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Tag: Nutanix

  • Cisco Aligns With Nutanix on Hybrid Cloud Computing

    Cisco Aligns With Nutanix on Hybrid Cloud Computing

    Cisco and Nutanix this week announced a strategic partnership through which the two companies will collaborate to advance hybrid cloud computing.

    As part of that agreement, Cisco is committing to making AHV virtual machine software from Nutanix available from the edge to the cloud, starting with the Cisco Unified Compute Systems (UCS) rack and, soon after, blade servers.

    Jeremy Foster, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco Compute, said via a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform, Cisco will be able to centrally manage virtual machines from Nutanix alongside the other major virtual machines it already supports.

    In addition, the partnership will enable Cisco to apply multiple forms of artificial intelligence (AI) across a hybrid cloud computing environment, he added.

    Thomas Cornely, senior vice president of product management for Nutanix, said the goal is to provide IT teams with an opportunity to consolidate infrastructure across a hybrid cloud computing environment. In effect, Nutanix and Cisco are working toward converging the control planes across their entire respective portfolios, he added.

    The goal is to enable IT teams to streamline the number of platforms that need to be supported as part of an effort to reduce the total cost of IT, said Cornely.

    The issue that IT organizations regularly encounter is that each platform requires hiring additional IT personnel to manage. At a time when many organizations are encountering economic headwinds, there is a natural inclination to reduce the number of platforms as the size of the IT staff is reduced. Despite advances in automation, IT labor costs still represent the largest overall segment of any IT budget.

    It’s not clear how aggressively IT teams are consolidating IT infrastructure to reduce costs, but after more than a decade of continuous investments in IT, many organizations are discovering they are supporting a wide range of platforms. During a downturn, however, IT teams tend to more aggressively eliminate “snowflake” platforms that require unique skillsets to manage, noted Cornely.

    In the meantime, IT environments are also becoming more distributed as more workloads move to the network edge. Those workloads are not replacing applications running in on-premises or cloud computing environments, so the overall IT footprint will continue to increase. Given the chronic shortage of IT skills, the only way to effectively manage that IT estate will be to rely more on automation frameworks increasingly infused with AI.

    Each IT organization will need to determine for itself what level of automation to embrace, but Cisco is betting most will opt to rely on a SaaS platform provided by a vendor versus building and maintaining an IT management platform themselves. Regardless, legacy approaches that depend heavily on manual processes will increasingly give way to cloud-based platforms that can more easily manage workloads wherever they happen to be deployed.

    The issue now, as always, is funding the transition to new platforms to bring the total cost of IT back under control and eventually pay for themselves.

  • Capgemini Introduces ‘Smart Foundry’

    Innovative DevTest environment management solution powered by Nutanix and Plutora capabilities bolsters speed-to-market for financial services institutions

    PARIS–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Capgemini today announced the launch of ‘Smart Foundry,’ its end-to-end DevTest1 environment management solution, powered by the Nutanix Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure and Plutora’s Value Stream Management (VSM) platforms. Smart Foundry integrates with Capgemini’s SmartQA platform to deliver multi-premise, cloud-agnostic, and domain-centric testing solutions for application deployment. The solution can deliver DevTest environments across on-premise, private and public clouds based on budgetary and reuse needs, and service level agreements. Smart Foundry can accelerate time-to-market by as much as 60%, lower costs by up to 40%, and reduce environment-related defects and provisioning delays by as much as 80%. Capgemini’s Smart Foundry solution is initially tailored to meet the needs of Financial Services organizations and will be rolled out to other industry sectors in the future.

    “Smart Foundry is designed to bring in intelligent integrations, more automation and self-provisioning capabilities to expedite ‘efficient route to live’ along with ‘effective QA’ in the Software Development Lifecycle”

    According to Capgemini’s World Quality Report 2019-20, the widespread adoption of agile and DevOps methodologies, the need for Quality Assurance (QA) orchestration and its impact on enterprises, is higher than ever before. The report concludes that there is a need for an integrated and intelligent ecosystem for DevOps2 and QA to realize business benefits.

