Nutanix Announces Acropolis and Prism

Nutanix have recently unveiled its next-generation Xtreme Computing Platform (XCP) to deliver invisible infrastructure, enabling IT teams to focus on what matters to them – the applications and services that power their business. Comprised of two comprehensive product families, Nutanix Acropolis and Nutanix Prism, XCP extends the industry-leading hyperconverged solution to enable application independence from infrastructure with an advanced app mobility feature, native virtualization and consumer-grade search capability. These innovations greatly simplify the datacentre, reduce costs and enhance IT service delivery.
Today, many business applications run on traditional storage and virtualization products that are time consuming to deploy, expensive to manage, difficult to scale and challenging to migrate from. Enterprises need infrastructure that delivers cloud-like scalability, resiliency, agility and flexibility – but with lower costs, better application service levels, and trusted security. Nutanix XCP makes the entire infrastructure lifecycle invisible and diminishes the innovation and financial burden borne by users of existing datacentre solutions.

“The most transformative technologies are the ones we don’t even think about. They work all the time, scale on demand and self-heal. In other words, they are invisible,” said Dheeraj Pandey, CEO and founder of Nutanix. “Building on our foundations of web-scale engineering and consumer-grade design, we will make virtualization as invisible as we’ve made storage and elevate enterprise IT expectations yet again.”
“With a leading 52% market share in the hyperconverged infrastructure market, Nutanix has demonstrated its ability to radically simplify data storage for all size enterprises,” said Matt Eastwood, senior vice president of IDC. “Their next big opportunity is to tackle the inherent cost and complexity of legacy virtualization stacks, and elevate IT teams so they can focus on driving the business.”

Nutanix Acropolis

Nutanix Acropolis builds on the core capabilities of the company’s flagship hyperconverged product to incorporate an innovative open platform for virtualization and application mobility. Acropolis offers IT professionals the flexibility to choose the best application platform technology for their organization – whether it is traditional hypervisors, emerging hypervisors or containers. With Nutanix Acropolis, infrastructure decisions can be made based on application performance and scalability and economic considerations, while allowing workloads to move more seamlessly without penalty should requirements change.
Nutanix Acropolis is comprised of three foundational components:

1.    Distributed Storage Fabric. Nutanix continues to add elegant software innovations to its leading hyperconverged infrastructure platform. Building on the highly respected Nutanix Distributed File System, the Acropolis Distributed Storage Fabric will enable common web-scale services across multiple storage protocols. Acropolis can now mount volumes as in-guest iSCSI storage for applications with specific storage protocol requirements such as Microsoft Exchange, unifying all workloads on a single infrastructure.

Acropolis also includes a robust implementation of erasure coding storage optimization, which is unique in a hyperconverged solution. Based on a patent-pending algorithm, Nutanix EC-X technology reduces the storage required for data replication by up to 75% compared to traditional mirroring techniques, and can be enabled on previously deployed Nutanix appliances with a simple software upgrade.

2.    App Mobility Fabric. The Acropolis App Mobility Fabric is a newly-designed open environment capable of delivering powerful virtual machine (VM) placement, VM migration, and VM conversion, as well as cross-hypervisor high availability and integrated disaster recovery. It supports most virtualized applications, and will provide a more seamless path to containers and hybrid cloud computing.

3.    Acropolis Hypervisor. While the Distributed Storage Fabric fully supports traditional hypervisors such as VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V, Acropolis also includes a native hypervisor based on the proven Linux KVM hypervisor. With enhanced security, self-healing capabilities based on SaltStack and enterprise-grade VM management, Acropolis Hypervisor delivers a better overall user experience at a lower TCO and will be the first hypervisor to plug into the App Mobility Fabric.

Nutanix Prism

Prism is an enhanced solution from Nutanix that brings simplicity to infrastructure management. Prism features innovative One-Click technology that streamlines time-consuming IT tasks, and includes one-click software upgrades for more efficient maintenance, one-click insight for detailed capacity trend analysis and planning and one-click troubleshooting for rapid issue identification and resolution.
Nutanix Prism delivers better value to IT administrators as a result of:

• Convergence of storage, compute and virtualization resources into a unified system to provide an end-to-end view of all workflows – something difficult to achieve with legacy three-tier architectures;

• Advanced machine learning technology with built-in heuristics and business intelligence to easily and quickly mine large volumes of system data and generate actionable insights for enhancing all aspects of infrastructure performance; and

• True consumer-grade user experience with sophisticated search technology that makes management tasks elegantly simple and intuitive, with no need for specialized training.

Nutanix Ecosystem

Nutanix is proud to have the explicit support from a large community of technology leaders, all of whom recognize the need to drive down datacentre cost and complexity. Nutanix and its ecosystem partners have completed extensive testing to ensure that applications and guest operating systems run on Nutanix Acropolis and Acropolis Hypervisor with no change to VMs.

Availability

Nutanix Acropolis and Prism are available today. For more information on the Xtreme Computing Platform, please contact us.