Listen to John Bowles, Senior Systems Engineer at Nutanix discuss how Nutanix's multi-cloud platform, Xi Beam, provides security compliance and cost governance capabilities for public and private clouds.
Speaker 1:On behalf of Nutanix and Carahsoft, we would like to welcome you to today's podcast, focused around optimizing your enterprise cloud with Nutanix Xi Beam. Where John Bowles, Senior Systems Engineer at Nutanix, will discuss how Nutanix's multi-cloud platform, Xi Beam, provides security compliance and cost governance capabilities for public and private clouds.
John Bowles: My name is John Bowles, I'm a senior systems engineer here at Nutanix. Today well, I guess we're going to be talking about Beam, what we did at Nutanix here is we kind of went through our customer base, and started asking, "Hey, what are some of the challenges you're facing inside of the hybrid cloud environments, when it comes to billing and the security governance?" A lot of customers provided that they're having issues with multiple consumption models in their two environments. For example, a key challenge in public clouds is the lack of consumption controls that could lead to runaway costs. They are having issues with that and managing multiple platforms. With managing multiple consumption controls, it brought a lot of different issues, for instance, different purchasing types.
You have on demand instances, spots, RIs. And trying to optimize your purchase plans manually can be very complex and frustrating. Another common challenge across public and private clouds is to need to automate chargeback processes. And this is one of the big ones that we got feedback on as well. Spending dozens of hours to manually assign individual resource costs to various cost centers can be very inefficient and takes time away from more productive activities during your day. And lastly, what we found out is in the private cloud environment, they're built on on-prem data centers. So it's not real easy to centralize the costs associated with running a private cloud because of many different factors you have to take into account for like power, cooling, infrastructure, telecom, et cetera. Let's talk about how Beam addresses some of these common challenges for our customer base.
So one of the big ones is, if you're familiar with Nutanix is we try to simplify everything for the administrators and engineers from a day-to-day perspective. So what we're looking to do is provide a centralized view to managing all these costs in the public and private cloud environments, and also provide an out of the box visibility to into unit resource costs for the Nutanix private cloud. Beam also uses tag-based cost allocation approaches to it. Automatically assign cloud resource cost to call centers. So you can also specify a chargeback rules to assign untaxed spending to call centers, to get notifications through budget alerts, to give you some more proactive capabilities. And Beam also delivers 35% more public cloud savings throughout cost optimization workflows. Automating manual scheduling and actions, eliminating unused resources or rightsizing underutilized resources and making smarter RI purchases and recommendations.
So, let's take a deeper look inside the dashboard here and some of the feature sets. So unified cost visibility metering. So Beam delivers unified cost governance dashboards that provide visibility into both public and private clouds from a spend perspective, using the same tool, making it easier for you to manage your cloud costs in a single source of truth. Beam also provides out of the box visibility to cloud metering for Nutanix private cloud as well. The Nutanix resource costs are calculated using both TCO models that calculate true costs of running a private cloud, including not just hardware and software licensing costs, but also facility costs, telecom costs, and IT admin salary costs. All these costs are calculated automatically and depend on the number of on-prem nodes that you have inside your private cloud. You can also enter your own custom costs, such as any third party services costs or any non Nutanix software you may use for your private organization.
So again, flexibility is one of our biggest things that we preach here at Nutanix and ease of use. So you see, we're trying to incorporate that into our billing and compliance product here. Is our TCO model is meant to provide a good approximation of true costs of running private cloud. It can be easily tuned into the individual cluster for a level of more accuracy. Their overall cluster level TCO costs automatically allocated into individual BMs on the cluster so that you can easily know what BMs cost to run inside of your Nutanix private cloud. One of our big ones here is our automated charge back and budgeting. So let's talk about this for a second. So chargeback was one of the biggest ones that we received feedback on. And the key advantage that Beam provides over the competition is that we provide a truly multi-cloud chargeback model, where you can centralize calls from public and private clouds and allocate them to business units and call centers inside your organization.
Like for instance, do you want to track a particular application or engineering team? Or maybe you're just trying to track a particular region. Beam creates tag-based multi-cloud call center reporting across Azure, AWS, and Nutanix, leveraging prism category tax values for Nutanix. You can also create automated chargeback rules to assign unallocated or untagged spending to a particular call center. You just have to specify these rules out of the box one time, and then any future costs associated to these untagged spending cost items will be allocated to that particular call center. So Beam's customers use this capability to unify the charge back efforts and reduce manual effort. Also, you can define budgets, set up alerts thresholds, or be notified if a budget exceeds a certain spending threshold, and you can take those corrective measures too. So again, if you're monitoring any type of billing construct, to be able to cut that spend bleed before it happens is a tremendous advantage and Beam provides that capability to you.
And my favorite here is the cost optimization and savings. Beam identifies resources that you're paying for, but not really optimally using them. So maybe they're completely unused or they're only being partially utilized. So what we do is we measure metrics such as CPU, IO, any type of memory utilization, and you can easily delete resources that are identified directly from the Beam console and downsize any type of resource or right size any resources identified as under utilized within your cloud account. And one of the biggest sources of cost savings is switching from on demand to RIs. But one of the biggest issues when I was working with AWS is you just didn't know which RI to purchase for your workload type. Well, Beam does this analysis by looking into the instances that you're running continuously over a 14 to 30 day look back period, in which it will make recommendations for the particular RI purchases for your workload. Showing you a cost analysis of RI and on demand instances.
And another one of my favorite little features here within Beam that I found out the other day is instead of relying on manual actions for repeated tasks, such as on scheduling of cloud resources, Beam can help automate those tasks. So just to give you an example here, say every weekend you wanted to power down your dev environment inside AWS, or maybe you wanted to delete any type of snapshots that are older than 30 days. Well Beam can schedule this process and automate these actions for you. So all you have to do is set it and forget it, give you those cost savings and peace of mind. And another one of the features that are coming that's going to be very exciting here in the future is the cross cloud decision support. So I believe this is begun coming out in the next release.
So what essentially this is is that we dynamically compare workloads across multiple public and private clouds. So, we analyze this and, and find out which clouds might be cheaper for you to run that workload, so you can make cost aware decisions and place workloads in a more efficient manner within your organization. And just to circle back some of the advantages. So, how does Beam stand out from other similar tools? So Beam is more of a SaaS-based service and starts to provide optimization recommendations within less than 24 after onboarding. So delivering immediate value both on on-prem and in public clouds. Beam also provides you more than just recommendation. It also allows you to configure policies for automated actions, as we spoke about just recently, and also deliver more cost savings by performing these automated actions. Beam is also again, highly customizable.
So again, the flexibility pops up here, helping you create granular cost analytics that meet your reporting needs for your organization. We are offering a 14 day trial for Beam, all that is required as you go to nutanix.com/beam and create your account. Once you create your account, you plug in your public cloud or private cloud information. After 24 hours, Beam is going to run an inventory and at that point, will provide you recommendations or any type of remediation efforts that you see fit for your environment. With that said, I want to point out here also is that we have our .next conference coming up here in a couple of weeks. Please contact Jamie if you would like to attend, it's free admission. We want to get as many people there as possible to check out some of our new products and features that are coming out.
Speaker 1:Thanks for listening. If you would like more information on how Carahsoft or Nutanix can assist your government organization, please visit www.carahsoft.com or email us at nutanix@carahsoft.com. Thanks again for listening and have a great day.