention of anyone willing to give them a chance.
After a couple years, I realized how wrong I was as larger companies were taking notice. For instance, VMware introducing vSAN. Later on, Dell partners with Nutanix to sell their software on Dell servers.
This year I had the opportunity to attend Nutanix .NEXT, their annual conference which was held right down the interstate from me in New Orleans.
Well, there’s my 15 minutes of fame, my tweet featured on a keynote speech.
First, I have been very impressed on how quickly Nutanix has grown to be a major player in datacenter infrastructure in addition to their software offerings that continue to disrupt how we do information technology. It’s not just about replacing traditional infrastructure with scalable nodes in a software-defined stack. It’s about getting you to shift the way you do IT from the traditional client/server model to a web scale cloud infrastructure that obfuscates the notion of on-premises and public cloud. Basically, what’s underneath a presentation layer is practically invisible.
A few of the announcements during the conference I thought were worth noting:
Nutanix Beam – Beam is a Software-as-a-service, the first of its kind for the company, which allows organizations to manage multiple clouds, including on-premises cloud on Nutanix infrastructure. Additionally you can do cost analysis, regulatory compliance, and security compliance from a single console. The big feature that really impressed me wasn’t just showing my periodical spending with public cloud but how much I could save if I’m just wasting resources and where I can cut such waste. Even better, with Nutanix’ Xi cloud services you can take advantage of AHV or vSphere deployed in Google Cloud Platform.
Right sizing on the fly, the right way.
Nutanix Flow – Nutanix’ answer to VMware’s NSX, only easier to manage and implement. While it may not have the feature parity of NSX, it does include the capability to do microsegmentation that allow organizations to further secure applications. Everything is easily managed from Prism Central.
Object Storage Services – Nutanix AOS has been webscale for quite a long time, not surprising that object storage is now supported. If you have a need for S3 compatible storage, have Nutanix nodes in your datacenter, and don’t want to manage yet another storage system your prayers have been answered. OSS also includes support for encryption, role based administration, quotas, and WORM.
Further improvements to AHV – Acropolis Hypervisor is the plucky new kid on the block that has been looking more and more like an enterprise heavyweight to finally break the duopoly of ESXi and Hyper-V. In the 5.5 release announced earlier this week you should see vGPU support, RBAC, and AHV turbo mode. The latter is an optimized data path between the VM and storage. More Nutanix customers are starting to adopt the KVM based hypervisor as they find it supports many of the same features they need from the other two, without the associated cost.
Other than that there were plenty of excellent sessions and courses with plenty of information. Additionally, other partners of Nutanix were on hand to show how their products integrate into Nutanix’ offerings. I certainly enjoyed the conference and hope to have the opportunity to attend next year. If anything, Nutanix has shown they will not let up despite their lead in the hyperconverged infrastructure market.
I made a backup of myself. The size is phenomenal, got to love the storage efficiency here or perhaps I’m just full of hot air, who knows?
Cache 'n Carry 