Nutanix Weekly: Multiple Clouds or Multicloud? Understanding the Key Differences

The terms “multiple clouds” and “multicloud” are often used interchangeably, but they represent distinctly different approaches to cloud strategy.

Blog post: https://www.nutanix.com/blog/multiple-clouds-or-multicloud-understanding-the-key-differences

Host: Phil Sellers, Practice Director for Modern Datacenter
Co-host: Andy Greene, Solutions Architect
Co-host: Chris Calhoun, Solutions Architect

Transcript

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Philip Sellers: Welcome to another episode of Nutanix Weekly, one of the many Podcasts here at Zintegra.

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Philip Sellers: all of which we like to call content

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Philip Sellers: with context. And that's because we take our real world experience and we bring it to the content that we review.

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Philip Sellers: And in this episode a little different, we're missing some of our new Tanix counterparts. But teams integra is here in force and so want to say, welcome and thanks for listening. So I'm your host for today. Phil Sellers, I'm the practice director here at Zintegra for modern data center.

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Philip Sellers: And we call it modern data center on purpose because we are focused on

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Philip Sellers: software defined outcomes very cloud like operation models and helping our customers succeed in in a modern way without some of the legacy constraints and confines that other companies sometimes face. So with me today, I've got Co. Host Chris Calhoun, solutions architect here on this integra team, and Andy Green.

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Philip Sellers: a solutions architect here on this integra team. So what makes these guys a little bit different is both of them come to us from vendor partners. And so Chris. You've been with us. What? Almost 6 months now

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: Close to it. Yep.

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Philip Sellers: And Chris, your your last place was where give us a little bit of background on you, and where you come to us from

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: Sure previously I was a solutions engineer or systems engineer. at Nutanix for the past 5 and a half years covering enterprise customers in the North Carolina, South Carolina region. So definitely have

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: some invested interest in Nutanix, and even prior to that I was a customer of Nutanix so definitely focused on the Nutanix brand. My experiences as a customer in the past journey through the clouds, let's say, and how I got to Zintegra, so excited to share that today

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Philip Sellers: Yeah, it's awesome. So not only did you sleep in a holiday inn express last night, but you've had some hands on experience, too, my friend.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: Absolutely.

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Philip Sellers: We've also got Andy Green. Andy. You're a little newer to the team. But you also came to us from a partner

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Andy Greene: That is correct. Yeah. So I joined Integra back in January. I'm just rounding out my 3rd month here prior to Zintegra. I was a senior systems engineer for cohesity, working on backup recovery and cyber resilience with clients all across the Carolinas and Southern Virginia. And then, prior to that, I spent 6 and a half years with Nutanix as well. I was a senior systems engineer there, working with commercial accounts here in the Carolinas

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Philip Sellers: So I'm the only guy on the podcast as as kind of usual, who hasn't spent time on staff at Nutanix. But as you can tell. I like hiring guys who who spent some time over there because the experiences is helpful for our customers. So really appreciate both you guys spending some time today talking tech

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Philip Sellers: the blog post that we're going to talk about today is one entitled Multiple Clouds or Multi-cloud understanding the key differences. And this is written by Nicholas Hollyon, worldwide field CTO for Nutanix. If you want to go out to the Nutanix website, nutanix.com slash blog. You can find this and lots of other content that we cover here on the podcast but shout out to nicholas, thanks for posting this. And we're going to dig in

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Philip Sellers: you know, as as the title sort of talks about multiple clouds or multi cloud. What's what's the difference.

