Nutanix Inc. today announced upgrades for two of its storage products, Objects and Files, that will enable companies to take better advantage of the public cloud in their operations.

Publicly traded Nutanix is a major provider of software for managing information technology infrastructure. Objects and Files are two services that companies can deploy atop their Nutanix-managed infrastructure to provide object and file storage capabilities for their applications, respectively.

The Objects service is receiving a cloud tiering feature that will enable companies to shift data from their on-premises hardware to Amazon Web Services. Nutanix positions the feature as a way to reduce the cost of storing archived records, or information that is infrequently accessed if at all but still needs to be retained for legal or other purposes. Nutanix customers using Objects can now move their archived records to AWS to take advantage of its S3 service’s low-cost object storage pricing, which starts at well under a cent per gigabyte per month. 

Files, the other service updated today, is also receiving a boost to its hybrid cloud capabilities. Notably, customers can now deploy the service on AWS and use it to manage their off-premises file repositories. The AWS deployment support is the result of Nutanix making Files compatible with Nutanix Clusters, a version of its flagship infrastructure management software built to run in the cloud.

“IT teams around the world are quickly moving to hybrid environments,” said Nutanix Chief Technology Officer Rajiv Mirani. “We recently extended our hyperconverged infrastructure software to public cloud with the launch of Nutanix Clusters to help companies do just that. Now the focus is on strengthening the overall platform, including delivering an easy-to-use, scale out storage fabric across their different cloud environments.”

Files, the company says, allows administrators to manage files stored in AWS, on-premises data centers and branch locations via a single centralized console. Looking ahead, Nutanix is working to make Nutanix Clusters available on Azure to add a multicloud element to its value proposition.

The third major focus of the update announced today is improving recovery point objectives or RPOs. RPO is an operational metric used to describe how much information can be salvaged in the event of an outage.

An RPO of two hours, for example, means that information created within the two hours that immediately preceded the outage can’t be restored, but data created earlier can. Nutanix says it has managed to reduce the recovery point objectives of Objects and Files to a few seconds and under a minute, respectively, meaning less than a minute worth of data would be lost in the event of a disruption.

Photo: Nutanix