In Carahsoft’s new podcast, Kelly Estes, Systems Engineer at Nutanix discuss how Nutanix Clusters on AWS enables single infrastructure management plane across all clouds, app migration across clouds with no code changes needed, and license portability cost optimization features with maximize investment.
Speaker 1: On behalf of Nutanix and Carahsoft, we would like to welcome you to today's podcast focused around unifying your private cloud and AWS with Nutanix clusters, where Kelly Estes, systems engineer at Nutanix, will discuss how Nutanix clusters enable seamless application migration and unified operations across clouds to help organizations accelerate their cloud journey with AWS.
Kelly Estes: Thank you very much and thank you everyone for joining today. We really do appreciate it. My name is Kelly Estes and I am one of the federal systems engineers supporting civilian agencies. We'll go ahead and get started. In our diagram here, you see we have all of our different clouds. We have our data center, which started with our mainframe and physical machines on-prem. Then we have all of our different cloud providers, our SaaS applications, our robo sites. This has really just created a lot of complexity not only on-prem, but also in the public cloud in different silos. We need to modernize the infrastructure so that we're able to get more done faster while still being able to address all of the current and emerging needs. Hybrid cloud, it is a reality and it's an important strategy for many of the organizations that we talk to.
Kelly Estes: Hybrid cloud, it is hard. Traditional third-party cloud environments don't integrate well with on-prem infrastructure and these public services have separate sets of skills, constructs, require different sets of management tools. The end result is really just another IT silo with distinct operational requirements, complex management and overall higher costs.
Kelly Estes: Where Nutanix truly started out would be on our left-hand side here. How do we make infrastructure and the data center invisible and improve processes, overall complexity in silos on prem? I've been with Nutanix, it'll be three years coming up on November 6th and I personally believe that we've done a really good job with our core and hyper-converged infrastructure story. More and more are we hearing that we need to go to the public cloud with our agency's modernization initiatives and cloud initiatives.
Kelly Estes: This does make sense. It's truly something that we've always realized from the beginning when we started as a company in 2009. It's not cloud first, but it's cloud smart. Let's keep our static workloads on-prem and our dynamic workloads in the public cloud that need to burst quickly for scalability. Given all these factors, it's really what we need is a balance between the public, which is suitable for your elastic cloud native applications and private cloud, which combines ease of use, agility, and scale with the security and control of the dedicated data center, of course. There is a strong need for a single operating system that can span private distributed and public clouds so that our operators can go in there and manage their traditional and modern applications using a single platform.
Kelly Estes: Platforms must seamlessly extend between clouds, allowing for our administrators to go in and move the virtual machines and applications without translation or without having to learn new skillsets or retooling those applications. The option to have the freedom of licensed portability, being able to choose really where your VMs would fit best and move those licenses around, whether it be on-prem or in the public cloud.
Kelly Estes: That's where we would like to introduce to you all, Nutanix latest offering, which is Nutanix clusters. What Nutanix clusters does is it enables our enterprises to run the Acropolis operating system, which is our AOS. If you've ever heard, if we say AOS or Acropolis operating system, it's the operating system that we run. It allows you to run those AOS clusters and AWS, and soon to be Azure, which we just made that recent announcement in .NEXT about a month ago.
Kelly Estes: Today, the Nutanix AOS clusters run on bare metal EC2 instances and can be managed via Prism Central, which Prism Central is a way for you to go in and monitor and manage multiple locations, multiple data centers, multiple hypervisors, and now clouds from one single pane glass view. It provides nearly the identical functionality to on-premise AOS environments as in the public cloud. Our customers are able to go in and leverage their existing AWS accounts, credits, VPCs, VPNs and their direct connect configurations.
Kelly Estes: As a result, our customers are really getting a full enterprise cloud experience without having to go in and deploy or manage multiple data center infrastructures. This is an example of a little bit of what an architecture would look like. We could also add the Azure stack over here as well, which is going GA at the end of the year. To deploy a Nutanix clusters, what we would do is you log into our hosted portal and choose all of your specific details, like how many nodes you want in your cluster, your replication factor for redundancy, what region you want to deploy in, what cloud, the instance type. Once you have clicked deploy, we make API calls to start the cloud formation. The deployment process, from deployment to up and running, it takes about 45 minutes. If you can think about the time savings of waiting for shipping and then rack stack cabling, not that our process takes long at all on-prem, but just eliminating that shipping aspect. If you need to deploy a cluster quickly, this is definitely something that can be done with Nutanix clusters.
Kelly Estes: The cluster, again, sits in your AWS VPC and integrates with all of their inherent services. You're still able to take advantage of the AWS services, even though it's a Nutanix cluster in AWS. Of course, you can use your credits and the account that you have today as well. We're using Nitro components, inherent AWS running on bare metal instances and the storage is NVME. The performance for those IO intensive applications that need direct access to NVME, now this is a beautiful use case for that.
