Today we are proud to announce the general availability of Nutanix Data Services for Kubernetes (NDK). NDK extends Nutanix Cloud Platform infrastructure capabilities to application-centric data services for containerized workloads. With NDK 1.0, platform engineers can make it incredibly easy for developers to build and run containerized workloads without scrambling for storage management resources.

Blog: https://www.nutanix.com/blog/announcing-the-general-availability-of-nutanix-data-services-for-kubernetes

Host: Phil Sellers
Co-Host: Harvey Green
Co-Host: Jirah Cox
Co-Host: Ben Rogers

Building a fully customized solution from scratch can be complicated. It requires researching various hardware and software products from multiple vendors and verifying that they offer everything you want and work together.

You must also make several detailed design decisions, then evaluate the complete solution for supportability, maintainability and scalability to ensure that it meets your operational needs, can adapt to changing requirements, and offers a compelling TCO and ROI.

At Nutanix, we understand that one size doesn’t fit all. To provide the right solution for your needs, we offer various technical solution artifacts: Tech Notes (TN), Best Practices Guides (BPGs), Reference Architectures (RAs), and Nutanix Validated Designs (NVDs).

Blog Link: https://www.nutanix.com/blog/nutanix-validated-designs-blueprints-for-success by Ketan Mota

Host: Phil Sellers
Co-Host: Harvey Green
Co-Host: Jirah Cox
Co-Host: Ben Rogers

In the first iteration of Nutanix Cloud Clusters, your built-in NVMe storage was the only capacity you could tap into.  With Nutanix's recent announcement of Just-In-Time storage with AWS Elastic Block Storage (EBS) you can now customize the amount of storage you need in a cluster with expansion capabilities.  

In this episode, we talk about the news from a blog post on nutanix.com posted by Dewayne Lessner about EBS with Nutanix Cloud Clusters.

https://www.nutanix.com/blog/just-in-time-cloud-storage-for-nutanix-cloud-clusters

Host: Phil Sellers
Co-Host: Harvey Green
Co-Host: Jirah Cox
Co-Host: Ben Rogers

Deploying a VDI environment for a globally distributed workforce, BYOD, hot desk environments and call centers is complex and is hard to manage. However, the storage that supports VDI to run VMs and unstructured user profile data need not be.

Exponential growth of unstructured data is putting a tremendous strain on the legacy three-tier architecture of VDI environments. Whether it is a single user VDI or a multi-user remote desktop service, deteriorating VDI performance, complexity in managing storage, protecting user data against cyberthreats and ransomware are key challenges. This is especially true with a growing remote workforce and user data.

Blog post: https://www.nutanix.com/blog/unified-data-services-platform-simplifies-vdi

Host: Phil Sellers
Co-Host: Harvey Green
Co-Host: Jirah Cox
Co-Host: Ben Rogers

We recently commissioned International Data Corporation (IDC) to evaluate the use of Nutanix Objects Storage for modern, data-intensive workloads. IDC examined the evolution of Object Storage which has ranged from cold data repositories for backups and archives to newer, high-performance object stores for data-intensive workloads. The study also involves insightful interviews with Nutanix customers who are using Nutanix Objects Storage for analytics workloads.

https://www.nutanix.com/blog/modern-data-intensive-workloads-requiring-high-performance

Host: Phil Sellers (@infraphilip)
Co-Host: Harvey Green III
Co-Host: Jirah Cox
Co-Host: Ben Rogers

As organizations adopt strategies to remain agile and competitive, cloud-native containerized applications are becoming a business imperative. In fact, the 5th annual Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Index article reported nearly all 1,450 IT decision makers surveyed (94%) reported having deployed Kubernetes® containerization which is the most commonly used cloud-native framework.

Embracing the concept of containerized apps requires a significant paradigm shift across every aspect of an organization—but with the right cultural mindset and the right tools and platforms, a cloud-native approach can set you up for current and future success.

Based on blog post - Going Cloud Native: Build Apps Once, Deploy Anywhere, https://www.nutanix.com/blog/build-apps-once-deploy-anywhere

Host: Phil Sellers
Co-Host: Harvey Green
Co-Host: Jirah Cox
Co-Host: Ben Rogers

As organizations advance in their digital transformation journeys, they’re creating more applications than ever to meet modern customer and internal demands. Whether its cloud-native applications, traditional applications deployed in on-premises datacenters or modern applications deployed at edge locations, the number of apps is skyrocketing. In the 5th Annual Enterprise Cloud Index (ECI) study commissioned by Nutanix, nearly all (94%) of the 1,450 respondents surveyed agreed with the statement that “one place to run and manage all applications and data across clouds is ideal for my organization.”