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Philip Sellers: I I think. And Nicholas says this, a lot of people use this language interchangeably, but I don't think of these 2 things as the same things. Chris, where are you at on that spectrum? Are they the same

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: Absolutely not, you know. Of course you say, what's the difference? Well, it's the spelling. No, seriously, it's actually more to it than that.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: It's really looking at a siloed, fragmented approach of having multiple homes for your data, but managing them

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: in either a seamless, integrated way which is kind of a teaser of where we would like to be versus.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: Well, you've got to go to

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: this engineer to handle handle azure workloads. This engineer to ha! Handle aws, workloads, and then maybe even a separate team to handle

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: support for your on premises. Private cloud. So that's really looking at it holistically, definitely, is not one in the same. So let's definitely talk about that and see if we can talk about the the goods, the bads, and the uglies of all of that to see which one we

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: can help steer customers and our from our experiences, and just operationally what seems best for you as a customer, let's say

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Philip Sellers: So so the difference between multiple clouds and multi cloud is more than 3 letters. When I see it, I think that's that's the best joke you could have made. So yeah, let's dig in. And I like where Nicholas goes. First.st He goes into some definitions Andy, help us out. What is the definition of multiple clouds

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Andy Greene: Well, you know, like, Chris said, it's largely siloed, but the organization is really managing each cloud separately. So you know, you have a different set of skills. And and each side of the business is trying to tackle that in its own different way, as opposed to having more of a unified approach to how, how we handle those things

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Philip Sellers: So a cloud isn't a cloud. It's it's not all the same. Give, I guess. Give us some more examples, and and seasoning on on that, Chris

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: Sure. With reference to the multiple cloud. It's the idea that

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: that moving workloads to a native cloud or a poly cloud, as it's mentioned here.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: They each operate differently in the sense that the there's isolation that

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: happens when you choose one cloud over the other for specific

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: services. Let's say even so, if, as you dive in and starting, start moving or migrating workloads often time, constraints to me are a big motivating factor to get stuff done quicker. Well, in that case.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: sometimes you may want to choose the easiest, easiest path forward which could be, hey, look! Let's use the tooling that's provided for this particular cloud vendor. Well, that totally makes sense in a uniform

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: focused or tunnel focused. Approach, let's say of if this is the only cloud we're in. Sure it makes sense to use these cloud services. But that's not necessarily the case, for I'll say a best in breed or a best case scenario for businesses. I know that many businesses jumped in head first, st feet first, st and it's it's been trendy to move workloads to the cloud, but

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: having a solid strategy around

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: overall upcoming management of that is. And that's again a little bit later in the article. But it's really focused on understanding where the business is, and where you want to grow. The business, too. So that's really what defines

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: purposed solutions and right tooling for those

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Philip Sellers: So tooling. That's 1 major difference, Andy. I've got to think financials another major difference between clouds

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Andy Greene: Yeah, that that's a great point. So you know, there, there are certainly scenarios where one cloud vendor has a better price on storage. Another cloud vendor may have a better price on running your virtual machines. But it can be difficult to to sort through all of that, and and find the right place for your workload at any given point in time.

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Andy Greene: So you know, we don't really, when we spread our workloads across multiple different clouds. We don't get that unified approach where we've got visibility into all of those costs, and we can then make those intelligent decisions about where it makes sense for our data to live, and and where it makes sense for those workloads to run

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Philip Sellers: Yeah, 100%. I mean, you know, aws azure. They offer marketplaces where we can buy other partner software. That's not always true with other cloud choices in the industry. So

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Philip Sellers: you know, there's there's different financial models and commits there. There's all sorts of things, I think. In addition to to just the the siloing effect that you mentioned.

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Philip Sellers: But yeah, I I think overall what we're learning is multiple cloud supplies when you don't have kind of that

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Philip Sellers: seamless sort of integration. So let's let's get the definition on multi cloud. Chris, you want to take this. What's a multi cloud architecture look like

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: Well, I think that the the cloudiness of it is the idea that

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: having to understand the difference in the 2 is the point that he makes here in the article is that cohesive, integrated inner environment

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: that spans multiple, private and public clouds, that you can manage as a single unified environment. I think that really goes to the key of

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: the business operations, both from financial perspectives that we mentioned about the commits, the contracts as well as the technical management. And that's to me, the overarching theme of this is me as a user in the past, knowing that

