Listen to Nutanix’s Account Manager, Patrick Conaway, discuss Nutanix hybrid cloud’s ability to unify operations across all IT sites and clouds, simplify tasks, improve service delivery, and accelerate adoption of DevSecOps within your organization.
Speaker 1: On behalf of Nutanix and Carahsoft, we would like to welcome you to today's podcast focused around hybrid cloud for DevSecOps where Patrick Conaway account manager at Nutanix will discuss how Nutanix hybrid cloud unifies operations across all IT sites and clouds, simplified tasks and accelerate adoption of DevSecOps within your organization.
Patrick Conaway: Thanks very much for the introduction. Hello, my name is Pat Conaway. I'm with Nutanix and for your benefit, just some context around my role at Nutanix, I focus on the federal systems integrator space, and some of the work we have been doing is around automation, using a product called Calm from Nutanix, and Calm is a tool that I'll be going into a little bit today and getting you guys up to speed. One of the intake questions today was around familiarity with Nutanix.
So I'm just going to spend one or two minutes giving those of you who don't have any context as to what Nutanix is like an elevator speech, so that you're at least aware of what our company is. And what we do. Nutanix has been around for over 10 years is publicly traded, is over a billion dollars in revenue with over 20,000 customers, over 400 in the federal space with many of them inside the intelligence and DOD community, our products, our software base, and are tightly integrated with servers provided by Supermicro, Dell, HP, Cisco, and in the commercial sector, Lenovo, although we've not sold any of that into federal.
So the purpose of Nutanix is to replace conventional three-tier architecture and hypervisors with a more cloud-like framework, right? So you have rack mount servers that have direct-attached storage, either spinning disc or solid-state and a software mechanism that unifies all of those direct attached storage devices into a single pool of storage resource that is then virtualized and offered up through the hypervisor to your VM workloads.
So in a nutshell, we reduce all of architecture. You might have EMC or Hitachi or Dell storage or NetApp or Pure. All of those are more of what we would consider legacy era storage platforms and going forward cloud architectures like AWS and Google are what we'll see data centers become more like where those separate storage devices will be virtualized and offered on rack mount servers.
So when our customers convert over from legacy onto Nutanix, they eliminate a lot of the physical hardware, a lot of the networking, complexity, troubleshooting, and delay and deployment that comes with those architectures. So we would love to talk to you about that sometime, but today we're going to be talking about Calm. I have some pretty good experience with Calm and have seen it implemented as well as I've seen over my 20 years in IT with companies like I started in hosting with UUNET.
And then I was at Juniper for infrastructure, went over to Cisco, and worked in the data center products group for eight years before coming to Nutanix. And I have seen all kinds of projects, leveraging vROps, VRA, Ansible OpenShift. I've seen cloud efforts at automation, and I have to say, I'm very impressed with the results that are possible and the level of effort that is required being not as much with Calm, and here you see some of our customer remarks around the success of the product, which is extensive. So we have actually some case studies at the end that we'll touch on.
In the case of one of my customers, it is a federal assistance integrator who is utilizing Calm to automate the provisioning of resources for their DevSecOps group, so that they can reduce the amount of time needed to instantiate resources as application development requirements arise. We're going to begin with some of the common issues inside the IT group that we support and address with con, okay? So our IT team typically is a group of people that interfaces between those on the front lines, whether in the case of HHS, it might be a hospital or at social security, it might be folks in the benefits team, et cetera, or in the case of DOD combat entities or in Homeland security frontlines at the airport, et cetera, those teams reach back through their IT support teams for new applications, for database access, for anything that they need to deploy and track.
They reached back to the IT team and they put those requests in through some sort of a communication process, perhaps an email, perhaps there's some sort of a remedy or a service now, some sort of a ticketing system, but the IT team is responsible for receiving and delivering those requests. And in turn, they reached back out to a virtualization team, to a team that manages the operating systems to the delivery team, the actual developers themselves, a cloud team in the case where the initiatives and the policies at the agency mandate cloud-first, the IT team will relay the requirements over to the cloud team and ascertain if that is a workload that can be put on the cloud or needs to be kept on-premise and then the database team. So those different providers on the back end are each a communication step, a sequence of time that adds up and delays the response of the IT team back to the end-users, right?
