Nutanix Inc. took full advantage of its virtual event last week not only to deliver new products, but also to signal a new way of thinking around the future of information-technology deployment.

The company concluded its .NEXT Digital Experience last week following a series of announcements that focused primarily on what Nutanix has defined as the “Four Ds.”

These encompass the digital hyperconverged infrastructure, or core HCI stack; DevOps and offerings for database automation services; desktop services or VDI technologies for remote work; and data center solutions that include storage.

Yet, along with a significant number of newly released products and services, Nutanix has also recognized that the customer need for services from cloud and IT infrastructure has taken on new meaning in this COVID-changed era. And that has impacted the company’s own messaging around the role of cloud technologies in the afterglow of its .NEXT virtual event.

“What we rolled out at this conference is a new way to talk about what we do at Nutanix and what we deliver in terms of a set of offerings,” said Thomas Cornely (pictured, far right), senior vice president of product portfolio management at Nutanix. “For us, cloud is not a destination. It is not just accomplishing something. It’s a new era of operating. It’s giving customers options in terms of what they want to deploy, and it’s also a new form of consuming infrastructure, from a Nutanix perspective.”

Cornely spoke with Stu Miniman, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, as part of the .NEXT Digital Experience. He was joined by Greg Smith (left), vice president of product and technical marketing at Nutanix, and Madhukar Kumar (center), vice president of product and solutions marketing at Nutanix. They discussed the latest enhancements for HCI architecture to deliver faster performance, extending Clusters to other public cloud providers, new management tools for developers, improved security controls and a less complex IT future. (* Disclosure below.)

Faster provisioning and scaling

Hyperconverged infrastructure software remains central to how Nutanix delivers innovation to cloud and datacenter markets. Earlier this month, the company advanced its HCI architecture with new storage solutions designed to lower latency and deliver faster performance for input/output-intensive workloads.

These included Non-Volatile Memory Express and Intel Optane-based solid state drives to improve virtual machine density.

“For Nutanix and our customers, it begins with HCI,” Smith said. “What we’ve seen in the past year is really aggressive adoption for HCI, particularly in core datacenter and private cloud operations. Customers are moving to HCI not only for greater simplicity, but to get faster provisioning and scaling.”

How has Nutanix managed to gain faster performance? Among the firm’s latest releases is Blockstore, a file system alternative that bypasses Linux kernel context switches and boosts the speed of storage processing for the Nutanix Acropolis HCI operating system.

The new software also uses a Software Performance Development Kit to avoid time-wasting interrupts and kernel processing so that the operating system is free to perform more tasks.

“We’ve done this by managing storage space on physical devices in the HCI software rather than relying on slower internal file systems,” Smith explained. “We’re seeing immediate performance gains of 20% to 25% for input/output operations per second and latency. The SPDK allows Nutanix to access devices from use space and avoid expensive systems interrupts and systems calls. That’s the real benefit of moving to HCI.”

Clusters now for Azure

The company’s latest releases came on the heels of another significant move last month that involved the announcement of general availability for Nutanix Clusters on Amazon Web Services Inc. Clusters is a scale-out, hyperconverged storage offering that integrates into public cloud accounts and allows users flexibility to run applications, improve performance and reduce complexity.

Nutanix also recently announced that Clusters would now become available on the Microsoft Azure platform as well.

“We’re leveraging their technologies, bringing some of their control plane onto our platform,” Cornely said. “This is core to our strategy of getting customers to do more with hybrid cloud and multicloud. HCI is a prerequisite to getting the most of your hybrid cloud infrastructure.”

Realizing the benefits of multicloud depends heavily on how applications can be deployed and managed throughout the IT infrastructure. Mindful of this important need for its customers, Nutanix also unveiled the Kubernetes-based Karbon Platform Services.

Karbon acknowledges that applications are often heavily dependent on external services rather than being self-contained. This means giving developers the ability to manage this process, which becomes especially critical as applications are built in the cloud.

“What we’ve found is that a lot of our customers have been looking for a way to manage that on their own, and Karbon Platform Services enables you to do exactly that,” Kumar said. “If you’re really just concerned with creating cloud native applications without worrying too much about how to configure the Kubernetes clusters or how to manage Istio, Karbon encapsulates all of that through a software-as-a-service play. You can go in and create your cloud native application as quickly and as fast as possible. That was one of the big announcements we made.”

Big step for security

Although Nutanix’s latest announcements are designed to meet customer expectations around improving performance, speed and flexibility in cloud use, there is still the nagging problem of security. A recent survey of IT decision makers conducted by the International Data Group found that while 81% had at least one application running in the cloud, the top three biggest obstacles to taking full advantage of cloud native were all security related.

Nutanix’s announcement around Flow Security Central is aimed directly at those concerns. The centralized SaaS-based management plane delivers compliance, network and security operations monitoring across Nutanix-powered private and public clouds.

“With Security Central, a cloud-based SaaS app, security operators have a single plane from which they can monitor the entire security posture of their infrastructure and applications,” Smith said. “It’s a big step for Nutanix and security.”

Among the many announcements made by Nutanix as part of its .NEXT event was that new virtual networking capabilities, natively integrated into the HCI software stack, were under development. The company is seeking to simplify the onerous task of creating and managing software-defined networks, which link apps running in public or private clouds.

This glimpse of the future offers promise for IT organizations that yearn to connect multiple clouds without the current complexity. It’s yet another vision from .NEXT of a new way for consuming cloud infrastructure services.

“Coming from a cloud native world, that’s a big deal, the ability to create your virtual private cloud and subnets and be able to do it across multiple clouds,” Kumar said. “That’s something that’s been a long time coming. We want to try and make the complexities invisible.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the .NEXT Digital Experience. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the .NEXT Digital Experience. Neither Nutanix, the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE