Calming the Clouds — Nutanix Cloud Platform

These days, companies are moving their workload towards the cloud. Cloud computing is the delivery of computing services such as servers, storage, databases, applications, network, software, analytics & intelligence. These cloud services can be either public, private or hybrid.

Cloud services are based on an automation engine, which is responsible for the allocation of resources and deployments of Virtual Machines (VM). The main idea is generally to pay only for cloud services you use, helping to reduce your operating costs, run your infrastructure more efficiently and scale up or down as your business needs change.

Nutanix Calm

Building and operating a multi-cloud architecture involves ensuring applications can be easily defined and scaled, independent of the cloud environment.

Nutanix Calm summarizes application environments from the basic infrastructure and matches the right cloud for the right workload, while balancing cloud operations. Nutanix Calm allows applications to be defined via blueprints, which can be provisioned, managed and scaled into different cloud providers. The solution includes an integrated marketplace so that application design can be shared across the organization. Calm leverages the hyper-converged capabilities of Nutanix across the network, compute and storage, as well as of public clouds including AWS, Google Cloud Platform and Azure.

Calm Private Cloud Approach

Nutanix Calm provides a solution for organizations that want to have their own private or hybrid cloud based on their own physical hyper-converged Nutanix cluster. The cloud administrator slices the Nutanix cluster into isolated pieces and allocates them between Tenant admins.

Each slice contains:

Core
Memory
Storage capacity
Network
Hybrid Cloud approach
The goal of many IT teams is to gather the best of private and public clouds. A well-made hybrid cloud is necessary to make strategic workload decisions. For many workloads it is most appropriate to own the infrastructure, while some workloads are best consumed as a public service.

With Nutanix Cluster you will be able to deploy workloads in the blink of an eye, including in public cloud vendors such as Amazon, Google and Azure.

Self Service Portal

Once an administrator creates the Tenant admins own private cloud in Calm, they can then access the Nutanix self-service portal and can use their total allocations of cores, memory and storage. Each slice can be identical to another slice or not, depending on the allocation.

The end users can access the Blueprints directly through the Nutanix Marketplace – a central location of application deployments.

IT managers can use customized blueprints that are published by Nutanix to simplify the set-up of popular applications.

Self Service Portal Governance

For organizations to get a consolidated view of resource consumption and costs, the costs will be assigned to resources within a blueprint. This allows the tenant admins to control the consumption and costs of:

• network and storage resources in the Nutanix cluster
• public cloud workloads

When applied to multiple environments, Calm provides a simple way to oversee the utilization and true cost of Nutanix cluster and public cloud consumption.

Nutanix isn’t the first company with the vision of integrating the private data center with the public cloud, but with Calm, Prism, and the AHV hypervisor, Nutanix provides a single vision for the automated data center.