Nutanix Next Conference provides hands-on learning with experts and a look at the latest Nutanix products. The conference discusses everything from datacentre modernization to multi-cloud and automation; applications and workloads, emerging technologies and more, providing attendees the upper hand on revolutionary business practices and technologies. For those of you who are unable to attend one of the many Nutanix Next Conferences being held over the course of this year, we’ve put together this article of the most important updates that can take your business to the next level.

Nutanix Mine Simplifies the Complexity of Enterprise Backup

Nutanix Mine is a new product launched by Nutanix that is designed to simplify the complexity of enterprise backup. It’s a revolutionary solution that integrates secondary storage operations with Nutanix’s Enterprise Cloud Platform. Nutanix Mine integrates with industry-leading backup vendors so businesses can easily manage their HCI environments and backup performances all from a single console, which reduces the cost and complexity of storage management.  At General Availability release both Veeam and HYCU options are supported.  There will be 3 form factors initially in Small, Medium and Scale out configurations with a varies number of storage heavy nodes and capacity and backup software licensing.

Important to note is that Nutanix customers will have a near similar backup GUI experience form Prism with all 3^rd party backup software partners.

Additionally, Nutanix Mine provides companies with the option to have the best data software without the need for complicated configuration of standalone secondary storage solutions. The availability of products within the Nutanix toolset can be deployed and managed with a single click within the Prism solutions console.

Xi Leap Provides Data Recovery Services

Xi Leap now offers DR services for all enterprise workloads. This change simplifies the process of transforming existing applications into a hybrid cloud service. It offers automated DR processes for on-premises and within Xi Cloud processes, allowing for easy, automated experiences for both scenarios.   Xi Leap is being offered with 3 service levels offering different options for quantity of maintained recovery points and recovery time objectives to restart services.  Different storage capacities per VM and length of time for workloads to run each quarter are inclusive of the new service levels.

Xi Clusters Enhance Hybrid Cloud

A new product released by Nutanix that accentuates its hybrid cloud story is the Xi Clusters. It is designed to allow customers to harness the same feature set from on-premises Nutanix deployments with the added benefits of AWS EC2 Bare Metal instances giving added resiliency and adjacency. This is done by enabling customers to stand up new clusters on bare metal hardware, which provides more control of their consumption across varied workloads.   All of this is managed via Prism giving companies a single Hybrid Control Plane from which to operate in a Hybrid environment.  Customer using Nutanix Flow for workload security will be happy to see those security policies transferred to AWS EC2 instances for a seamless experience and insurance of a secure hybrid cloud infrastructure.

At the conference, the Nutanix Move workload migration tool was utilized to migrate workloads from on premise Nutanix infrastructure to AWS EC2 Bare Metal instances with only a few clicks of the mouse.

Xi Beam Improves Multi-Cloud Security

Building on Xi Beam’s Cloud Cost Control and Governance features, Nutanix released enhancements to Xi Beam’s security.

Changes made to the Xi Beam SaaS tool, allow cloud operation teams to enhance their multi-cloud security through real-time security processes. Xi Beam is designed to identify any critical weaknesses within the cloud infrastructure as soon as they happen and to execute specific actions of remediation. This allows for companies to fix any security risk prior to it impacting their business.

Changes to the Xi Frame Increase Flexibility

Nutanix announced at the Next Conference that Xi Frame (a cloud based Desktop as a Service VDI broker) received a significant update that provides customers with the ability to run VDI workloads not only in the cloud within AWS or Azure, but now native on-premises AHV based infrastructure.

The new on-premises supported deployments and workloads, which essentially includes any app, infrastructure, browser and storage, allows Xi Frame VDI sessions to run on-premises and maintain data compliance.

This now gives Nutanix customers further choice to run VDI workloads in the public cloud or on-premises with Citrix XenDesktop on AHV or ESXi, VMware Horizon View on ESXi and Xi Frame on Cloud or AHV.

ROBO Updates

To meet the need of more use cases, Nutanix has extended support for single node and dual node Remote Office/Branch Office solutions with hybrid and all-flash options.  These ROBO deployments are built from the same Nutanix software stack and are managed with the same Prism Element and Prism Central consoles that you are used to using in the datacentre. You can also enable async replication between ROBO clusters and central datacenters to provide additional levels of resiliency and can now also enable Nutanix Files on ROBO deployments.

Managed via Prism Central, Prism Pro becomes a requirement to perform centralized upgrades on ROBO based nodes.  You can also use a combination of Calm and Prism Centrals Image Management capability to control application deployment and updates across ROBO sites.

Nutanix Era

The Nutanix Era (Database as a Service) services have been enhanced to provide seamless one-click provisioning of database engines (including SQL and Oracle), database catalogues and database recovery SLAs.  Also enhanced are easy to manage copy data management (CDM) using Time Machine, one-click cloning and refresh and one-click backup.

At the conference an Oracle RAC 4-node database infrastructure was auto provisioned to best practices in minutes utilizing Era and Calm templates.

More Hardware Options

A significant announcement made at the Next Conference is the availability of new hardware options. Nutanix customers can enjoy newly announced appliances from Intel, HPE, Inspur, and Fujitsu, as well as support for any Intel Optane SSD and AMD EPYC processors.

As Hyperconverged use cases expand – Nutanix Files (CIFS and NFS solution) and Nutanix Buckets (Object Storage solution) provide Nutanix integrated examples – so does the need for deeper storage across fewer nodes.  Through leveraging hardware choice, customers can drive up to 80TB of HDD (10 x 8TB) on a single node and a total RAW capacity of 92TB (24 x 3.8TB SSD) of high-performance flash.

The HPE partnership announcement is a different appliance partnership for Nutanix, unlike Dell and Lenovo whom OEM Nutanix software.  With HPE, Nutanix is OEM’ing HPE server hardware as another option named DX to Super Micro’s NX named appliances.  For existing HPE customers that enjoy ProLiant servers this is welcomed news knowing they can now run Nutanix software on their preferred hardware vendor.

From the emerging technologies and enhancements made to existing ones to modernized datacentres; from multi-cloud options and automation to new applications and workloads that enable the best practices for businesses, Nutanix’s latest products offer exciting new opportunities and solutions for businesses.