    The new solution incorporates cutting-edge technologies and practices such as service virtualization, container management, interactive configuration management databases, chaos engineering, observability, and auto-healing. Smart Foundry was designed as a reference architecture that seamlessly integrates with Capgemini’s SmartQA platform and a wide range of test data, automation, and reporting tools leveraging machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities.

    “Smart Foundry is designed to bring in intelligent integrations, more automation and self-provisioning capabilities to expedite ‘efficient route to live’ along with ‘effective QA’ in the Software Development Lifecycle,” said Ajay Walgude, Vice President, Capgemini’s Financial Services. “To do this, it is essential that a highly automated and intelligent test environment and test data management platform is implemented. We teamed with Nutanix and Plutora, who deliver next-generation technology, to achieve these goals. This is not just an engineering solution. Capgemini has leveraged its deep domain experience across sectors to build industry-specific environment solutions to address functional and non-functional testing requirements using Smart Foundry.”

    To provide a cloud-like experience, Capgemini chose the Nutanix Hybrid Cloud infrastructure platform to power, secure, and orchestrate DevTest environments. Additional Nutanix solution components that are incorporated into the solution include: Nutanix Calm which simplifies and automates deploying DevTest environments with detailed blueprints; Nutanix Karbon for Kubernetes management; unified storage to support the block, file, and object data needs of diverse applications; and Nutanix Beam which provides cost management capabilities.

    “Many organizations struggle with maintaining visibility and managing overheads for their DevTest environments, due to over-reliance on manual processes and the lack of standardization,” said Manoj Gupta, Vice President of Systems Integration at Nutanix. “Capgemini’s Smart Foundry, built on industry-leading Nutanix Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure platform software, gives organizations a standardized, high-performing, continuous testing solution with measurable benefits such as shorter development lifecycle, improved software quality, high developer productivity, and significant cost savings.”

    “Software drives innovation and it has always been our intention to help organizations to shape their business through amazing software and stay competitive through continuous innovation,” said Jeff Keyes, Vice President of Product, Plutora. “By bringing Plutora’s Value Stream Management (VSM) and environment provisioning capabilities to Capgemini’s Smart Foundry, we believe the resulting visibility provides for a holistic environment management solution. To compete in today’s constantly changing landscape, it’s vital for organizations to focus on driving successful outcomes and increasing business value, and the importance of VSM in that pursuit is essential when building a holistic environment management solution like Smart Foundry.”

    Plutora offers a complete pre-production environment management solution that provides internal and external environment teams a central place to collaborate on and view environment bookings and configurations. As part of Capgemini’s Smart Foundry, Plutora gives users the ability to select from a list of available Nutanix Calm Blueprints and the system orchestrates the build of the appropriate environment, automatically. Plutora also allows users to create a Change Request that will orchestrate the provisioning of synthesized test data.

    Capgemini will host a FinServ Meet Up session at Nutanix’s upcoming Global .NEXT Digital Experience, on Wednesday, September 9th at 11:35am-12:15pm PDT and Thursday, September 10th at 12:20pm-1:00pm CEST. Participants can register to attend the free event and learn more about Smart Foundry.

    About Capgemini

    Capgemini is a global leader in consulting, digital transformation, technology and engineering services. The Group is at the forefront of innovation to address the entire breadth of clients’ opportunities in the evolving world of cloud and digital platforms. Building on its strong 50-year+ heritage and deep industry-specific expertise, Capgemini enables organizations to realize their business ambitions through an array of services from strategy to operations. Capgemini is driven by the conviction that the business value of technology comes from and through people. Today, it is a multicultural company of 270,000 team members in almost 50 countries. With Altran, the Group reported 2019 combined revenues of €17billion.

