Listen to this podcast to learn how you can instantly implement a work from anywhere environment in a secure manner through Nutanix’s desktop as a service (DaaS) solution, Xi Frame.
Speaker 1: On behalf of Nutanix and Carahsoft, we would like to welcome you to today's podcast, focused around working from anywhere with Desktop-as-a-Service, where Phil Ditzel, Frame public sector director, discusses how state and local government and education organizations can instantly implement a work from anywhere environment in a secure manner with Nutanix's Desktop-as-a-Service, Xi Frame.
Phil: I'm Phil from Nutanix. We are speaking about Nutanix Xi Frame for the local and higher education. So to get started, Xi Frame is Nutanix's offering for desktop and application delivery as a service. We run, it's called a control plane in the public cloud. Its job is in three parts user experience broker, it's also part administration suite for the end user computing team, and it's also part automation. With the service stay local education customers can deliver things from GP backward labs, Windows desktop, Linux desktops, all the way up to solutions for their employees or workers. So as part of Nutanix DNA, we've got a lot of work around virtual desktop infrastructure with our core HCI platform platform. In the early days of our business were really tied around VMware Horizon View. And so we built the technology to our core platform to mitigate things like boot storms.
Couple years ago, certified AHV is a tier one hypervisor. So a Citrix on top of our core HCI, and you can use VMware, vSphere, Nutanix AHV, Microsoft Hyper-V. So the traditional study piece versus desktop infrastructure we have you covered for sure, but where the industry is going is control planes, brokers that are tied to the public cloud for a hybrid cloud scenario. Frame is the only really true multi-cloud desktop for application service offering. With Frame, you can immediately tie it to Google Cloud Platform, GCP, Microsoft, Azure, Amazon AWS, or Nutanix [H-hydroful 00:02:26]. The thing with Frame is you can actually deliver desktops from the public cloud and the private cloud together. You can actually place maybe lab scenarios or bursty workloads in the public cloud, steady state workloads with data low-calorie requirements on-prem.
Frame is again, a platform that Nutanix runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week to help you deliver desktops Windows apps, or Linux desktops to really an HTML style browser at the Edge. HTML style browsers are Chrome, Firefox, Safari on really any device: Chromebooks, Chromeboxes, Macs, Linux or Windows desktops. The final thing with this platform is that really Edge is less important. We have a lot of KP12s delivering very, very high end GPU intensive applications to students at home with the Chromebooks and HTML style browser Chromium. All of their applications are being hosted in either public cloud or Nutanix on-prem, they're doing all the heavy lifting of running the applications or desktops, but their user experience, they just see the applicants into their browser. Maximum flexibility, the goal is to drive down the pain at delivering again, user computing, desktops, or applications.
With the control plane in the cloud and that is a managed service by Nutanix, just takes the burden off of the customers to run their own broker service. Nutanix updates the control plane, applies fixes or new features. Customers essentially just have the fixes or features after they're published. You don't have to go and do anything. You use those features. So it's more like a Tesla car in that case where you download, the car updates overnight, and you get to use all the fun, new features, without any burden on your side. So the true multi-hybrid cloud, the control plane again, is the public cloud. We run the control plane 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It is a true multi-tenant environment. From your tenant you can, again tie Frame to AWS, Azure, GCP. Google has selected Frame as one of their three go-to market partners for end-user computing tied to Google Cloud Platform, which is a very nice feather in our cap. With Frame, of an application or desktop to a user's browser.
We are, for all intents and purposes, using the technology that Netflix uses to essentially deliver movies or TV shows to your screens at home. The remoting protocol, we call it the Frame remoting protocol has been built to satisfy very difficult conditions in the early days, has been adapted to really function very suitably today for this environment where everybody is at home on wildly different internet connections. The remoting protocol will adjust each user's particular network configuration or situation. It adjusts to deliver the experience the best way it can. We have folks that are a thousand miles away from where they sit to their experience the desktops are next door. We have districts that are handing out LT hotspots to underserved students, where they can actually get all their material and use Frame applications with them. But there's a question of where to go with Frame for the public and private cloud powered by Nutanix ACI.
