Becoming cloud native with Nutanix

“You don't need to transform your entire environment to cloud. You can start really small. Nutanix takes a lot of the pain, if not all of it out of that initial footprint on starting in the cloud,” says Michal Car, Director of Hybrid Multi-cloud for APJ.

For Nutanix, there are two key areas which customers are looking at currently. First, they want to know how they can modernize their services to support the rise of AI. Specifically, customers are looking at an evaluation point to see where they are going to be in the future with AI.

The second aspect is on how they’re trying to cope with the changes announced by VMware Broadcom. According to Michal Car, Director of Hybrid Multi-cloud for APJ at Nutanix, non-Nutanix customers are requesting evaluation as they need a safe pair of hands. They want a solution that’s not going to introduce risk, not going to introduce operational complexity, and something that can move fast.

“So obviously, when you're talking about enterprise, there's a large scale of workloads. Even if you were to go cloud native, that's a very long journey. So, they need to get it done fast, like within 12 months. And then they need to make sure that they're not introducing risk,” said Car.

For Car, this is where Nutanix’s partnership with AWS has the strongest story. Car mentioned that Nutanix covers the organization’s journey from the edge, core and the cloud while AWS provides the infrastructure on the cloud side.

“It’s not much of a difference approach but there are nuances to the solution,” said Car.

While network and security are probably the biggest technical challenge in any migration, Car believes that the mindset of the organization needs to be on par with the requirements as well.

“Whatever the technical challenges, we can overcome them. That's not the problem. But do you really want to move to the cloud? I think that's being pushed now more because if you want to access the AI features and the modern services in cloud, which is what a lot of organizations have already started, it's got to talk to the data that's residing on prem if you want it to be useful to the organization. So now that push to go up is there,” explained Car.

Taking the first step

As Car puts it, customers' fear of change or not making a change is going to impact them significantly from a financial point and from an innovation point. If an organization is not making the change now, it’s guaranteed there's a competitor who's saying they’re going to go and start doing it.

“You don't need to transform your entire environment to cloud. You can start really small. Nutanix takes a lot of the pain, if not all of it out of that initial footprint on starting in the cloud, because you don't need to reskill and you have to do very little retooling. It's such a seamless process to get in there,” added Car.

On the ROI benefits some businesses may question, Car highlighted that customer could pick the workloads that make the most sense to run in whichever native service that they want to run them in.

“Start small but start and we can control the security and governance across that. You don't need to come in with this fear not knowing what to do on the cloud. For me, the best place to start is business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR). BCDR is an easy way to get your footprint in the cloud. Start looking at the workloads that make sense to go in there and evaluate the hyperscaler of choice for you.”

“If you run a lot of Windows workloads, and they're really modern Windows workloads, you might want to look at Azure and wrap all that up. If you're very heavy open source, you might want to do AWS. That's for your VM estate. And then obviously, you want to start looking at what are the native services that they need to talk to. And if it's data and query, you might go to Google. If it's SQL and database, you might go to Azure, and AWS have pretty much everything. So, start with BCDR, and then DevTest,” explained Car.

Working with partners

In terms of working with partners, Car pointed out that Nutanix has seen five new partners come on board this year across the Asia Pacific region that were AWS competency and migration premier partners.

“What we're seeing from the partner side is that the cloud native partners are turning around now saying, their customers are coming to them, they're looking for a faster exit, they're looking for a safe exit, and then a faster path to modernize. Who can deliver that? Nutanix. So, we're seeing a strong relationship with Versent, Amdocs, Sourced Group, Axrail and eCloudvalley across the region. It's going really strong in terms of the cloud native teams coming to us and looking to assist with move,” said Car.

In Malaysia and Singapore, Car mentioned that Nutanix has a strong relationship with Axrail. Axrail has been helping customers build out really simple AI models in AWS. Sitting between two employees, these bite size agents deliver a 40% productivity gain for them.

“It's a really clear win. But now, as it starts to grow and roll out, those agents need to talk back to the data that's on premises. And this is how our partnership with Axrail started because they realize they have got a lot of customers with all this data on prem, and they can't get it into AWS fast enough,” explained Car.

Concerns on data

Another interesting point highlighted by Car is data compliance and regulatory requirements. According to Car, Nutanix gives customers the ability to place data dynamically and the workload that's next to it anywhere they want.

“So, from the edge to core into the cloud, we're not going to change the data, the governance and the security and the sovereign policies that you've built. We just shift them wherever it may need to reside. For example, a customer might want to ingest the data in the edge and then replicate it up into AWS. Nutanix gives customers the control plane and the mechanisms to be able to do that. Customers don't have to worry about security and safeguards. They also don't need to worry about having a data and AI specific team in the organization just to protect it,” said Car.

Car also pointed out that the same policies that companies have spent 10 years evolving are still applicable in the cloud. They don’t need to rearchitect their entire framework of enterprise apps and data to be able to use the AI services that are available.

“It’s very different to what VMware is doing. But we support both models. And again, this is a unique value prop for us is that if you want to consume those small services over here in the cloud, you can go for it. If you want to build an enterprise AI model, you can go and do that as well. And we can help you and support you in that. There's a different set of data and agents that you may want to build that needs to be localized and run and do that. We definitely see that use case. But for smaller ones, or for testing, you might want to run that in the cloud, so you don't have to go and invest heavily on the GPUs,” said Car.

This also solves the problem of upskilling. From an operational perspective, Car said that upskilling is a real challenge, as companies can't really teach their entire ops team to be cloud native.

“They probably want to, but it's very hard to do while you're also doing a migration program, especially while you're trying to just keep the lights on in your business and do day to day operations. I think that simplicity from the ops point almost outweighs how simple it is to move, because your staff can just do it. If you're coming from Broadcom or VMware over to Nutanix, the learning curve is really small so you can do that. And then you can focus on upskilling your staff on the native service that is going to make the biggest impact to your organization,” concluded Car.