Data center company Nutanix Inc. today introduced some new services that can help pandemic-affected companies to deploy, upgrade and troubleshoot their cloud infrastructure from anywhere, in order to support their remote workforces.

The company said that with many employees now being forced to work from home, its customers are struggling to manage their cloud infrastructure as properly as they did before. The problem is that tasks such as infrastructure maintenance, troubleshooting and updating software are generally carried out at corporate data centers.

But with social distancing now a requirement in many areas, it simply isn’t possible for companies to maintain large teams of information technology workers onsite. Nutanix says its new services, delivered via its hyperconverged infrastructure software, enable those IT teams to maintain critical cloud infrastructure deployments remotely.

The company’s HCI software helps companies deliver and manage cloud environments. It said the new Nutanix Foundation Central service, which is available now, will integrate with its HCI software to enable customers to deploy private cloud infrastructure at scale from a single interface, from any location.

In addition, Nutanix is planning to launch two more services soon that will help its customers to maintain that infrastructure, troubleshoot any problems that occur, and keep it updated.

They include Nutanix Insights, which is currently still under development. When it’s launched later this year, Nutanix Insights will provide predictive health and automated support services.

The service will work by analyzing telemetry data from cloud deployments in order to identify proactively any issues that could affect the performance of applications and the availability of data. Should issues arise, the service will then provide customized recommendations that should enable engineers to fix those problems remotely.

In addition, Nutanix Insights will enable customers to open a support ticket with Nutanix. Once a ticket has been opened, a site reliability engineer will be assigned to troubleshoot the problem without the need for any manual interaction.

But it’s not enough to simply maintain existing infrastructure. Companies want to update their software too. To do that, Nutanix is working on another new service, called Nutanix Lifecycle Manager, that will help customers to roll out one-click upgrades to its software stack without causing any application downtime.

The idea is that Nutanix LCM will be automatically able to determine where updates are required, prioritize those updates and then orchestrate the entire process. As with the other services announced today, Nutanix LCM will be able to operate from any location.

Analyst Steve McDowell of Moor Insights & Strategy told SiliconANGLE that COVID-19 and the resulting stay-at-home orders have led to a rapid and unexpected shift in how IT organizations operate. He said enterprises have been forced to reconfigure their infrastructure rapidly to support a sudden and unexpected remote workforce. But they are doing this in data centers and where physical access is limited, and sometimes even impossible.

“Nutanix’s new offerings directly address the evolving needs for remote management, configuration, and monitoring,” McDowell said. “These are capabilities that are in demand by IT organizations of nearly every size.”

The analyst said Nutanix Foundation Central and Nutanix LCM both bring enhanced levels of flexible deployment functionality to Nutanix’s portfolio. However, he said the new Nutanix Insights offering is the most exciting of today’s announcements.

“Nutanix bringing predictive analytics and proactive support to the software-defined infrastructure world is a huge step forward,” McDowell said. “The ability for Nutanix to proactively engage its customers when the new Insights software detects issues is extremely valuable. This will ultimately lead to more reliable deployments, while allowing Nutanix to maintain a streamlined support organization. It’s a great set of announcements overall, and show that Nutanix is continuing its evolution toward being a full-service enterprise player.”

Photo: Nutanix