    Visit us at www.capgemini.com. People matter, results count.

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    1 A DevTest environment is a non-production environment used for development and testing needs.

    2 DevOps is a set of practices that combine software development and IT operations.

  • New Global IT Research Report Shows Public Cloud Only is not a Panacea; 91% State Hybrid Cloud is Ideal IT Model

    Research Suggests Cloud Interoperability and App Mobility Outrank Cost and Security for Primary Hybrid Cloud Benefits

    SAN JOSE, Calif. – November 15, 2018 – Nutanix, Inc. (NASDAQ: NTNX), a leader in enterprise cloud computing, today announced the findings of its first annual global Enterprise Cloud Index, measuring enterprise plans for adopting private, hybrid and public clouds.* The new report found enterprises plan to increase hybrid cloud usage, with 91% stating hybrid cloud as the ideal IT model, but only 18% stating they have that model today. The findings also revealed that application mobility across any cloud is a top priority for 97% of respondents – with 88% of respondents saying it would “solve a lot of my problems.” Additionally, the report found public cloud is not a panacea; IT decision makers ranked matching applications to the right cloud environment as a critical capability, and 35% of organizations using public clouds overspent their annual budget. When asked to rank the primary benefits of hybrid cloud, interoperability between cloud types (23%) and the ability to move applications back and forth between clouds (16%) outranked cost (6%) and security (5%) as the primary benefits.

    Nutanix commissioned Vanson Bourne to survey IT decision makers about where they are running their business applications today, where they plan to run them in the future, challenges in setting up their cloud environments and how their cloud initiatives stack up against other IT projects and priorities. The survey resulted in approximately 2,300 respondents from multiple industries, business sizes and geographies in the Americas; Europe, the Middle East, Africa (EMEA); and Asia-Pacific and Japan (APJ) regions.

    In roles centered on agility and digital transformation, IT teams understand that runtime environments for enterprise apps change constantly. Respondents indicated a need for greater orchestration and application mobility across cloud environments, as they seek flexibility to move apps to the “right” cloud on a more dynamic basis.  In addition, shadow IT practices that circumvent enterprise IT teams are posing a significant challenge to forecasting and controlling public cloud spend with well over half of respondents (57%) reporting one or more incidents of shadow IT.

    Other key findings of the report include:

    • Hybrid cloud better addresses business needs over single public cloud, including the price tag: 87% of respondents said that hybrid cloud as an IT trend is having a  positive impact on their businesses, and more hybrid cloud users reported all their needs were being met (49%) compared to single public cloud users (37%). Furthermore, organizations that use public cloud spend 26% of their annual IT budget on public cloud.  Perhaps most striking is the fact that only 6% using public cloud came in under budget, while nearly six times as many (35%) overspent in their use of public cloud resources
    • Security is top of mind for determining workloads: 71% of respondents surveyed for the report ranked data security and regulatory compliance as the top factor in determining where to provision their workloads. This was followed by performance at 62%, ease of management at 53%, and cost at 52%.
    • App developers today are circumventing IT: 57% of respondents said their developers are circumventing IT when it comes to deciding where applications run, putting the organization at potential risk.
    • Finding hybrid IT talent is difficult: With clear benefits to a hybrid model, respondents say scarcity of hybrid experts is a challenge, with 54% claiming talent retention is part of the problem.
    • EMEA is expected to surpass the Americas with hybrid cloud adoption: Regionally, the Americas reported greater use of hybrid clouds now (22%) and within 12 months’ time (31%). However, the two-year outlook has EMEA (43%) surpassing the Americas’ hybrid plans (39%) and APJ (39%) catching up.

    “As enterprises demand stronger application mobility and interoperability, they are increasingly choosing hybrid cloud infrastructure,” said Ben Gibson, chief marketing officer for Nutanix. “While the advent of public cloud has increased IT efficiency in certain areas, hybrid cloud capabilities are the next step in providing the freedom to dynamically provision and manage applications based on business needs. However, the findings of this study reveal an important gap in the market: organizations need IT talent to manage their hybrid cloud models, especially in the next 12 to 24 months.”