The reality is we've seen a lot of K-12 spin up directly deliver their labs scenarios, things like CT programs or STEM programs or project lead the way in the public cloud. They could rapidly spin up, spin down work loads in burst if necessary, deliver GPU batch workloads, so applications like AutoCAD, SolidWorks to the students. And with Frame, you have the capacity of power up and power down is necessary to satisfy the time of day or student load. If your organization has employees or students that are outside of the geographic region, some higher ed have students that are outside the United States. Frame can be tied into cloud regions. 72 cloud regions around the world offered by AWS, Azure, or GCP. So you actually can deliver desktops or applications that are geographically close to students, or employees. We've seen Frame tie to Nutanix HCI on-prem for steady state workloads, predictable workloads or applications that have data, gravity, data locality requirements.
It makes more sense for the user perspective that Frame tie to on-prem resources if a large data set sits on-prem, for sure. You can leverage HCI or files offering since you have two data locality for users, desktops, their files, application servers, et cetera. And the powerful thing with Frame is that you are able to spin up desktops in a public cloud and on-prem together. You're not tied to a particular path, you can pivot as you grow with Frame. Your Frame has several parts. There's a user experience, which is delivered to an HTML5 browser. There's again, another notion of the admin side, we call dashboard. And this is a rendering of dashboard. Dashboard has been built to be very easy to use and consume from the administrator perspective. It's getting a little bit prism on-prem, but I built like a iOS interface there, those notions of swipes left and right to turn features on or off, up and down arrows to increase decrease, sliders to increase decrease.
You don't need a PhD in end user computing to leverage Frame. One of our customers that spun up... The first customer for COVID-19 with Frame was the CIO of State of Maryland Lottery. He was involved in their organization, spin up and delivery of really non-persistent jump hosts with Frame. He didn't want to go out and hand out laptops to everybody at the Edge. So he uses Frame as really a spot that his employees at home can connect to with their home PCs. And it's a clean interface to their on-prem infrastructure. Other districts are using Frame to deliver again, high end applications like AutoCAD, SolidWorks, or STEM GT programs, RVIS, across the board now to the Adobe Suite and Office, all of it's powered by an admin using dashboard to onboard applications and figure we call launchpads the methods to deliver the experience to the users capacity settings.
And it becomes very easy to deliver rapidly these a classroom scenarios or remote access. So customer choice with Frame. Step zero is scripted service. Frame has two types of licenses named, which are particular individuals over a month period. So if you want to have a hundred people in your organization, you could subscribe to a hundred names, or there's a subscription type called concurrent maximum concurrent, which is actually tied to number of machines under Frame's control to satisfy peak capacity. That is also more tied to a churn and burn state, where you have a large pool of people, but you want to satisfy a random number at any one time. The subscription, they tend to go from one month through 60 months. The subscriptions are built, so you can actually onboard more subscriptions as you go, and they'll all co-term together at the same time.
So you subscribe for 12 months to start and you start adding on subscriptions as you grow the infrastructure or the use of Frame they'll all co-term at the 12 months or eight months or seven months later. That's maximum flexibility for your consumption. Again, Frame supports tying it to AWS, Azure, Chief, or AHV you can begin with cloud. As soon as authorization of users brainpower into identity providers choice speaks per called SAML. We support active directory federated services Azure AB, Google Directory, Okta, Duo, Centrify, Shibboleth a whole bunch. And that means you could tie into your organization's provider for at least one login. If you have two factor authentication it's all done. If you're an identity provider and Frame gets back to cheat some answers from your IDP.