So that is the reason for those delays because all of that needs to be evaluated. It needs to be checked against policy against budgets, et cetera, before answers can be given. So that process is where a lot of the business being conducted today in the federal government really struggles. So what end-users ideally would have is the ability to come in to a portal and identify the resource that they need from a selection or a marketplace.
Now, many products out there can provide this marketplace, but very few have the ability to instantiate the backend communication and process that needs to happen to fulfill those requirements. So where a user might require, say a database or a Jenkins workload, or some sort of application to be deployed. Having a marketplace, if it only kicks off a manual process will not resolve this it response time.
There needs to be something that goes out to the right-hand side of this graphic and pulls those resources together, right?And automates those processes. So what does that look like? Well, there needs to be a plan in place underneath those selections. And in comm, we call that a blueprint. The blueprint will identify the components that are required from networking, configuration base applications, and VMs.
So in the case of my customer, these components included applications like Jenkins and Bitbucket and Artifactory and others that the developers required access to. And on the backend, in order to deliver those, the IT team needed to go through network provisioning. They needed to configure those spaces for the developers. They needed to establish the resources for those applications to be deployed upon. And they needed to check security credentials. For instance, one of the issues was that for security reasons, passwords needed to be changed every 30 days for the customer.
And in order to do that, there needed to be a process in place where credentials into that system would be checked in congruency with that timing- right? So that was something that comm was able to build into that process and allow those administrators to automate so that as users came in to access the selections inside the marketplace, their credentials were kept up-to-date along with the security policy. And that brings us over here to these policies, right? The operations, the dependencies on these outside like active directory, like certain users having the ability to select certain resources, all of that is controlled inside your policy framework.
And then where those connections happen. So these capabilities all are accounted for inside the comm blueprint and finally security. The security policies that are taken into account need to be dynamic, right? So as our customer started to utilize the blueprints, it clear that their policy for security updates needed to be rectified inside the blueprint. And that's where the development actually happens, right? We're actually able to go into the blueprint to create a dependency that this user's security credentials are updated at a cadence as dictated by the customer.
So that's just one of many examples of how we could adapt the back-end policy operational approach to meet the customer needs. One of the key reasons that we wanted to present the blueprint is because to users who wish to truly bring in automation and make changes to the way they provision and reduced those difficulties that come with this process that we covered previously again, when this process here needs to be automated when customers truly want to go through the steps necessary to implement a solution such as Calm, there is an infrastructure team that aligns with the consumer and both sides of that organization, whether it's people that are provisioning, storage and VMs and hypervisor resources is, or the application developers themselves, both of those teams need to participate together in establishing those blueprint criteria.
So later in the presentation, I'll clarify how we do implement Calm and some choices that are available. And they are effectively very modest, small-sized bundles that include a number of VMs and applications and a number of professional services hours from Nutanix to come in and assist our customers in creating an initial blueprint. And the main factor that customers need to bear in mind is that it is very different from just provisioning a service now, or some other sort of a front end interface, ticketing ITSs product.
There is a lot of curating. There is a lot of pipeline of features that will be experienced once Calm is implemented. So every iteration of the blueprint becomes more and more specific to the workloads that the customer wants to invoke. And the benefit of this is that as we work with the teams, they then become experienced in how they can automate the tools inside of the comm blueprint.
And even to the point where they can turn around. And in the case of my customer, deploy Calm into smaller offices where it services are more difficult to deliver and automate provisioning of VMs and operating systems and desktops through that mechanism in those locations. So it is a building process and does really bring a platform for customers to experience rather than a waterfall type of approach, where first we need to know the amount of resources needed.
