By Kathy Gibson – The world has never been in a situation like the one we find ourselves in now, and it’s driving renewed pressure for IT to do more with less, remotely.
Rob Tribe, senior director: systems engineers Western Europe and sub-Saharan Africa at Nutanix, says there is currently a huge focus on the here and now, with limited ideas about what comes next.
For IT, remote working and IT operations are their big pain points, and solutions need to be available now, he adds.
“People are looking to the public cloud a lot more, But it brings a host of challenges as well in terms of security, policies and more. It’s also about business process: it’s not just a case of lifting workloads and moving them; there are implications for users.
“The is a big focus now on virtual desktop interface (VDI) – if you’re not doing it now, how do you implement it quickly?”
Ease of management has been on the agenda for many years, with the “single pane of glass” being a long-sought goal.
“This is one of the attractions of the public cloud, the single API,” says Tribe. “There is no reason you can’t do that as well on-premise. Homogenisation across all the pieces is an attractive benefit.”
This speaks to co-existence with hybrid cloud, with is something that Nutanix offers. “We are working on getting the Nutanix software to run in the public clouds, and have already delivered Nutanix natively on AWS.
“But the key thing we are working on is being able to take applications and data, and make that as seamless as possible the Nutanix one-click tradition. The profiles you’ve set up for security and resource allocation also shift with them.
“You want to be confident that the platform does that for you.”
Pai Venugopal, vice-president: customer success at Nutanix, points out that the current global crisis has pinpointed just how important IT is to every business.
“For instance Deutsche Bank has recognised that remote working is here to stay, and that public cloud is going to be instrumental in that,” he says.
The concept of digital transformation is not just about how we work, but about how we do things, Venugopal adds.
The public cloud has demonstrated that IT can be made can be simple, and can be delivered via a single API. Companies are looking for ways to bring that level of agility to their own businesses and on-premise systems.
Venugopal explains that the patch to this lies in first modernising infrastructure and applications.
“We have realised cloud is not a destination, it’s a methodology,” he says. “When companies decide to go all in with cloud they want to be able control costs, and to use the public cloud as an extension of their data centre – and that’s any cloud, not just one.”
The on-premise private cloud must ensure that applications adhere to the cloud-based methodologies that organisations want. “We need to adopt an approach that there is a cloud that is suited to every workload.”
Multi-cloud is the new normal, Venugopal explains.” We need to recognise the need to modernise IT so that infrastructure, the management tools and the clouds themselves are invisible. When this happened, IT can can focus on the applications and their impact on the business.”
But this adds complexity and cost, he points out. Nutanix has adopted the philosophy of standard systems, bring the architecture of the public cloud into the data centre by virtualising the entire infrastructure, driving HCI and eliminating complexity.
“In this environment there is no concept of downtime, with upgrades and updates happening seamlessly, while the system is running in production,” he says. “This lets customer build a truly automated private cloud.”
This simplicity is also extended to the processes, so provisioning workloads to private or public clouds is automated.
“When you go down this path, you can bring private clouds and public clouds together,” Venugopal Says. “The journey is about simplicity, automation and no lock-in.
“When things change – and they will – you need to make sure you are in charge. Nutanix partners to help companies optimise their infrastructure, automate processes and step into he world of public cloud. You have the freedom to choose hypervisors, processes and clouds.”