Google and cloud services provider Nutanix have entered into a partnership designed to help organizations deploy and manage enterprise application workloads in hybrid cloud environments.
The partnership will make it easier for customers of both companies to access native cloud applications and on-premises applications as a unified cloud service, Google and Nutanix said in statements at the latter’s NEXT 2017 conference this week.
“With this strategic alliance with Nutanix, Google is addressing one of the most pressing technology challenges faced by enterprises,” noted Nan Boden, head of global technology partners at Google in one of the statements, which is “the ability to manage hybrid cloud applications without sacrificing security or scalability.”
Both companies described the partnership as a response to the growing enterprise interest in the use of hybrid cloud environments for running application workloads.
Hybrid clouds typically combine the use of on-premises and public cloud infrastructure. The objective in using them is to try and take advantage of the best of both worlds by running certain types of workloads on public clouds and other mission critical apps on computers systems running in house.
Gartner is among the many who expect interest in and adoption of the hybrid cloud model to grow in the next few years. But according to the Gartner analyst firm, cloud providers will need to address multiple challenges first, including application incompatibilities, integration challenges and a relative lack of tools for managing the environment.
Nutanix and Google pitched their partnership as designed to address some of these challenges.
For instance, customers of both companies now will be able to manage applications across the Nutanix and Google cloud platforms via a single control pane, Nutanix said in its statement. Nutanix’ One-Click Hybrid Operations with Nutanix Calm for Google Cloud Platform dashboard will enable administrators to provision applications on both cloud and on-premises systems via a single click, Nutanix said.
As a result of the partnership, Nutanix customers will also now be more easily able to extend their data center environment to Google’s cloud platform without the need for extensive and expensive data migration. Making it possible is a new hybrid cloud offering dubbed Nutanix Xi Cloud Services to GCP that lets organizations leverage services such as disaster recovery to extend on-premises environments to the cloud, Boden said.
Similarly, organizations will now find it easier to deploy, manage and scale container-based applications in a hybrid cloud thanks to the support for the Kubernetes container orchestration technology in the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS.
In addition to collaborating on hybrid cloud infrastructures, Google and Nutanix have agreed to also collaborate on Internet of Things applications that require real-time intelligence and cloud computing capabilities, Boden added. As one example, he pointed to organizations using Nutanix to run open source TensorFlow machine learning models and then analyzing the processed data on Google’s cloud platform.