And second, we need to know the security policy and back and forth conversations. Calm gives a way to automate that and use checkboxes. And as the customer selects what they need, the lemonade, the non-relevant questions from the process, so that alone can accelerate as you present to your end-users, the resources that they require. And then the questions that naturally follow that before your IT team ever gets involved, they are able to go through and really figure out for themselves what they need.
As far as what you're seeing here in the middle. This marketplace, I called these chicklets these little tabs. I mean, you see MongoDB, you see SQL Server, you see Terraform, you see Puppet and Chef, Jenkins, Hadoop. You're seeing all these different types of applications and databases resources there that developers might like to select and instantiate and build on. This is very similar to what you would see through an Amazon web services or an Azure cloud services platform.
The difference being though that our customers who have this marketplace built through Calm that workload, when it is built is not forever then dedicated to be on-premise or in AWS or Azure, it is truly cloud mobile. So that presents a great value when compared to leveraging a particular cloud service providers marketplace, and that has made a big difference in the cost-benefit analysis of creating a customer's proprietary platform to do their automation through comm.
I also had mentioned service now. So in the case of my customer, ServiceNow is the ITSM the front end that their users interface with. So we utilize a ServiceNow deployed plugin for comm. So it's in the ServiceNow marketplace, and that plugin is supported. So it is a tight integration that is provided through your ServiceNow marketplace and supported there. And so all of the underlying automation that the comm blueprints create for the ServiceNow users is accessible to them, but they never actually see the name comm.
They never actually interface with a Calm interface. They're doing all of that through their ServiceNow interface. And that's really good for the customer because they have such a deep investment in ServiceNow that it's already attached into their credentialing and resources so that it prevents them from having to direct users to multiple different interfaces. And hopefully, that's pretty straightforward. Now, I'm going to take you through a couple of use cases that are on our public website.
And again, I encourage you if you have interest in learning more about Calm, we can provide you with a detailed briefing and demo of some of our comm capabilities. Fairway is a mortgage corporation that was already a Nutanix customer. So they were using PRISM PRO, which is our management interface, and AHV, which is our Acropolis hypervisor. One of the key benefits with Nutanix of the Acropolis hypervisor is that it is a cloud-era hypervisor it's based on KVM, just like the hypervisors that you get when you go out to Amazon and Azure. Again, this is an on-prem cloud model. When you work with Nutanix software for your infrastructure, the benefits that you see hereafter deploying Nutanix, Fairway implemented comm to automate their deployment, as well as desktop login for their web users, infrastructure management, and provisioning.
And you can see the benefits that they derived there. Also, we have public endorsements from the ones that I showed you at the beginning, as well as from the VP of IT from Fairway, as well as university of Reading. So this being more in our segment of FED and SLED again, a large enterprise customer with a lot of technical requirements across the education reporting compliance lab environments, they were able to utilize Calm for self-service provisioning portal and marketplace was developed for university of Reading.
And again, like many others, they experienced those cloud-like capabilities, utilizing the comm platform. And here you can even see that they utilize it also to automate their cloud platforms as well, right? So they are able to leverage the comm platform, not just for their on-prem usage, but also out to the cloud. It's really important to note that if you are looking at infrastructure and cloud and automation, that one of the key benefits that Nutanix can provide is to allow you to host your applications on-prem, as well as deploy those applications into the cloud, through a capability called clusters.
And that capability is really unique to Nutanix. So if you have the requirement to easily move VMs out to the cloud, and back again, I urge you to consider Nutanix because unlike any other platform out there, when you do it with Nutanix, you're able to utilize the resources inside of AWS or Azure, such as artificial intelligence, databases, commerce, backup, and recovery, any of the added features and capabilities you might today use in AWS, including your existing VPCs, your existing networking.
All of that is accessible via the Nutanix means of migrating onto the cloud and back again. And when you do that, another advantage is you don't pay twice for those platforms. When you're running Nutanix in the cloud, the same licenses you run on-prem can be taken to the cloud. You don't need to replicate those licenses. So really great technologies. We really appreciate you guys coming on. I hope this was helpful.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening. If you'd like more information on how Carahsoft or Nutanix networks 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.