Modern organizations are faced with the dual challenge of not only building infrastructure that accommodates their newly developed apps but also ensuring seamless mobility for apps and data across diverse environments and between different clouds and on-premises setups. Workload migration and portability are essential to modernizing your applications and fully embracing the benefits of the cloud.

Discussing a blog from Marc Trouard-Riolle: 
https://www.nutanix.com/blog/making-workload-migration-efficient-and-cost-effective

Host: Philip Sellers
Co-host: Harvey Green
Co-host: Jirah Cox
Co-host: Ben Rogers

In the first installment of our What If You Could series, we defined hybrid multicloud and showed how Nutanix was the only vendor to make hybrid multicloud simple and cost-effective across on-premises and multiple public clouds. In this article, we take a deeper look into multiple cloud deployments—which often don’t equate to true multicloud—and why they can be a challenge. 

To survive in an increasingly competitive and shifting marketplace, organizations continue to look for ways to increase agility, scalability, and innovation with public and private cloud services. Today the cloud is a vital component of practically every business, regardless of industry and size. And when it comes to the cloud, the concept of “one-stop shop” doesn’t apply. 

Organizations are using multiple clouds to find the right balance between business and technical requirements and varying cloud services for their different workloads, so they can work as efficiently as possible. With the multiple cloud approach quickly becoming the de facto standard for modern enterprises, the term “multicloud” is often used to describe this approach, but that can be a bit of a misnomer. 

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-host: Philip Sellers
Co-host: Harvey Green
Co-host: Jirah Cox
Co-host: Ben Rogers

In the past, the Hyperscalers have always been positioned as the default/ “you can’t go wrong” deployment zone for AI/ML workloads. But this is not true for many use-cases, see why AI and machine learning are drifting away from the cloud. 

Real-world examples from many ISVs and customers tell a different story with multiple drivers: low-latency, data privacy and cost (especially at scale) that make the Core DC (owned or hosted) a better choice. With leading market analysts agreeing on explosive data growth at storefront/ branch/ customer service center locations, for Edge AI/ML use cases, on-prem deployments are a ‘no-brainer’.

Blog: https://www.nutanix.dev/2023/10/12/deliver-enterprise-grade-edge-ai-ml-with-nutanix/

Host: Philip Sellers
Co-host: Harvey Green
Co-host: Jirah Cox
Co-host: Ben Rogers

Unstructured Data Under Siege

In today’s digital age, data is the lifeline of businesses. It drives decision-making, influences strategies, and unveils market insights that can propel any organization ahead of its competitors. However, much of this data is unstructured, creating challenges with data visibility, and making it more vulnerable to cyber attacks and insider threats. 

The complexity of defending unstructured data from ransomware is a key obstacle hampering an organization's security posture. Protecting only the endpoints and employing network-centric tools, and device authentication is no longer sufficient. For organizations, it's imperative to deploy a holistic approach to data security, ensuring that the very essence of their business—its data—is safeguarded from these evolving threats. 

Starting with Storage: Laying The Foundation for Robust Data Security

To protect against ransomware and other malicious threats, IT and Security leaders should look beyond endpoints. To achieve true ransomware resiliency, an organization needs to be able to detect attacks from within the data layer, block the activity, determine the scope of the affected systems, and recover quickly. 

The Nutanix Data Lens™ SaaS-based data security solution helps proactively assess and mitigate unstructured data security risks by identifying anomalous activity, auditing user behavior, and adhering to monitoring requirements - all at the primary storage layer, where your data is stored. Additionally, global data visibility across clouds helps with intelligent decision-making and lifecycle management of unstructured data stored on the Nutanix Unified Storage™ (NUS) platform

The latest release packs powerful features for cyber resilience, permissions visualization, risk scoring, and support for the  Nutanix Objects Storage™ product

What’s New Today?