    To learn more about the report and findings, please download the full “Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Index 2018”, here.

    *For the purposes of this study, hybrid cloud “describes the combined use of at least one private cloud and at least one public cloud service, with some degree of integration between the two cloud environments.”

    About Nutanix

    Nutanix is a global leader in cloud software and hyperconverged infrastructure solutions, making infrastructure invisible so that IT can focus on the applications and services that power their business. Companies around the world use Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS software to bring one-click application management and mobility across public, private and distributed edge clouds so they can run any application at any scale with a dramatically lower total cost of ownership. The result is organizations that can rapidly deliver a high-performance IT environment on demand, giving application owners a true cloud-like experience. Learn more at www.nutanix.com or follow us on Twitter @nutanix.

    © 2018 Nutanix, Inc. All rights reserved. Nutanix, the Nutanix logo and all product and service names mentioned herein are registered trademarks or trademarks of Nutanix, Inc., in the United States and other countries. All other brand names mentioned herein are for identification purposes only and may be the trademarks of their respective holder(s).

     

  • Nutanix Extends DevOps Ambitions

    Nutanix Extends DevOps Ambitions

    Nutanix at its .NEXT Europe conference has signalled its ambitions now extend into the realm of DevOps. The company announced it will make available an Acropolis Compute Cloud (AC2) and an Acropolis Object Storage Service on top of its Enterprise Cloud OS software that creates an instance of a hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) platform that can be deployed on-premises or in a public cloud.

    In addition, Nutanix is embedding an App Marketplace in its Nutanix Calm orchestration software through which applications developed on top of Enterprise Cloud OS can be accessed.

    Finally, Nutanix has added Veritas Technologies to the list of providers of data protection software that can be employed to provide backup and recovery software for applications running on top of its core AHV hypervisor.

    Greg Smith, vice president of product marketing for Nutanix, says his company is now moving well beyond simply trying to combine compute and storage in a locally deployed appliance. It envisions organizations employing Enterprise Cloud OS to drive hybrid cloud computing applications across a consistent set of automated orchestration services based on a common platform optimized around an HCI architecture.

    HCI architectures were pioneered by cloud service providers, and Nutanix applied those concepts to local data centers in the form of an appliance. The company then took the software it developed for the appliance to create a portable cloud operating system environment it is now extending with, for example, an object service that is compatible with the S3 interface defined by Amazon Web Services (AWS).

    Smith says Nutanix is making the compute and storage services available on top of Enterprise Cloud OS as an alternative to more expensive compute services based on platforms such as VMware. Nutanix is essentially in a race against other providers of HCI software to extend the reach of its platform. VMware, for example, has made its software stack available on the IBM Cloud and similarly is working to make its software available on AWS. Smith says the Nutanix approach gives IT organizations more control over where they want to deploy HCI software on any platform, including server platforms from Cisco Systems, Dell EMC, Lenovo and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) if they so desire. All three of those vendors also provide access to rival HCI software platforms.

    Nutanix developed its own hypervisor on which Enterprise Cloud OS is built to enable its software to be deployed on multiple platforms. But just to make things more interesting from an IT operations perspective, Nutanix also has HCI software that can be deployed on a VMware hypervisor.

    Against that backdrop, IT organizations are trying to determine the rate at which they want to replace traditional rack-based systems with HCI platforms, which combine compute and storage to reduce the total cost of operating an IT environment. Most legacy applications still expect to access external storage. But as new applications are developed, the expectation is that most of them will run on some form of an HCI platform that can scale out to support a much broader range of applications.

    It’s not likely legacy applications running on rack systems will go away anytime soon. But it is apparent that IT operations teams will be managing a mix of rack and HCI systems for years to come.

    — Mike Vizard