“Hybrid cloud” is a way for companies to use both public cloud computing services and private cloud services in their own data centers. Nutanix Inc. thinks the concept needs a reboot.

To help do that, Nutanix today is bringing its hyperconverged infrastructure, a method of tightly combining compute, storage, networking and other technologies in a single system, to the cloud.

It’s doing that with a new version of its Enterprise Cloud OS delivered as a full software stack with multicloud capabilities provided by the Calm.io automation platform that the company acquired  last summer. The company is also announcing a new cloud service called Nutanix Xi Cloud Services that duplicates the on-premises stack in a hosted environment.

Taken together, the moves enable customers to deploy Nutanix Enterprise Cloud software on-premises, on popular public cloud platforms or natively with Nutanix Xi Cloud Services.

Separately, Nutanix and Google Inc. announced a partnership under which Google will enable Nutanix-based applications to move from on-premises data centers to the Google Cloud Platform. The agreement allows enterprises to manage their applications running on their own servers and Google’s cloud as if they’re running in one place, making it easier to tap Google’s massive processing power in the cloud but keeping the data in their own data centers. “You can talk about cloud-native all day long, but it’s not there yet,” Nutanix Chief Executive Dheeraj Pandey said during a keynote Wednesday at the company’s Nutanix .NEXT trade show in Washington D.C.

The deal appears to signal Google’s most aggressive effort to date to integrate on-premises and cloud infrastructure. The first results of the integration will reportedly be released in the first quarter of next year.

“For all of the advantages of the cloud, some 95 percent of today’s workloads are still running in private data centers,” Diane Greene, senior vice president of Google Cloud, acknowledged during the keynote. But she added, “The public cloud offers flexibility, the freedom to deploy new initiatives the instant they’re needed, rather than going through the budgeting and bulldozing process required to turn cornfields into new data centers.”

The announcement also gave Nutanix a boost. Its shares rose more than 9 percent Wednesday, to $20.36 a share and rose about 1 percent more in after-hours trading. “The Google announcement gives Nutanix credibility,” said Stu Miniman, an analyst at Wikibon, owned by the same company as SiliconANGLE.

Nutanix has previously delivered its Enterprise Cloud OS on a variety of third-party hardware platforms, but support has now been broadened to include the full range of Nutanix features and ported to Cisco Systems Inc. and Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. hyperconverged platforms.

Nutanix devotees will probably take the greatest interest in Xi Cloud Services, which enable instant provisioning of Nutanix infrastructure on demand as a native extension of the enterprise data center. The result is a turnkey cloud service built from the same infrastructure stack with the same tooling and service level agreement as the core Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform, a concept that’s similar to Microsoft’s on-premises Azure Stack.

Duplicate in the cloud

“This is a native extension to the enterprise cloud platform that’s running today for more than 6,000 customers,” said Greg Smith, Nutanix’s vice president of product marketing. “It’s an integrated cloud environment that can be instantly provisioned and automatically configured so they can extend their enterprise environment into the cloud with same tooling and service-level agreements that they’re already using on premise.”

The service will be particularly useful to companies that want to extend their Nutanix environment to field-based operations such as oil rigs and airline terminals, Smith said.  “It’s the same software stack, so that all the applications in my private data center can also run in the cloud,” he said.

To get the benefits of both public and private clouds working in concert, organizations need hybrid architectures that leverage the same tooling, technology stacks and operational flows across their entire public and private cloud environment, he said. “Without this commonality they’ll create another IT silo.”

The Xi Cloud Service is expected to be the foundation for a number of specialized functional services. The first will be a disaster recovery service that Nutanix said customers will be able to set up, manage and test in minutes using the familiar Prism management interface. Users will be able to avoid the time and cost needed to set up duplicate failover data centers for disaster recovery purposes by duplicating their Nutanix environment in the cloud.

In addition to monitoring the cloud service from within Prism, administrators can also see see ongoing consumption and usage at any time for budgeting purposes. Subscription fees will be based on how many virtual machines and how much data a customer uses, Smith said.

Nutanix Calm is the result of Nutanix’s acquisition of Calm.io and its DevOps automation platform last summer. Nutanix Calm is said to abstract application environments from underlying infrastructure and recommend the right cloud for the workload. Applications are defined via blueprints that can be used across on-premises and cloud platforms. The software supports Nutanix’s AHV, VMware Inc.’s ESX and Micorosoft Corp.’s Hyper-V hypervisors as well as public clouds including Amazon Web Services Inc., Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Corp. Azure.

The Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS is now available as a software-only offering for Cisco and HPE. Nutanix Calm will be generally available by the fourth quarter and Nutanix Xi Cloud Services for disaster recovery are planned for early access by the first quarter of 2018.

Images: Nutanix