Kelly Estes: Then of course, it allows you to migrate your apps back and forth seamlessly. If you think about it, if you're using Nutanix solution today, you're able to create protection domains and migrate VMs. We can move those VMs from on-prem Nutanix to in the public cloud and AWS, and say you decide or the organization says, "Okay, now we have our Azure credits and we're going to move to Azure. Then we can even move those VMs over to the Azure cloud as well and back and forth between."
Kelly Estes: Then a quick last note because it is definitely one worth mentioning is you'll see that S3 bucket in there. This is something that I really see a lot of value of in terms of cost savings because with Nutanix clusters, we have something called a hibernation feature. Where if you don't necessarily need that cluster up and running 24/7, you can go in, hibernate the cluster. What this is doing is it's powering down your running cluster that's currently running on your EC2 instance and allows the customer's data to sit in that S3 bucket. For our cost effective solution, if say for dev tests, we don't need that cluster up and running constantly, that can be a big, big cost savings. Nice cost effective solution.
Kelly Estes: Again, unified management for clusters on-prem and the public cloud, the Nutanix hybrid story, it truly allows for you to have freedom of choice. We've always had that on-prem from your different OEM vendors. Say you really like Dell hardware, you've had a great experience with their hardware, our on-prem clusters can give you the freedom of choice of hardware, hypervisor because there is support for our included hypervisor AHV, Hyper-V ESXi as well. Now it's just even more freedom of choice from your public cloud experience, whether it be on-prem. This is an example of what the HTML5 web-based console would look like, Prism Central, where you can go in and create VMs from the same console on your on-prem Nutanix cluster and even go on and create VMs from that public cloud Nutanix clusters as well.
Kelly Estes: Then, like I mentioned before, the portability of your licenses. Say in that scenario where you power down the EC2 instance and it goes to S3, that actually frees up your AOS licensing to bring back on-prem or to Azure, for example. This all, I'm sure, sounds great but really where does it make sense? The two use cases... There're six here, two that we're really seeing would be on your right side. VDI on the cloud, unfortunate example would be COVID-19 where our agencies, they had to start working from home. What this allowed them to do is say we can't fit all of the VDI instances for remote work from home on-prem. Well, this allows us to burst up and run the desktops in the cloud. Those IO intensive databases, like I mentioned before, because the direct storage is NVME, we're able to directly access that NVME fast storage for great, great performance. There are different instances, of course. Depending on your workloads, there are different instances and those that go from maybe $5 an hour to $7 an hour. Depending on the resources that you need, there are different compute and storage levels there.
Kelly Estes: Lift and shift. This is really nice because you don't have to go in and do any type of code changes because those on-prem applications aren't necessarily built for the public cloud. You don't have to go in and retool those applications, it's truly a lift and shift. On-demand elasticity. With our automation tools, even say you get to a certain threshold of resources and you want the cluster to scale seamlessly for you without any type of manual intervention on your end, you can go in and create a blueprint and say, "Once I get to a certain threshold of this, add in another node." Or say, "I go down in my resources, take that node out from the cluster." A lot of different use cases you can do there.
Kelly Estes: Business continuity. Of course, for DR if you would like. Say we are replicating snapshots on a weekly basis and you could take advantage of that hibernation scenario or the automation so it's even more automated, we can always fail over to that DR site with our protection domains. Many different things. It's really just depending on your all's individual use cases, which is something that we truly like to talk to you one-on-one and see what you have in your environment on-prem in the public cloud, what initiatives are there and really work with you to see what makes most sense for each individual case there.
Kelly Estes: Then lastly, there are tons of ways to try this out. Two specifically that I would recommend. The first one being Test Drive and this is a completely free of no charge POC experience. What it is is we have a hosted environment where you can go in and go to Nutanix Test Drive. What this will do is it reserves you a four to eight hour environment. That time starts as soon as you register. Say you go in eight hours later and you're wondering why it's not working, that's because as soon as you register, that time clock starts then. Just letting you know to go ahead and plan ahead. Again, all costs covered by Nutanix. It's actually a self-guided tour. This is something that I'm really happy and thankful that Nutanix did for our customers. I've even seen value in it, just running through different solutions. It'll, say, give you an example of a different use case and it actually walks you through a live environment and tells you why it's doing what it's doing. It's a really good way to get hands on in my opinion.
Kelly Estes: Then a trial. We do have a 30 day free trial. This would be free AOS licensing for 30 days. However, the cloud costs would come from your individual AWS credits today. That is something that we are looking for. If you need GovCloud, we are looking for an early access GovCloud customer so please feel free to reach out. We're going early access next month for GovCloud So very excited about that milestone.
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.