Step three is apps licenses. Are you still on the hook to onboard your applications and license those applications? As part of the subscription service, we always include certain professional service hours to help tie together your infrastructure and your applications with Frame. Step four is user files, very important to delivering lab scenarios or any computing scenarios, remote access. Frame supports natively cloud storage, Onedrive, Dropbox, Google Drive. You can also conduct operations like domain, join desktops and push down your assists or SMB shares is normal. You have maximum flexibility on if you want to protect cloud storage or not. You can use domain joined desktops, or you don't have to. It's really up to your environment. The last step again is delivery. The bulk of our users are using just the HTML5 browser. Again, Chrome boxes, Chromebooks, thin clients, Mac, Windows, tablets. If your use case requires multiple monitors up to four, we have what's called a Frame app that can run on Mac, Windows, or for Linux.
So there's three fronts. We have built into the control plane a lot of controls, audit the controls. If you have two discrete versions of the Frame control plane for different customer use cases, the bulk of our customers are using what we call the commercial control plane. That is run by follow-the-sun support. If you are a state local organization, you can actually leverage, subscribe to our control plane that we call GovCloud. The GovCloud version of the control plane is managed by US citizens on US soil. It currently holds a certification called FedRAMP authorized, it's moderate level. We have a CIO of a federal agency. The GovCloud version has more controls that have been audited since the strict requirements for use, but a customer can subscribe tie Frame into AWS GovCloud, Azure Gov, or GCP regions on the economy, and it states Nutanix AHV.
A government customer can also request the FedRAMP package, which contains an authority to operate a what's called 3PAO audits. What third party audit and a 450 page system design doc that is available for customers usually with .gov email addresses. In any case, excuse me, the method to deliver the live video to a user's browser is an encrypted session such as the same technology to encrypt your banking information with the web browsers. Frame does not intercept or route or trombone the user's connection to the virtual machine that's running their desktop application, which is very important too, in today's, again, situation where everybody's at home or remote. You want to have the quickest connection to from a user's browser to their machine, the lowest latency connection. And that is a point-to-point connection. So a user's browser speaking directly to a board first machine it's backing the workload with again, it was Frame. If you had the use case to deliver desktops or applications to geographically diverse employees, students, you can tie Frame if you get 72 different data centers and regions around the world to deliver the applications or desktops.
We have regions spinning up all the time. This is a slide it's a couple of months old, a lot of the newest baselines regions spun up in the Middle East and APEC. In the United States, we have the bulk of the capacity available between US East, US West, which is generally Oregon, and then US Central, which is either Ohio or Texas. One more slide speaks about Frame. This is the spaghetti strings of how users connect to desktops, control by Frame. So the middle column is the Frame control plane. That service that Nutanix runs in the public cloud. Frame can tie into AWS Azure GCP natively, Frame can tie into Nutanix HCI, the private cloud natively on the same interface. The interface has been skinned to look exactly the same, no matter where the capacity's being delivered from.
So you learn one dashboard and that's all you have to worry about. A user with their browser would connect to the Frame control plane, to the identity provider of the agency or the school district. And you click on a notion of a launchpad. The launchpad is the way that we deliver experience, so desktops or applica- Now click on that launchpad, Frame will tell their browser to essentially connect to the root machine running their desktop or applications. So if they're in the public cloud they can connect to the VMware cloud account. Or if they're tied into Nutanix HCI, on-prem we have a notion of a streaming gateway client. That's usually gateway clients which is a reverse proxy. It tied down the secure connection and the proxies users in their experience, they're going to click on a launch pad and they connect to a desktop or application. And either way, the user has no idea where the application desktops being delivered from, and they really shouldn't need to know anyways.
So yeah, we have a maximum flexibility on how you want to deploy and deliver applications and desktops from Frame. Okay, well that is Nutanix Frame. If you have the need to connect with our folks to chat about Frame we are on standby. We have a couple of ways to show Frame off very quickly. One of them is called a test drive where you can give Frame a functional test. There's actually a nice PDF day in the life walkthrough of leveraging Frame from admin in this perspective, or you can onboard a couple of apps. You could publish and really see and feel what Frame would do for your organization quickly. Thank you for your time. Appreciate it.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening. If you'd like more information on how Carahsoft or Nutanix can assist your organization, please visit www.carahsoft.com or email us at nutanix@carahsoft.com. Thanks again for listening and have a great day.