• Threat Containment Window:  Proactively detect and block a threat, defend from further damage and get alerted to begin a One-Click Recovery process within 20 minutes of exposure. Don’t just take our word for it, read this report to see how Data Lens delivers on the promise. 
• One-Click Recovery: Seamlessly recover from the last good snapshot available and restore your data and operations swiftly.
• Permissions and Risk Visualization: Identify the root cause of access control risks and monitor the risk score to track vulnerabilities within your data and user groups.
• Objects support: Nutanix Data Lens has increased its coverage to include Nutanix Objects Storage, enabling customers to effortlessly access S3-available data, providing an intelligent understanding and forensic capabilities similar to those available for the Nutanix Files Storage™ product today. 

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-host: Philip Sellers
Co-host: Harvey Green
Co-host: Jirah Cox

In today's fast-paced digital landscape, the ability for businesses to seamlessly scale applications, data, and infrastructure across data centers, edge, and the cloud is critical for innovation and growth. Our recent announcement of the Nutanix and Cisco strategic partnership reshapes the landscape of hybrid multicloud adoption and data center modernization, delivering a joint solution that is now generally available.

Our partnership with Cisco is built upon our shared leadership in application, data, infrastructure management and security. It represents our collective commitment to deliver a cohesive and consistent cloud operating model that transforms how businesses procure, deploy, secure, and manage IT services. This new platform is a fully integrated and validated solution that combines Cisco’s SaaS-managed compute and networking infrastructure (Cisco Unified Computing System with Cisco Intersight), networking (ACI), and management (UCS Manager)  with Nutanix Cloud Platform–which includes Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) and its built-in AHV Hypervisor, Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM), Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS), and Desktop Services solutions. 

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-host: Philip Sellers
Co- host: Harvey Green
Co-host: Jirah Cox
Co-host: Ben Rogers

For mission-critical applications in various industries like banking, capital markets, insurance and healthcare, there is a need to support highly available synchronous data replication to ensure high level platform protection and availability. Providing this functionality is key for a business to function unhindered. The cost of data unavailability can be significant to a business, with some estimates measuring the impact at several thousand dollars per minute and upwards of six figures or more if the unavailability lasts for an hour or more. And this doesn’t take into account recoverability to the latest dataset right before the failure. With these types of dollar amounts, the inability to bring the system back to its latest data point can have a tremendous impact on the viability of a business. Customers need RPOs of zero to help ensure any incident that takes down a primary site will allow a secondary disaster recovery site to be brought online quickly with the latest copy of the data.

So without further ado, drum roll please…Nutanix™  Files Storage now supports establishing a metro cluster with our 4.4 release. This is not a drill and you are not seeing things, this isn’t a mirage, it’s here. This capability is built on top of our already mature and customer validated Metro offering that has been used for years now to protect applications running on our hyperconverged platform. I know what you are thinking: how does it work, so let's dive in! 

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-host: Philip Sellers
Co-host: Jirah Cox
Co-host: Ben Rogers

As new cybersecurity threats evolve, Nutanix has been hard at work improving the way you patch, upgrade, and operate your Nutanix Cloud Platform. We understand how critical and difficult patching and upgrading can be, especially in a world under constant attack. You must be resilient, and proper lifecycle management improves your cyber resilience!

We know that upgrades can be a bit intimidating, but fear not! Nutanix is continually working to make the process smoother and more efficient. We’re thrilled to announce a new version of Nutanix Life Cycle Management (LCM), 2.6!

Blog: https://next.nutanix.com/community-blog-154/nutanix-lifecycle-management-2-6-is-here-check-out-the-top-5-coolest-features-of-lcm-41843
Thanks to Mike Baronde - the blog author! 

Host: Phil Sellers
Co-Host: Jirah Cox

Federation is an exciting and important new feature that was added to Nutanix Objects in the 4.0 release (Spring 2023). It enables a global namespace to be created across multiple Nutanix object stores, even if they are thousands of miles apart in entirely different geographic locations. Buckets hosted by these different object stores then appear to exist within a single object store, offering a consolidated view of the data.

https://www.nutanix.dev/2023/07/10/simplifying-access-to-geo-distributed-object-data-using-global-namespaces/

Host: Philip Sellers 
Co-Host: Jirah Cox
Co-Host: Ben Rogers

One of the leading concerns of moving to a new hypervisor is the perceived risk and cost of migrating. Nutanix Move makes migrating to Nutanix AHV simple, and over the past year, more than 100,000 virtual machines (VMs) have been migrated to AHV. While there are several ways to migrate from traditional 3-tier infrastructure or competing on-premises or public platforms,  multiple factors are leading to the rapid adoption of AHV and Nutanix Move.