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: in my past experience

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: a dove head first, st or our company dove headfirst into into a cloud platform, with the idea that this is going to be sliced bread adjacent as far as the best thing in the world for us. Well, that transformation is obviously a big part of it, and you have to be flexible, and knowing that

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: now hindsight's 2020, would there be things to do differently? And this is kind of like to me, a great discussion around that, because I'm reliving some of that experience here and also trying to help guide folks to understand that

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: strategy is important.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: Timelines are important, but making sure that there's a mix of the 2, and being able to manage what you have.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: it's not always necessarily a public cloud. It could be a colo, that type thing. So that's what we need to address here is understanding that we need to choose the right cloud for the right job. So think about tooling where workloads fit best. That's really part of what a multi-cloud approach entails

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Philip Sellers: Yeah, well, and and you're right. So tooling again is a big part of this. But the difference, the key difference is now you're trying to adopt tooling that spans across multiple different clouds and gives you kind of

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Philip Sellers: a consistent experience and management across multiple different environments.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: So let's flip back to that that financial conversation, Andy. And how does that become affected now that you're

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Philip Sellers: Operating in the same way

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Andy Greene: Yeah, sure. So you know, when we talk about that unified platform, right? Giving us the ability to move data and and workload seamlessly across those different clouds.

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Andy Greene: Now we've got the ability to manage all of the different cloud cloud environments from a single platform, and that does give us that flexibility to start making some decisions based on real time factors, things like cost performance and regulatory needs. So you know, all of this is really built from that single unified platform. And then from that data can flow securely from, say, one environment to the next.

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Andy Greene: All managed through a single control plane

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Philip Sellers: Yeah, that makes total sense. So now it's become not a silo, but an advantage from a cost perspective, from a financial perspective in a multi cloud strategy.

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Philip Sellers: So Nicholas goes on in the article here to point out the many challenges of multi clouds or excuse me of multiple clouds. The downsides here. So let's go through these kind of rapid fire. 1st one up. I'll go back and forth between you guys, inefficiencies and workload management and siloed it. Teams. Let's talk about the silos, Chris

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: Sure. Here's obviously to me going back to some of the past work and centering around

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: folks that even app dev guys that hey? I've got urgent needs. I need to get stuff stood up.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: Let's let's move it to whatever cloud that we can get in the quickest. It'll take our credit card, you know, and and that's part of it, too, is understanding that just because, you've got workloads in place.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: you manage it differently, and you may. In my my past there was a team that that quickly moved to azure, let's say, and got an environment stood up. That became production. Well, we had to have somebody under my team that would support that. So one guy that was in charge of we'll say that azure support is not the same guy that's in charge of aws. So I think that that's

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: of the defining inefficiencies that we see when you do have

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: basically disparate cloud environments that are all supported separately, let's say, and that's what causes those silos within it teams. It doesn't lend itself to flexibility. Whenever you have that one go to Guy. That's the specialist in a specific area. So I think that that's a pretty big call out as far as the the management approach

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Philip Sellers: Well, and Nicholas calls out to that that ultimately leads to higher, mean time to repair right? So that's something that we may not always think about as it practitioners, but that is certainly something our business constituents are looking at. They're definitely thinking about, how fast does it get stuff fixed for me, and so we don't want to do anything that that increases time to repair

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Philip Sellers: second one. Here is scalability limitations. Andy. I mean that that to me doesn't necessarily make a lot of sense, because clouds supposed to bring us this infinite scale. So how does this multiple clouds thing cause a scaling limitations

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Andy Greene: Well, I think you know, when you take an application that's been built for a certain Cloud provider, it can be difficult to lift that application up and and move it into a different environment. Right? So these cloud platforms, they don't always communicate well with each other. And and as a result of that that impacts our customers. Ability

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Andy Greene: to to then start to respond to some of the internal or external needs that may come along that might require them to to shift one of those applications into a different cloud realm.

