Nutanix’ new multicloud management products aim for simplification

Hybrid cloud integration provider Nutanix is set to release three new features for its multicloud platform, aimed at simplifying complex environments and making application management simpler for IT teams.

The first is Project Beacon, a centralization of the basic Nutanix Cloud Platform offering designed to deliver a unified experience for business applications across multiple public clouds. Where most PaaS services are tied to specific public clouds, according to the company, Project Beacon is designed to provide platform services for apps running different services wherever they might be, complete with Kubernetes integration.

“Project Beacon is our vision for enabling developers to write applications once and run them anywhere by delivering data-centric PaaS level services that are no longer tied to a single infrastructure provider,” said Nutanix president and CEO Rajiv Ramaswami, in a company announcement made at the company’s annual .NEXT conference in Chicago today.

Part two of the company’s releases are features enabling what Nutanix calls unified data services, which are designed to obviate the need for third-party tooling or in-house workarounds to get stateful Kubernetes applications to work with storage provisioning. The Nutanix Data Services brand will also encompass multicloud snapshot technology, designed to provide things like backup and disaster recovery for both containerized and virtual applications, as well as cross-cloud data migration.

“This will also help many customers manage costs of their primary infrastructure, enabling them to easily store snapshots in a less expensive storage medium, and just as easily recover them, across any infrastructure,” the company said.

Finally, Nutanix announced Nutanix Central, a single console for monitoring and management across a company’s entire infrastructure, whether it’s private cloud, public, hosted, or on-premises. The idea is to simplify the management of data and apps across complex infrastructure topologies. The dashboard will include alert summaries, metrics at the domain and cluster level, and include individual role-based access for security.

Research firm Gartner rates Nutanix highly — it was a “visionary” in that company’s last on distributed file systems and object storage — in part because of its wide base of integration with the third-party ecosystem. Nutanix looks to be playing into that strength with today’s announcements.

The company said that Nutanix Central will be available to customers as part of their Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure license, while Data Services for Kubernetes and Multicloud Snapshot are still under development. Messages asking for availability dates for Nutanix Central and Project Beacon had not been returned at the time of this writing. Nutanix declined to share pricing information on any of these products.