Data center infrastructure supplier Nutanix Inc. today announced that it’s giving administrators an easier way to consolidate infrastructure management across public clouds, on-premises data centers, hosted and edge environments.

It’s doing so through a new, cloud-delivered interface called Nutanix Central, which it says will dramatically simplify the process of managing applications, infrastructure and data from any location. Although Nutanix is best known as a provider of software-defined hyperconverged infrastructure that integrates compute, storage and networking hardware into a single appliance, these days it’s more focused on software, enabling hyperconvergence and centralized management across third-party servers and systems.

Nutanix Central was announced at the company’s annual conference, .NEXT 23, today and tomorrow in Chicago. It explained that Nutanix Central is the perfect tonic for a growing number of enterprises that are struggling to maintain control as they juggle with multiple application environments. What companies need is a “seamless hybrid multicloud experience” that can only be delivered via a universal cloud operating model, the company said.

Through Nutanix Central, administrators will enjoy a more consistent management experience across endpoints, with integrated security, access to self-service and on-demand resources, governance controls and full license portability, making it simpler to run apps and store data in any environment.

Thomas Cornely, Nutanix’s senior vice president of product management, said enterprises typically manage vast numbers of apps across multiple environments. “This is leading to significant management challenges that are only going to increase as the number of Edge endpoints grow,” he said.

Nutanix Central solves these headaches, the company said, providing unified management and reporting across customers’ entire Nutanix environments in a single location. It also supports multidomain use cases such as federated identity and access management, global projects and global fleet management. From its central dashboard, users will be able to access both domain- and cluster-level metrics to see a quick overview of each domain. They’ll also have the ability to discover, deploy and manage new Nutanix offerings and partner solutions in any location.

As an example, Nutanix said a customer with multiple hosted data centers in different locations, that also happens to use various cloud platforms, will benefit from centralized governance and security across all of these assets.

NAND Research Inc. analyst Steve McDowell told SiliconANGLE that Nutanix Central can be thought of as a cloud-centric control panel and the first step in the company’s push to offer a hybrid cloud infrastructure management solution. He said it’s a nice update that does all of the things administrators would want to see it do, with control and metrics for an organization’s entire infrastructure.

“One of the things that stands out for me is its federated identity and access management capabilities,” he added. “The new IAM gives IT organizations the flexibility, control, and accountability required to deploy across cloud boundaries. Nutanix clearly understands how IT shops operate in these environments.”

Nutanix Central will also bring new capabilities to Nutanix Cloud Platform, its multicloud infrastructure management platform. The new features are aimed at supporting higher performing and more secure apps, and will make it possible to integrate data management for containerized and virtualized applications across any environment. They include comprehensive data services for Kubernetes applications and cross-cloud data mobility.

Enabling true application portability

Finally, Nutanix announced a new vision around decoupling applications and their data from the underlying infrastructure they’re hosted on. It’s called Project Beacon, and the goal is to deliver a portfolio of data-centric platform-as-a-service offerings that will be available natively anywhere, the company said.

The basic premise of Project Beacon is that it will enable developers to write applications once and run them anywhere. Although this is already possible at the infrastructure layer, Nutanix said the PaaS services that many companies use to build and ship applications often result in lock-in, since they’re tied to specific clouds. As a result, companies face high switching costs and complexity when they want to move apps to a more suitable environment.

With Project Beacon, Nutanix will change that by providing comprehensive platform services through a single application programming interface and console, with consistent management across environments. It plans to introduce an entire suite of data-centric platform services characterized by a consistent and simplified management experience, with automated mobility and portable licensing. At the same time, developers will retain full control of data governance and protection as well as compliance.

McDowell said Project Beacon defines a framework for eliminating the pain of deploying services across cloud boundaries, while simultaneously removing a lot of the vendor lock-in associated with cloud deployments.

“Abstracting away the intricacies of specific cloud services, and doing that in a way that also applies to on-prem deployments, reduces the complexity of managing workloads across a hybrid-cloud infrastructure,” McDowell added. “That’s what Nutanix is promising with Project Beacon. It describes Nutanix’s strategic direction towards helping IT organizations navigate the new realities of hybrid cloud.”

Nutanix said it’s kicking off Project Beacon with database services, as these are the foundation of every application. To that end, the company will extend Nutanix Database Service as a managed service on any public cloud. It plans to expand from there to other data-centric platform services such as streaming, caching and search, with the goal being to deliver all of the key elements required to support modern apps. With it, developers will no longer have to reply on platform services that lock them into a specific infrastructure.

McDowell said today’s announcements show that Nutanix understands the complexities and reality of delivering IT services in a hybrid cloud world. “The announcements are all good and I like the vision painted by Project Beacon,” he said. “At this point, it’s all about Nutanix’s ability to execute.”

Photo: Nutanix