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Andy Greene: So you know, I think the the fix for this is when we can have a single common operating system that we can deploy that workload into multiple different clouds. Now, we've got that ability to to lift the application, shift it into a different cloud at any point, anytime, that it makes sense

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Philip Sellers: Yeah, absolutely. And and with that tangentially, we, we talk about cost optimization. That's the next item that Nicholas calls out

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Philip Sellers: without unified view of all cloud costs. It's difficult to optimize. Spending across platforms is what he says. And I think you called out that earlier in our discussion, Andy, and it's spot on right. You've got to have visibility. And I think back to early virtualization. You know, network visibility. What was going on inside of these fear wasn't always

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Philip Sellers: easy to see, and that lack of visibility

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Philip Sellers: that opaque sort of operations led to finger pointing and other

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Philip Sellers: wild goose chases during troubleshooting, and neither of those is a great thing, right? So with cost optimization, the more visibility the better.

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Philip Sellers: You know a unified platform, unified tooling to make those decisions in more real time, like you said becomes a huge huge advantage for your company.

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Philip Sellers: you know, all of these seem to be really interrelated. The next one is lack of data portability. And so, Andy, I'm gonna throw it back to you because, like, you were talking square about this but data portability is tough. And we, we talked a little bit about this in other podcasts. But data gravity exists, right data has weight. It's hard to be portable? So so how are we affected when we're running in multiple clouds in terms of our data?

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Andy Greene: Yeah, great, great question. So you know, we've talked a little bit about the financial implications having to refactor applications.

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Andy Greene: But other concerns that our customers are thinking about, you know, are around disaster, recovery. How do I do disaster recovery from on-prem to the cloud, or from one cloud provider into another. How do I deal with compliance? Is there a single tool that can provide me reporting across all of these instances, across on-prem to the cloud and and back.

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Andy Greene: And then, finally, how do I back all of that up? Is there a single tool that can back up all of these applications? All of these data sources

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Andy Greene: across my multi cloud environment. And and these things, you know, tend to become challenging when when we're working with separate systems in in the what we called earlier, the multiple cloud model. But as we go to that multi cloud model where all of the workloads are running on a single operating system that gives us that portability across cloud environments that solves a lot of those challenges for us

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Philip Sellers: Yeah. And and you know, I'm I'm struck with this because you've you've called out multiple different

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Philip Sellers: things that are just good practice. Right? They're accepted good practices for us when it comes to our data

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Philip Sellers: and the data is crown jewels. But disaster, recovery, compliance, backup strategies. These are things we have

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Philip Sellers: rules and regulations that often dictate what we need to do. So that doesn't go away just because we've moved to a cloud data center. That's that's a huge thing.

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Philip Sellers: Something else that doesn't go away is is the need for compliance against all that regulation. So, Chris, I'll I'll push it to you. Security and compliance risks. What do we get into here? But I I think I think it's another mileage may vary between clouds. Sort of conversation. Right

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: Absolutely. You've heard in the past of companies that show up in the headlines. You definitely don't want to be one of those companies that have exposed web servers, exposed data exposed to corporate anything out on the public Internet. And that's part of the compliancy risks

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: of having to manage. And this is obviously focusing on a multiple cloud

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: scenario of okay, if we manage

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: cloud vendor one differently than we do approach for cloud vendor 2, then obviously, that's not a seamless policy. One of the things that it mentions here specifically around security and compliance is, some governments are even beginning to mandate that companies. Workloads can't be stored in a single cloud platform.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: And that's 1 of the things, too. That that I think is really important is the sense that

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: in times past.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: Many larger enterprise companies would have, we'll say, a dual vendor hardware strategy of hey, look! We don't want to put all our eggs in one basket for

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: oem vendor, one versus oem vendor. 2. But in the case of

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: clouds, sometimes that happens with that urgency and timeline that we mentioned before of.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: Okay, we've it's trendy. We've got to hurry up and get there. Well, that compliancy and security needs to be

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: a leading factor in your decision making of creating those landing zones. How do we secure those seamlessly in the sense that it needs to be done the same way? The same rules apply for both. It can't be regulations for one, and then loose loose restrictions and loose operating model for the other. Because obviously, that's where there's

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: there's differences that don't equate to business success. So I think in order to stay out of the headlines, you need to have a consistent, secure operating model for any platform that you move workloads to that. Data is super important. And that's what is

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: on high alert these days for data breaches. So we've got to be mindful of that.