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-host: Jirah Cox
Co-host: Ben Rogers
Co-host: Harvey Green
Co-host: Philip Sellers

Blog Link: https://www.nutanix.com/blog/nutanix-ahv-and-nutanix-move-a-year-of-remarkable-success

Customers with the most demanding workloads will be excited to see the latest expansion of database support on the Nutanix Cloud Platform that provides a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) and optimizes performance.   

The enhancements, which became available to Nutanix customers as part of the AOS 6.6.2 release, include support for compute-only nodes running either VMware ESXi or Nutanix AHV along with best practices for optimally configuring hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) database clusters using a combination of compute-only and storage-only nodes.

Host: Philip Sellers
Co-host: Jirah Cox
Co-host: Ben Rogers

Blog Link: https://www.nutanix.com/blog/introducing-the-optimized-database-solution

During its annual .NEXT conference, Nutanix, the leading provider of hybrid multicloud infrastructure solutions, unveiled a series of new product offerings and an ambitious vision to help customers streamline their operations across distributed environments and accelerate the deployment of modern applications.

Project Beacon

Nutanix announced Project Beacon, a multi-year effort to deliver a portfolio of data-centric Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) level services available natively anywhere – including on Nutanix or the native public cloud. With a vision of decoupling the application and its data from the underlying infrastructure, Project Beacon aims to enable developers to build applications once and run them anywhere.

As the initial phase of Project Beacon, Nutanix will expand the capabilities and benefits of Nutanix Database Service (NDB) to the public cloud as a managed service, providing the same database automation and management experience already available on Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI). The company plans to subsequently extend this effort to other popular data-centric platform services

Host: Harvey Green
Co-host: Jirah Cox
Co-host: Donvan Linton
Co-host: Marina Troyano

The Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) Cost Governance™ solution is ideal for customers challenged by the ongoing analysis and reporting of spend by cost center, driving accountability against budgets, and finding opportunities to optimize your cloud spend. Through one unified interface, NCM Cost Governance allows customers to manage costs across their public, private, and hybrid multicloud environments. 

As investment in public cloud resources increases, the need for robust cost management across hybrid multicloud endpoints also grows. Gartner estimates show the magnitude of the savings opportunity with “Worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services forecast to grow 20.7% to total $591.8 billion in 2023, up from $490.3 billion in 2022.” 

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-host: Harvey Green
Co-host: Philip Sellers
Co-host: Jirah Cox
Co-host: Ben Rogers

 The recent pandemic upped the ante on IT modernization as most organizations accelerated cloud deployments to support workforces that distributed overnight. Now as we emerge on the other side, many enterprises are reexamining their workload deployments in the face of escalating cloud costs. Indeed, Gartner® predicts that “by 2027, 85 percent of the workload placements made until 2022 will no longer be optimal, due to changing requirements.”1 As enterprises pursue more agile, mobile, and portable applications, IT leaders need to make quick decisions about where to house their workloads and, in so doing, reevaluate their cloud strategy.

As organizations are rethinking their infrastructure strategy, they are looking to leverage new opportunities and innovations to gain agility, simplify management, drive operational efficiencies, and better equip their IT teams with the resources and skills needed to be competitive, all while keeping costs in check. The options are overwhelming. And if placing 100 percent of your workloads in the public cloud isn’t the answer, what is?

IT workload environments aren’t “one size fits all.” Many IT leaders are finding success with hybrid IT infrastructure, where applications and data are spread and shared across a combination of on-premises, colocation, and public cloud environments, based on the unique characteristics, resource utilization, performance specifications, and security requirements of each application. Hybrid IT strategies offer a host of benefits, not the least of which is that IT leaders regain control of their data, making it easier to support a remote workforce, scale their operations, increase agility, and protect critical assets, all while being cost-efficient.

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-host: Harvey Green
Co-host: Philip Sellers

In this multi-part series, the goal is to first familiarize you with the solution and then provide guidance on preparing to deploy Flow Network Security and help you learn the constructs that form your policy framework.

So, what is Flow Network Security?  By now, you may have heard the name, read about it or had a conversation about it with a Nutanix employee.  First off, and in most basic terms, Flow Network Security is built-in security for workloads that run on Nutanix AHV, our native hypervisor.  Think of it more as a feature or solution rather than a separate “product”.

