Hyperconverged infrastructure company Nutanix Inc. is pushing forward to try to eliminate the complexity of managing disaggregated workloads across multiple cloud computing environments.

At its .NEXT Conference 2018 today, the company unveiled a new software-as-a-service offering aimed at providing multicloud governance and management capabilities. Called Nutanix Beam, the service is meant to help enterprises manage things such as spending, security and regulatory compliance across a range of both private cloud platforms and public ones such as Amazon Web Services Inc. and Microsoft Corp.’s Azure.

“Our vision is to become the operating system for the multicloud era,” Greg Smith, vice president of product marketing at Nutanix, told SiliconANGLE. “Companies will increasingly have a blend of clouds, public and private, in their infrastructure. These clouds will need to be harmonized and managed, and we believe that our software is the platform for companies to do just that.”

Stressing the need for more comprehensive cloud management services, Nutanix offered up one of its early-access customers, the sales and marketing consultancy ZS Associates Inc., which highlighted some of the common problems of running multiple public cloud workloads.

“For us, integrity, security and compliance is of the utmost importance, especially across our multiclient, multitechnology environment with a large application landscape, but it was becoming a nightmare to keep track of everything,” said Rustum Virani, a cloud solution architect manager at ZS Associates.

Nutanix reckons Beam is the ideal solution to this problem. The service was built using technology it acquired after buying startup Minjar Inc. in March. Minjar operated a cloud service called Botmetric that provided “unified cost control” services for companies running workloads in multiple public clouds.

“Botmetric was one of the leading cloud governance solutions on the market, managing more than $1 billion of cloud spend across AWS and Azure at the time of Minjar’s acquisition by Nutanix,” Smith said, explaining Nutanix’s decision to acquire the company. “It was built for the multicloud world and has a natural architecture that can expand into the private cloud.”

Nutanix Beam does much the same as what Botmetric did, providing an overview of organizations’ cloud costs, including the ability to optimize their spending by identifying unused or underused resources and reconfiguring them. It also helps companies ensure their cloud workloads remain in compliance with whatever regulations they need to adhere to, providing real-time scans to identify risks and violations as they occur.

“Beam is an excellent tool that provides single pane of glass to see the state of our infrastructure, automate tasks, provide cost-saving recommendations and also generate billing reports,” Virani said.

Nutanix also took the opportunity to announce two other products that support multicloud workloads. These include a new software-defined networking product, and a new database service aimed at helping enterprises optimize storage costs.

Nutanix Flow is an SDN offering that introduces microsegmentation capabilities that allow application traffic to be managed at a granular level, providing more protections against threats that cannot easily be detected by traditional security firewalls. Flow, available now, is integrated with the company’s Acropolis server, storage, virtualization and networking software.

As for Nutanix Era, this is a “private cloud platform-as-a-service” product that’s designed to streamline and automate database operations. The main idea is to reduce wasted storage space that occurs when enterprises store multiple copies of databases across different systems by automating “copy data” processes, the company said.

In addition, Nutanix Era helps companies save time and money by performing “space-efficient” database snapshots that use fewer storage resources. With these snapshots, the company said, customers can also recover or clone their database from any specific point in time with a single click. Era is currently being tested by select customers, with general availability scheduled for the second half of 2018.

Image: Nutanix