Nutanix, Google Partner To Bring Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Across On-Prem, Cloud Environments
A new strategic relationship between Nutanix and Google is aimed at making it easier for Nutanix-based hyper-converged infrastructure workloads to easily migrate to the Google cloud.
The relationship, unveiled at Nutanix's .NEXT conference, being held this week in Washington, D.C., builds a bridge between on-premise and cloud deployments, said Venugopal Pai, vice president of business development and alliances at San Jose, Calif.-based Nutanix.
It is part of a wider Nutanix effort to bring its hyper-converged infrastructure technology to hybrid clouds.
Nutanix Wednesday also unveiled Xi Cloud Services, which extends data center services to the cloud, either an upcoming Nutanix cloud or the Google Cloud Platform, via the company's Prism centralized data center infrastructure management software. The first service will be Xi Cloud Disaster Recovery.
Nutanix also unveiled the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS software, an application that extends the Nutanix hyper-converged infrastructure environment to the cloud.
In addition, the company introduced Nutanix Calm, a single software fabric that lets customers define and publish applications in the form of blueprints that can then be provisioned across different cloud environments.
Nutanix and Google are partnering in two ways to bridge the two worlds, Pai told CRN.
The first is Nutanix support for Kubernetes, the container technology pioneered by Google before being released to open source, Pai said. Nutanix customers can now run applications built in Kubernetes containers on-premise and in the Google Cloud Platform.
"So now we can bridge customers looking for Kubernetes in the cloud or on-prem," he said. "We allow the seamless transportation of containers to the Google Cloud Platform with a single click."
The other part of the Nutanix and Google relationship is the ability to run native Nutanix services and Kubernetes container applications both on-premise and in the Google Cloud Platform via the new Nutanix Xi Cloud Services, Pai said.
The first Nutanix Xi Cloud Service is disaster recovery. "With our new relationship, customers can easily move virtual machines for disaster recovery purposes to Google via Xi Cloud Services," he said.
The Nutanix and Google partnership is important as clients increasingly move part, but not all, of their IT to the cloud, said Jeff Guenthner, director of solutions architecture at CMI, a Mill Valley, Calif.-based solution provider and Nutanix channel partner.
"Every client we talk to has a cloud-first strategy, yet has legacy ties and is on a journey to being a hybrid enterprise," Guenthner told CRN via e-mail. "We understand the driving forces pushing this client paradigm. It was a main tenet in our decision to make them our [hyper-converged infrastructure] go-to market partner. Regardless of the current point [for] our clients on the hybrid enterprise journey, Nutanix is complementary."