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Philip Sellers: Well, that that begs the question, how did we get here? If multiple clouds sounds so horrible as we go through all of these different points. How did so many customers clients, get into this situation?

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Philip Sellers: I know from my perspective. I'll call out from my past merger and acquisition, that's 1 key way.

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Philip Sellers: You may acquire another firm that has a different opinion about how cloud should be done.

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Philip Sellers: So that's 1 way I got into it. What are ways that that you guys have seen? From your past or client interactions getting into this situation of multiple clouds

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Andy Greene: I think a big part of it has just been how much the cloud has evolved. We we saw this huge explosion of cloud from, say, 2014, 2015, timeframe until now. And you know what was right, for an organization in 2014 may have changed drastically by by the time 2017 came, and then 2019, 2021 all the way to today.

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Andy Greene: So you know, you end up in this scenario where you've consumed the services that made sense at the time. But but I think it's it's a good time to now take a look at at the bigger picture, and, you know, is this the best fit for us in 2025

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Philip Sellers: Yeah.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: Yeah, to echo that I think that. That

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: customers have been through this cloud. 1st approach of let's see if we can move a workload or or new workloads. Especially can it go to the cloud?

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: Perfect question. But that doesn't mean that you immediately put it in the cloud without the

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: right policies, the right security, all of the things that we've talked about. Governance. cost modeling. All of that needs to be a factor as far as the decision make making. But of course, as I said, earlier, shadow it, those folks that had demands put on them to stand up workloads quick, efficiently.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: quickly. Yes, but maybe not efficiently, because that's where we are now, because the business demand said, Hey.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: put it in the cloud. Well, in some cases it may make sense for business units to use. Aws, if there's workloads that are, we'll say, Microsoft specific. Okay? Great. That takes care of the we'll say, the OS licensing. Let's we've already got an agreement with them. Let's

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: move workloads quickly to azure. So that's that's part of that early decision making that took place where even going back to financial costing, who was offering the best financial incentives at the time to move workloads are there discounts rebates? If you can move

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: 50% of your workload within this 1st year.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: you will will give you a discount on your your services. I think that's something, too, that that many companies look to, we'll say, get out of the data center business, but in turn may have made some decisions along the way

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: that

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: will not necessarily be regretful, but ones now that in 2025, like Andy said, let's reevaluate. Let's let's redefine what our priorities are. Does it still make sense to operate in those cloud models? Or is it either financially or workload.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: requiring to maybe renegotiate or revalue where that data is placed? And I think that that's really important, too.

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Philip Sellers: Yeah, a hundred percent. So I mean, it sounds like a a multitude of different reasons we got here. We'll we'll recap the ones that Nicholas calls out here in the blog post platform choices by individual business units. You know, maybe they weren't the traditional on premises data center folks. And so they made different choices. Your cloud providers specialized in different things, you know, he calls out, Gcp. Great being a great choice for data analytics versus Microsoft.

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Philip Sellers: You know, if you had a Microsoft workload going azure, and Microsoft's always had this magical thing called an enterprise agreement with lots and lots of customers, and so they leverage that to get them into more average spend and then into dedicated azure

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Philip Sellers: aws has their commit models to to get the best financial prices when you're spending in an Aws cloud. So

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Philip Sellers: financial is a huge driver for

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Philip Sellers: client behavior for people. It's a huge incentive. So I think that's a a really good call out Chris. Those cloud 1st policies definitely heard a lot about that in the early phase of cloud adoption.

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Philip Sellers: And then, you know which platform

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Philip Sellers: you know, made the most sense to your app. Dev folks it could have also been a huge huge factor. Anyway, I love this because take comfort, everyone. Nicholas calls this out.

