Nutanix is ready to announce Nutanix Clusters. This brings the on-premises Nutanix experience to AWS and opens another front in the company’s battle with VMware.
Sources close to the company say Nutanix Clusters in AWS (NCA) has been in an early-access test phase for many months and is now robust and ready to move into general availability.
NCA runs on bare metal all-flash servers in AWS and uses AWS networking. Customers spin up servers using their AWS account and deploy Nutanix software on them. This process uses AWS Cloud Foundation, Amazon’s facility to provision and model third-party applications in AWS. On-premises Nutanix licenses can be moved to AWS to instantiate NCA there.
VMware uses its ESX hypervisor as an overlay atop AWS networking and this can sap resources and become a performance bottleneck, according to Nutanix sources.
NCA supports four types of AWS instance, including Large CPU, Large Memory and Large Storage. The Nutanix Prism management console can be used to manage NCA.
NCA bursts on-premises Nutanix deployments to AWS to cope with spikes – for example, an immediate requirement to add 1,000 virtual desktops. It also has disaster recovery capabilities.
Customers can use NCA to migrate on-premises applications running on Nutanix to AWS. There is no need to re-engineer applications as the software runs the Nutanix environment transparently across the public cloud and on-premises worlds.
When no longer needed, a Nutanix cluster in AWS can be spun down with its data stored in S3, incurring S3 charges only, until spun up again. The the spun-up NCA is rehydrated from the S3 store. We understand this go-to-sleep facility will follow the main NCA release in a few months.
A blog by Nutanix CTO Binny Hill provides more background on NCA and there is more info an early-access solution brief.
