5 New Nutanix Software Products And Features Launched At .NEXT That Partners Need To Know About

Most Important Announcements

San Jose, Calif.-based hyper-converged pioneer Nutanix launched a slew of new software products and features during the Nutanix .NEXT Conference in New Orleans today including new software to help channel partners manage public cloud costs, "time-machine" database technology and the company's first-ever Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution.

"Our goal is to make clouds invisible so that customers do not have to concern themselves with the underlying infrastructure, including cloud infrastructure, so they can focus solely on the applications and services that power their business," said Greg Smith, vice president of product marketing for Nutanix, in an interview with CRN.

Here are the five biggest product unveilings on Tuesday at Nutanix .NEXT Conference 2018.

Nutanix Beam

Nutanix's first ever Software-as-a-Service offering, Nutanix Beam, offers multi-cloud governance so customers can manage their spending, security and regulatory compliance across almost any cloud platform. Beam provides in-depth analysis of exactly how organizations are consuming public cloud services.

"It provides cost optimization and security compliance for public clouds like AWS and Microsoft Azure. As companies of all sizes have made the leap to public cloud infrastructure, and many people and groups within organizations take advantage of public cloud services, that sort of uncontrolled, undisciplined use of public cloud results in, at times, exceedingly high costs," said Smith. "Beam breaks it down and shows you exactly what cloud services are being used, who's using them, how much of those services are being consumed, and how much it costs."

Beam is based on Nutanix's Minjar Botmetric service, which the company acquired in March, that is already managing more than $1 billion of cloud spending across AWS and Microsoft Azure.

Nutanix Flow

Nutanix Flow is the company's new software-defined networking offering designed for multi-cloud environments. Flow provides application-centric security to protect against internal and external threats that are undetected by traditional perimeter-oriented security products. As enterprises are turning to cloud-based infrastructure for modern business applications, protecting the application requires Flow's micro-segmentation capabilities, according to Smith.

"It includes automating network provisioning and managing, but most notably native micro-segmentation services that govern traffic between individual applications to protect those applications against both internal and external threats," said Smith. Flow is built into the company's Enterprise Cloud OS, so there is "no separate product to install, manage, upgrade – it's completely built-in," he said.

Netsil Technology Inside Flow

In March, Nutanix acquired application discovery and operations management startup Netsil. Nutanix is integrating Netsil's advanced stream processing, application discovery and mapping technology into Nutanix Flow in order to simplify security policy definition for applications running in both public and private clouds.

"What that will allow us to do is discover the applications in the environment and discover all the interdependency relationships between individual services so that we can define and enforce very find-grained application security policies all the way down to individual database calls, API endpoints, et cetera.," said Smith.

Nutanix Era

Channel partners will have a new set of enterprise cloud PaaS offerings to bring to market with Nutanix Era, which provides automated database provisioning and lifecycle management. The solution extends Nutanix's Enterprise Cloud OS software stack beyond core Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) capabilities for private cloud environments to platform-layer services that the company says bring one-click simplicity to database operations.

"This is a native built-in service that allows Nutanix operators to easily provision a new database instance using the database engine of their choice, then manage that database throughout its lifecycle. So this goes beyond provisioning to restoring the database, upgrading it and scaling it," said Smith.

Era provides partners with copy data management services to help reduce the cost of managing multiple copies of databases across organizations. The services currently support Oracle and Postgres database engines with planned support for other vendors' databases in the future.

Time-Machine Capabilities

Nutanix Era will include new "time-machine" capabilities tied to application-specific APIs for creating point-in-time database copies. This new feature will enable application developers to quickly select the exact database copy they need while also helping administrators to easily restore or refresh any database instance because every recorded transaction is captured, according to the company.

"This time-machine technology allows you to build IT for the future, but still go back in time," said Smith. The technology enables databases running on Nutanix to be cloned or recovered to any specific point in time.