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Philip Sellers: you're not alone. And there are lots of customers overwhelmingly. Customers are running multiple clouds individually, maybe in silos and not necessarily on a full multi cloud architecture. So let's talk through some of the benefits of that architecture. We we've gone through the bad. Let's go through the good.

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Philip Sellers: there's a lot of benefits. So I'm gonna go over them real quick. So 1st up is flexibility and optimization. The second one is seamless integration. I've heard Chris say that multiple times today, scalability and performance. We talked about some of the limitations there that can be solved cost control, enhanced security and compliance and those are kind of the big things. So let's go through those of those

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Philip Sellers: 5 different topics. What? What's the one that's most interesting to you? I'll go to Andy first, st

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Andy Greene: I would say scalability and performance.

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Andy Greene: you know, I I think that scalability opens up a lot of doors for us in terms of you know how we treat things like Dr. That we talked about earlier. We see a lot of customers who clients who, you know in the past have had a primary data center, a Dr. Site. And they're managing both of those environments. They have hardware. They're paying for power and rack space.

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Andy Greene: You know, I think, that that scalability of the cloud gives us the the opportunity now to think about what would it look like to to replicate our workloads up into the cloud. Have a copy of them sitting there.

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Andy Greene: and then, when we're ready to to fail over, if we have that compelling event that requires us to fail over to our Dr. Site. We can quickly scale that environment, you know, to to meet the needs of the workloads. So I think it opens up a lot of flexibility just in terms of of how we treat some of those secondary sites

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Philip Sellers: I got a great story when it comes to that. And you mentioned Dr. Integration with scalability and performance.

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Philip Sellers: We we redid our our Dr. Planning, and we utilized our code pipeline and automation and stuff like that.

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Philip Sellers: And the outcome was basically we could trigger a Dr. Event. And in 2 h we had a full environment built automated online, ready for testing. And that cut down all of our Dr. Just through the ability to do scaling and and processing in that automation way so great outcomes that you can drive based on that.

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Philip Sellers: Chris. Which of these 5 sticks out for you

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: For me. It's the flexibility and optimization with this obviously being a nutanix blog, i'm thinking about or podcast but I'm thinking about the use cases and benefits that Nutanix lends itself to as far as this flexibility. One of the things that

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: I've worked on with a customer, my time at Nutanix was positioning workloads

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: and targeting those workloads to the right location

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: based off of optimization. And that's 1 of the things that I think benefits. Nutanix, too, is having those azure as well as aws targets available depending on the workload or even private cloud. And I think that that's important of the

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: tooling that we talked about earlier. If you've got flexibility in that, hey? Knowing that this workload calls home quite often, it may make sense to run it in private cloud in the sense that you keep that data private, secure in your own data center. And you don't have to worry about

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: reaching back from a public cloud any delays or latency, any of that respect. So I think that flexibility is really key in making sure that again, you're using the right tool for the right workloads, and I think it it calls about calls out about

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: data, intensive workloads best suited for which cloud maybe private. Maybe either of the 2 public clouds or Gcp. As well like you mentioned earlier for that, or even a heavy compute task, knowing what's running behind those workloads and how they communicate really helps me make better business decisions

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: and also cost effective decisions. There may be months out of the year. It makes better sense for you to operate in one versus the other, and I think that flexibility and freedom is something that now those customers that may have jumped on an early adoption have the chance to go back and

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: and readjust, and for those new to the the their cloud journey. This is a chance to think about this upfront, to make sure that these workloads are

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: dynamic enough and also focused enough so that you do have that flexibility

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Philip Sellers: Yeah, flexibility is definitely a key. Right? I mean, I I think we all want choice at the end of the day. And and this is a choice making sort of

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Philip Sellers: benefit to to organizations who adopt, you know, a a multi cloud architecture

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Andy Greene: And, Philip, I'm curious, you know, as we talk about some of these benefits. Is there one that stands out to you

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Philip Sellers: Yeah, I mean for me, seamless integration. You know, I I think this benefit

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Philip Sellers: has a lot to do with with the overall strategy, the intentionality of of multi cloud. Right?

