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Cloud software maker Nutanix on June 28 introduced a new operating system, Nutanix Calm, based on its hyperconverged infrastructure software that can unify public and private clouds under a common hybrid cloud computing architecture.
The San Jose, Calif.-based company made the announcement at its .NEXT 2017 conference in Washington, D.C.
While its products sound fairly complicated to use, Nutanix is the first company to offer a radically simple compute and storage infrastructure for implementing enterprise-class virtualization without complex and expensive network storage (SAN or NAS).
At the conference, which continues through June 30, Nutanix also announced important new partnerships with Google and international oil and gas searcher Schlumberger, among others.
Partnership Should Help Monetize Google Cloud
The search engine’s partnership with Nutanix should help the monetization of its Google Cloud, thanks to the many access and deployment options Nutanix brings to the table. Nutanix’s hybrid approach bridges the gap between on-premise servers and machines in large cloud data centers.
“With public cloud, you have to meet them where they are; that’s becoming increasingly clear,” Nan Boden, Google’s head of global alliances, told CNBC in an interview. Boden said that in recent years Google had not previously signed major deals with data center hardware providers.
Nutanix Calm is due to be released before the end of the year. It extends the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS multi-cloud strategy by making it possible for administrators to deploy applications on a common stack of software that can be run at the edges of the network, in a local data center, in a hosting service or on a public cloud.
The Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS extends beyond Nutanix-branded appliances and OEM offerings from Dell EMC, Lenovo and IBM to flexible subscriptions and enterprise license agreements (ELAs) on Cisco and HPE platforms, the company said.
Choice is a Major Ingredient
The fact that there are lots of choices for users is perhaps the most important attribute of Nutanix Calm, the very name of which evokes the opposite of the chaos that cloud administrators often have to deal with on a regular basis.
“We know that most all of our customers want to meld new cloud services in with their existing IT capital investments and be able to move different applications between them, using common management tools, so they can move applications based upon business needs,” Nutanix executive Greg Smith told eWEEK.
The extra capability in the system is complemented by Nutanix Xi Cloud Services, a turnkey cloud service due to be available under an early access program in the first quarter of 2018. It can be employed to both provision Nutanix infrastructure as well as provide additional capabilities such as disaster recovery services.
Nutanix Calm, based on the company’s acquisition of Calm.io in August 2016 and the stack of software Nutanix developed as an alternative to the implementation of VMware that Nutanix also supports, is clearly an ambitious attempt to make hybrid cloud computing the enterprise standard.
Google Has Marketshare Ground to Make Up
In the public cloud, Amazon Web Services (32 percent of the market) and Microsoft Azure (15 percent) are currently Google’s (8 percent) biggest competition. Microsoft has been working to make its public cloud and private cloud tools match, while AWS has developed hardware and even trucks to facilitate the migration of data into its cloud.
Nutanix said it does eventually intend to support application deployment on AWS and Azure, although now it’s working mostly with Google.
Nutanix’s .NEXT conference continues through June 30.