It may have lost the market lead in hyperconverged infrastructure to Dell EMC, but Nutanix Inc. could make up for it in new terrain. In its refreshed branding, the HC in HCI might as well stand for hybrid cloud. The company is betting this will attract more customers, pushing further into multicloud management with its just-released Acropolis Operating System 5.5. Can the new features together with its partner ecosystem deliver a private cloud experience to rival the public cloud?

“True private clouds haven’t been built yet,” said Sunil Potti (pictured), chief product officer at Nutanix. What passes for private cloud now does not allow applications to travel seamlessly from the on-premises data center to the public cloud, he added.

To achieve this hybridization, they must be standardized, commoditized and then harmonized with public clouds like Amazon Web Services Inc. and Google Cloud Platform, according to Potti. A friction-free on-ramp to public clouds accessible from the comfort of a company’s home-base data center may persuade many that private hybrid cloud is the way to go.

“If you can bottle up the AWS or GCP experience and funnel it inside the data center, there will be a ton of workloads that stay inside,” he stated.

Potti explained how Nutanix’s evolving product line attempts to do just that during last year’s interview at the Nutanix .NEXT EU event in Nice, France. He spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio. (* Disclosure below.)

Watch the complete video interview with Sunil Potti below:

On-prem, true private cloud is growing at a 30-percent compound annual growth rate, according to Wikibon.com researchers (Wikibon is owned by the same parent company as theCUBE and SiliconANGLE). That is in fact double the rate of infrastructure as a service and public cloud. While vendors and customers hammer out the details of what private cloud looks like, hyperconverged infrastructure that sandwiches commodity hardware with software-defined storage often pops up in private cloud conversations.

Nutanix made its name in HCI, but it is now aggressively venturing out into software and multicloud management. It held the number one spot in HCI market share until Dell EMC overtook it in the second quarter of 2017. To be sure, Nutanix is not famished for customers; it posted strong 46-percent year-over-year revenue growth in the first quarter of the 2018 fiscal year.

Can AOS 5.5 build a better private cloud than its prior HCI offerings and win Nutanix new, cloud-conscious customers?

Calm for multicloud goes live in AOS 5.5

AOS 5.5. is Nutanix’s most jam-packed release yet with more than 50 new features and enhancements. Outstanding among them is the integration of Calm.io, an automated application management platform Nutanix acquired in 2016. The company has made much of this a part of the addition to its platform, touting it as a homebase from which to manage complex, multicloud environments.

“Calm is a control plane at the application layer. It’s how you build a multicloud, hybrid cloud technology together and manage the entire lifecycle; compliance, governance — all of these things together,” Aaditya Sood, senior director of engineering and products at Nutanix, told theCUBE during the Nutanix .NEXT event last June.

“You’re also going to see that as a fundamental construct for app mobility,” Potti stated. “Imagine Calm as construct that you’re able to go in, provision workloads whether it’s on-prem or off-prem — but at some point in time, you want to move them back and forth.” This plays to Nutanix’s ultimate vision of hybridizing applications themselves, not just infrastructure, he added. 

In AOS 5.5, Nutanix has integrated Calm directly into the Prism Central user interface users are already familiar with. This version of Prism features machine learning that tracks the behavior of virtual machines to help manage expenditures. Nutanix has decoupled the Prism and AOS release cycles so that it can upgrade Prism and Calm with new machine learning and other capabilities at a faster pace.

AOS 5.5 also features network segmentation. Acropolis hypervisors have a security feature that cordons off management traffic from backplane traffic via separate virtual networks for each. This is done with one-click and is baked into the product, making it more attractive than, say, VMware Inc.’s NSX network virtualization, which is layered-on and expensive, according to Potti.

Other products in Nutanix’s portfolio can blend with AOS 5.5 to create the hybrid, on-prem cloud experience users desire. These may include Acropolis AHV (hypervisor) acceleration with Nvidia Corp. graphics processing units, ideal for virtual desktop interface workloads.

Later on in 2018, Nutanix will introduce a web-scale object storage service tailored for hybrid workloads, Potti stated. “You can’t build an object storage service that is simply on-prem or simply off-prem anymore. It has to be hybrid from day one,” he said. 

Multicloud chums

If Nutanix cannot build the perfect hybrid cloud itself, it may tap its partner ecosystem for help. It may well have to since, unlike competitor VMware, it avoids overwhelming users with endless configurable knob nerds.

“They’re keeping their product clean, simple, easy,” Jens Söldner, IT consultant and instructor, Heise.de, told theCUBE during the .NEXT conference. The challenge for Nutanix’s partners will be in staying abreast of the company’s brisk evolution from plain HCI to a multicloud platform, he added.

“You really need to refocus, learn the orchestration, learn the automation, get into the container stuff,” Söldner stated. 

Watch the complete video interview with Jens Söldner below:

Intel Corp., for one, is in for the ride, even hastening Nutanix into uncharted terrain. “We really appreciate the business of Nutanix, but we’re here to make it faster, better, bigger,” said Michal Kowalik, partner sales manager at Intel.

Intel works with Nutanix from the business level all the way down to engineering to accelerate the Nutanix on-prem cloud journey. “The story that we have is very much hand-in-glove with what these guys want to achieve,” said Justin Wheeler, storage solutions architect at Intel. 

Watch the complete video interview with Justin Wheeler and Michal Kkowalik below:

Nutanix and partner Citrix Systems Inc. have long shared a common, simplified HCI vision. As the companies grow, they are embracing similar ideas about what cloud means.

“Enterprise cloud for us, as Nutanix, is really a fabric that envelopes the public, the private infrastructure and even stretches out into the edge,” Raghu Nandan, senior director of product management at Nutanix, told theCUBE during .NEXT.

One-click deployment of the Citrix cloud on Nutanix infrastructure brings the cloud consumption model on-prem. “You can be from nothing to a production environment in literally minutes,” Nandan said.

The Prism control pane with Calm is making this process even easier, according to Bernie Hannon, strategic alliances director at Citrix. “That’s really where Calm has done an excellent job of making a lot of that transparent,” he said.  

Watch the complete video interview with Raghu Nandan and Bernie Hannon below:

Earth to Google cloud

Who could forget Google Cloud? Nutanix made its hybrid cloud intentions clear with last summer’s GCP deal.

“Hybrid cloud needs be a two-way street,” said Sudheesh Nair, president of Nutanix. “The strategic alliance with Google demonstrates our commitment to simplify operations for our customers with a single enterprise cloud OS across both private and public clouds — with ubiquity, extensibility and intuitive design.”

In a recent interview with The Register, Nair expressed his view that the big three public clouds will all have an on-prem go-to-guy. AWS’ unofficial on-premises partner is VMware; Microsoft Corp.’s Azure is spawning its on-premise doppelganger in the form of Azure Stack, he stated.

Meanwhile, a similar on-prem partner role for Google has not been snatched up yet. Nutanix, with its pre-existing relationship with the GCP, sees itself as a shoe-in, Nair believes.

Be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Nutanix .NEXT EU. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Nutanix .NEXT EU event. Neither Nutanix Inc., the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE