Aviatrix Systems Inc. is joining with Nutanix Inc. on a product that enables enterprises to automate connectivity between hyperconverged private cloud environments and popular public clouds.

Separately, the company said its Aviatrix Cloud Interconnect software will be sold with Cisco Systems Inc. as part of the networking giant’s HyperFlex hyper-converged ecosystem.

The deal with Nutanix will leverage the newly announced Nutanix Calm multi-cloud orchestration software to enable Nutanix customers to extend their data center networks into Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and other public cloud services. Aviatrix Cloud Interconnect addresses the difficulty organizations often have when connecting applications between public clouds and their data center.

The Cisco partnership will see Cisco partnering with Aviatrix to deliver the Aviatrix’s Hybrid Cloud Interconnect software with its own hybrid cloud management software and Cisco AppDynamics DevOps monitoring software.

“As more heavy lifting is done in the cloud, companies are running into networking issues they haven’t seen before,” said Aviatrix Chief Executive Steven Mih. “It’s not as simple as cloud vendors would like you to believe.”

Top challenge

Enterprise Management Associates Inc. analyst Shamus McGillicuddy said the top networking challenge enterprises face when implementing a hybrid cloud architecture is the complexity of provisioning interconnections between public and private cloud resources. “Provisioning a direct VPN connection to a single public cloud environment is notoriously complex,” he said in a prepared statement.

Aviatrix said it’s turning that process into a quick point-and-click process. The result is that Nutanix users will be able to run workloads and data at any scale across both private and public clouds.

Developers using a DevOps methodology have been eager adopters of public cloud because of the speed of deployment and configuration flexibility, but that’s creating new silos that information technology organizations must wrestle with, Mih said. “It’s our belief that IT should participate in enabling DevOps by giving developers a hybrid environment at a pace DevOps developers expect,” he said. “Customers will be able to orchestrate applications on premise in the cloud.”

Creating those connections typically involves the work of experts to configure edge routers on the data center side and in the cloud. “It can take months to get those connections set up for just one cloud,” Mih said. “When you think about multiple virtual private connections, the process happens again and again.” Founder and Chief Technology Officer Sherry Wei said 40 percent of the support calls Amazon Web Services Inc. receives relate to networking issues.

Aviatrix is a centrally controlled system that can be tuned to understand the business’s cloud accounts, deploy gateways and makes the connection in minutes, Mih said. Connections are fully encrypted and are independent of the transport layer. Organizations can then orchestrate their hyperconverged hybrid environments with a single graphical interface, without the need for a command line. The management software will be integrated with Nutanix Calm’s orchestration capabilities.

Aviatrix has a strong data center pedigree. Mih was formerly an executive at data center operations company Mesosphere Inc. and at NoSQL database provider Couchbase Inc. Wei bootstrapped Aviatrix after quitting her job as a principal engineer at Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. She was previously an engineering manager at Cisco Systems Inc.

The bundled solution from Nutanix and Aviatrix will be available on the Nutanix Marketplace as well as through Nutanix and Aviatrix sales and channel partners. More information on availability, bundle options, supported deployment configurations and pricing will be available next month.

Image: Pixabay