On-premises, public cloud, private cloud, colo facilities and hybrid versions of everything are on the decision table for IT leaders at large and mid-size enterprises alike. As they look to modernize their datacenters and avoid the cost and complexity of expanding existing on-prem, capex-heavy infrastructure, they’re considering more opex-driven solutions. Datacenter managers often face the same three challenges to providing IT support for their users:

1. Maintaining data security – cyberthreats, including ransomware encryption, have been on the rise and the cost to corporations has been stiff. According to Cisco’s 2023 Cybersecurity Readiness Survey, 60% of respondents reported experiencing some kind of cybersecurity incident within the previous year.
2. Providing appropriate capacity – business IT requirements, including storage, compute and networking, require a high level of flexibility and an increasing amount capacity, especially for storage. Gartner estimates that 70% of file and object data will need to be deployed in consolidated, unstructured data storage platforms within the next five years.
3. Reducing infrastructure complexity – hybrid use of on-premise and public cloud, multiple vendor solutions, plus infrastructure flexibility and scalability have become increasingly challenging to manage. Gartner predicts that within the next two years, 70% of organizations will need to implement some type of structured infrastructure automation to deliver flexibility and efficiency.

We hear from our customers that they need to provide a high level of support while simplifying their datacenters. And, of course, they need to cut costs or look for alternatives to high capex investments. They want to design, deploy, support and upgrade their infrastructure while avoiding inflexible or insecure infrastructure. In some cases, these customers are also looking for less expensive hypervisor options and want to avoid additional costs for data security and other capabilities they feel should be part of their original solutions.

These are all completely reasonable requests and some newer vendors have stepped up to meet these key challenges. For example, Nutanix comprises hybrid cloud infrastructure and multicloud management, plus unified storage, database services, and desktop services, to support applications and workloads, across multiple locations. 

How Nutanix is Meeting the Needs of the Modern Datacenter

Its implementation of security is a good example of how Nutanix delivers a thoughtful and differentiated solution from other vendors. Rather than requiring an expensive add-on product, Nutanix Network Flow Security can be enabled at the dashboard through a checkbox. Nutanix employs micro segmentation, essentially placing a micro firewall between every single virtual machine. This prevents any outside threat from spreading and keeps all data secure between each VM or app instance. 

To accomplish this, Nutanix uses machine learning and AI to enable you to track your network communication flow and then it makes recommendations for access and security. You can put the system into “monitor mode” first to ensure everything is working, and then you can select the recommended enforcement configuration to implement the policy you’ve chosen. This is perfect for regulated industries that must meet guidelines and requirements like PCI and HIPAA.

Increasing capacity – whether storage, compute or networking – requires adding a single node into a Nutanix cluster in the datacenter. You only need to add the type of node you require, making the system very lightweight and flexible. In fact, most of the Nutanix solution is software-defined and multicloud-based. 

Reducing complexity is achieved through a centralized management platform, providing everyone’s favorite ask, “a single pane of glass” for monitoring and managing the datacenter environment. Clusters can be extended to multiple datacenters, the edge and public clouds, quickly and easily creating a unified hybrid cloud. The infrastructure also has the ability to self-heal should a drive, node or network connection fail. 

As datacenter managers prepare for what comes next within their enterprises, Melillo is ready to provide the guidance and support they need to build tomorrow’s modern datacenter infrastructure.