Nutanix .NEXT 2017 - Calm and Marketplace

Another exciting announcement this week at the Nutanix .NEXT conference in Washington, D.C. is around Nutanix's new product called Calm, which came from their acquisition of Calm.IO in August 2016.

Nutanix Calm provides application automation and lifecycle management for the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform and public clouds, as well as self-service and governance, and hybrid cloud management.

So what is Calm and why is it needed? Managing applications has become increasingly complex. Consider these application automation and lifecycle management pain points:

• More app components and platforms leads to increased response time and finger pointing
• Knowledge silos and fragmented ownership leads to longer time to issue resolutions
• User expectations are for frequent releases, but these complexities are leading to longer release cycles

If you add a hybrid cloud element to these existing challenges, the problem becomes worse due to a lack of interoperability between disparate cloud platforms.

So how do you solve this problem? It boils down to two things:

1. Full stack automation
2. A single control plane for application orchestration

Full stack automation with a single control plane for orchestration is exactly what Calm is. 

Let's look at Calm at a high level.

Now let's break Calm down into its three main layers - Application Lifecycle Automation and Modeling, Self Service and Governance, and Hybrid Cloud Management.

Application Lifecycle Automation and Modeling

Application blueprints are an intuitive and visual way to model applications. Blueprints incorporate all elements, including VMs, configurations, and binaries. Blueprints are how you can drive repeatable provisioning of applications. 

Self Service and Governance

Nutanix Marketplace empowers self-service through one-click app provisioning, pre-integrated blueprints, and role-based access control. Imagine no longer having to spin up VMs for somebody else. You build the blueprint, give them access to deploy it, and they take over from there. Think of an application vending machine for your business!

Hybrid Cloud Management

Where do you want your application to reside today? On premises? No problem. In the cloud? Which one? You pick. The choice is yours. For some customers, this will come down to availability or data locality requirements. For others, this is going to come down to cost. Imagine being able to truly understand the real cost of your cloud providers. You can with Nutanix Calm. 

Calm is expected to be generally available in September 2017 and start with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV) support. Future releases will include support for ESXi, Hyper-V, Azure, and containers. I understand Calm releases will happen quite quickly after the initial release, so I would expect to see these features before the end of 2017.

Enjoy the rest of .NEXT 2017!

I would like to thank Greg Smith and Chris Brown at Nutanix for sharing this content with the Nutanix Technical Champion community.

Nutanix .NEXT 2017 - Xi Cloud Services & Xi Disaster Recovery Service

Today at the Nutanix .NEXT conference in Washington, D.C., Nutanix unveiled a major new offering that has been under wraps (to the best of my knowledge) for nearly a year. This exciting new product is called Xi (pronounced 'zye', rhymes with 'bye') Cloud Services.

Xi Cloud Services are delivered by Nutanix and consumed by Enterprise Cloud Platform customers (if you're a Nutanix customer, that's YOU.) They do that by providing a native cloud extension to the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform, which is available via Prism.

When will Xi Cloud Services be available? Early access is expected in November 2017, with GA coming in early 2018.

"I thought cloud was super easy? I mean, anyone can spin up VMs in the cloud, right?" Sure, but hybrid clouds - specifically, a combination of your existing on-premises infrastructure PLUS resources running in one or more public clouds - are another beast entirely.

Management tools are often vendor-specific and the constructs used across platforms are disjointed. This is where Xi Cloud Services comes in.

Xi Cloud Services provides a complete platform extension to the cloud.

"I still don't get it. What's the point?" In order to adopt cloud, it needs to be non-disruptive. You can't spend time re-platforming applications. Think about what Apple did when they introduced iCloud. A simple toggle switch on your iPhone and you immediately got access to resources outside your phone without having to do anything. The phone OS stayed the same because iCloud was an extension of the OS. It was extremely simple to setup and use. It gave you incredible flexibility. That's Xi Cloud Services. Xi Cloud Services is the Enterprise Cloud OS.

"So give me a use case for Xi Cloud Services." OK, how about disaster recovery? In fact, the first offering for Xi Cloud Services is going to be the Xi Disaster Recovery Service.

DR allows customers to rapidly and quickly protect VMs without 3rd party products, professional services, or the need for a separate data center. If you're familiar with Nutanix's "1-Click" technology, think of this as 1-click DR.

"Hmm, we've been doing DR for years. Why can't we just keep doing that?" Well, think about the three ways customers are currently approaching disaster recovery.

1. Do It Yourself - often complicated, capex-heavy, and requires highly specialized skills
2. Managed Services Providers - expensive and relies heavily on professional services
3. DR to Public Cloud - as mentioned above, on-prem and DR technology is disjointed, and is inherently complex

"Oh come on, it's not THAT bad." Let's consider the various touch points of any DR project for a second.

1. Recovery Site Provisioning - find a site, buy a lot of stuff, build a lot of stuff
2. Replication - get the data to the recovery site (perhaps in a variety of ways)
3. Runbook Automation - plan the plan, in other words
4. Security Policies - you didn't think your CISO would let you ignore that part did you?
5. Network Connectivity - aside from replication connectivity, how will users and data ingress/egress the network at the recovery site? How will you fail back?

Take steps 1-5 above, and that's Xi Disaster Recovery Services rolled into one easy to consume service. To use the old tired utility analogy, you didn't build the power grid or the water works for your house. It's a series of complex technologies that someone made easy for you to subscribe to as a service.

Specifically, Xi Disaster Recovery Service:

1. Eliminates the need for a dedicated DR site
2. Is managed centrally through Prism
3. Has flexible subscription plans

"Where will my Xi Disaster Recovery Service workloads reside?" At launch there will be US West region and a US East region, with two availability zones on each cost for a total of four nationwide. 

Let's take a look at a screenshot of Prism and how this would look to an end user. As you can see it's as simple as point and click.

First, select the VM and choose Protect from the Actions menu.

 Next, create the runbook, which helps define things like VM dependencies, boot order, and network settings.

As you can see, allowing or disallowing access of specific VM networks to the internet and creating backward connectivity to the source can all be done in a few clicks. Simple!

Now let's take a look at the DR Dashboard, which like all other Nutanix dashboards, gives you a wealth of information. You can see your RPO status, DR test status, and current bill for the DR resources you've consumed. 

I think this announcement is huge for Nutanix and will provide a lot of value to their customers. Disaster recovery has been far too complicated for too long. Many other competitors to Nutanix in this space need multiple products to pull this off, many of which were acquired and poorly integrated over time. 

I can't wait for my first Xi Cloud Services opportunity! Enjoy the rest of .NEXT 2017!

I would like to thank Greg Smith and Chris Brown at Nutanix for sharing this content with the Nutanix Technical Champion community.