While AHV has been available for many years, one thing became obvious as customers were looking to have more security options in their Nutanix environment; we didn’t have a Nutanix-developed solution to provide network security.

Enter microsegmentation.  Network virtualization got its beginning as a Stanford University research project that ultimately became a startup and commercial solution from Nicira, circa 2007.  VMware acquired Nicira in 2012 and the solution became, as you may know, NSX, which offered software-defined networking and microsegmentation functionality.  Since this time, other software companies have brought their own solutions to market.  

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-host: Harvey Green
Co-host: Philip Sellers
Co-host: Jirah Cox

Within Nutanix we have Replication Factor (How many data copies are written in the cluster) and Redundancy Factor (how many nodes/disks can go offline). Both can have a value of 2 and 3. What is what is explained here: Blog Post.

So, when we have a larger cluster, we always recommend using RF3 (Redundancy Factor 3) as the risk is higher that you have multiple nodes/disks go offline at the same time.

During trainings and onsite customer work I often get the question, "what will happen if multiple nodes go offline in Redundancy Factor 2?" In this blog post I will explain different scenarios and their behaviors.

Blog by: Jeroen Tielen
Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-host: Harvey Green
Co-host: Philip Sellers
Co-host: Jirah Cox
Co-host: Ben Rogers

Nutanix launches the most significant update yet to its Nutanix Cloud Clusters™ (NC2) hybrid cloud software, now enabling organizations to run the Nutanix Cloud Platform™ software on the Microsoft Azure® cloud service. With support for both the AWS and Azure clouds, NC2 is a true hybrid multicloud platform. It provides easy access to Azure services from customer VNets running enterprise applications. There’s a simple migration path for applications without modification, and expanded license portability with a consumption model choice.

Organizations are increasingly investing in the public cloud to solve business and IT challenges for improved operational flexibility, agility and cost-efficiency. According to 1,700 IT decision makers polled for the 2022 Enterprise Cloud Index report, 83% agree that hybrid multicloud is the ideal operating model.

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-Host: Harvey Green
Co-Host: Philip Sellers
Co-Host: Jirah Cox
Co-Host: Ben Rogers

Nutanix launches the most significant update yet to its Nutanix Cloud Clusters™ (NC2) hybrid cloud software, now enabling organizations to run the Nutanix Cloud Platform™ software on the Microsoft Azure® cloud service. With support for both the AWS and Azure clouds, NC2 is a true hybrid multicloud platform. It provides easy access to Azure services from customer VNets running enterprise applications. There’s a simple migration path for applications without modification, and expanded license portability with a consumption model choice.

Organizations are increasingly investing in the public cloud to solve business and IT challenges for improved operational flexibility, agility and cost-efficiency. According to 1,700 IT decision makers polled for the 2022 Enterprise Cloud Index report, 83% agree that hybrid multicloud is the ideal operating model.

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-Host: Harvey Green
Co-Host: Philip Sellers
Co-Host: Jirah Cox
Co-Host: Ben Rogers

Storms, tornadoes, human error, and ransomware. While these disruptions have different root causes, the potential aftermath is the same: downtime and data loss. 

On average, downtime costs organizations $540,000 per hour. Every minute of downtime is a direct hit on revenue, reliability, and reputation. This is one of the most dreaded situations an IT department can face, which is why it’s crucial to have a strong data protection plan in place. 

Nutanix’s Cloud Platform’s data protection capabilities are robust and trusted by organizations who may have a need to build a solution for their highly sensitive and mission-critical data. The Nutanix® snapshot technology is natively built into the Nutanix Cloud Platform and offers a backup and disaster recovery plan that can be customized for your data protection needs in concert with a powerful ecosystem of Nutanix-certified backup vendor partners. 

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-host: Harvey Green
Co-host: Jirah Cox

The results are in! With NVIDIA’s newest GPUs designed for virtual desktops and applications, you can address a wider variety of use cases than you could ever before. In our independent testing using the NVIDIA® nVector benchmarking tool, we saw that a single A16 GPU could support 64 virtual desktops, each with 2vCPUs and 1GB framebuffer profiles, per node. With two A16 cards installed we were able to scale to 128, albeit we would recommend a high-performance CPU when scaling to 128 desktops. In a minimal Nutanix® configuration of a three node cluster that equates to 384 users per cluster, all having access to 1GB of framebuffer profile!

Host: Harvey Green
Co-host: Jirah Cox
Co-host: Ben Rogers