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Philip Sellers: I I like to think of.

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Philip Sellers: you know, a strategy as something that that we've thought about

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Philip Sellers: and plan for, and then we try to adhere to. So

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Philip Sellers: you know, Cloud, 1st strategy, Chris mentioned earlier. You know the questions asked, can this work in cloud, you know. Can this run in cloud? To have a strategy? Can this be multi cloud? We we've got to have that tooling, that substrate, that that kind of exists. And for me, I think about that as either a pass, you know, a common sort of platform that we're operating on, or something like kubernetes that can become a very consistent way.

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Philip Sellers: And then that brings us that seamless integration. Right now we've gained choice because we're talking to a Kubernetes Api.

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Philip Sellers: and we can make choices about how it's implemented in aws, how it's implemented in azure, how it's implemented in our data center on Nutanix, how it's implemented in our Msps data center on Nutanix.

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Philip Sellers: And now I've given a common set

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Philip Sellers: of interactions Apis to my entire development staff. And so to me, the value of that is huge. And I think that's really the driver here is, you adopt a a consistent way of interacting. You can change out the individual components.

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Philip Sellers: Because you've standardized the way that you're you're accessing things.

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Philip Sellers: So for me, that seamless integration is probably the the biggest key benefit

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Philip Sellers: we can't leave out cost, control and enhance security and compliance. By standardizing you, you get the advantage of choosing your pricing model, choosing the right destination. We have a customer, large enterprise customer. They're realizing that benefit today, and they're realizing it on the Nutanix platform by being able to repatriate or choose which workloads go where

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Philip Sellers: and rather than the developer being in the driver's seat. Now they have sres who can make those decisions based on other factors like cost, like geography. And so they now have the independence

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Philip Sellers: to cost control or to locate things closer to the end user

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Philip Sellers: security and compliance with a single cloud control plane, you're able to consistently

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Philip Sellers: apply all of your rules and ensure your data. Movement is where it needs to be. We mentioned geography, geography is a huge concern, especially for our European counterparts, who may be listening. You know you've got to be in a certain data center, a certain country your data can't leave. So ensuring that compliance is is a huge concern.

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Philip Sellers: So Nicholas wraps up with this. A future cloud strategy requires a multi-cloud approach.

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Philip Sellers: Does.

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Philip Sellers: do you? Wanna do you agree? Do you disagree like, what do you think of that conclusion that Nicholas is making

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: I definitely think that that his approach is spot on. There are customers that have been early adopters that may have found success, and some have stopped and started, started and stopped several times to get it right. And this is an opportunity for you to

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: this article calls out, obviously some of the pitfalls that customers may have fallen into from a multiple cloud approach to now holistically embrace the cloud model because it's not necessarily a target location end goal. It's basically an operating model. And that's really what needs to be. The focus is

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: if you can standardize on an operating model, a support model monitoring financial model. Then you have the flexibility and freedom to use the tooling available in each

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: of the cloud offerings. That's where obviously some lend itself. It's not all clouds the same. So, having that freedom to move your workloads really is key for agility in

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: 2025 businesses are looking to save and be leaders in the market, and you you can accomplish that by making sure that your strategy is spot on and having those defined goals, knowing that

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: you're secure, focused on modeling as well as

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: good technical best practices for support. And I think that that's really key, too, as far as a holistic approach

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Andy Greene: Yeah, I you know, I think the

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Andy Greene: the cloud world has been evolving, and it will continue to evolve. And and for me, this is really about future proofing. It's about having that adaptability to to know that as things change you know, we still have the the ability to to run workloads where we want to to put data where we want to, wherever it makes the most sense to, but also to bring that security piece with it to bring compliance, reporting single pane of glass management.

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Andy Greene: You know all of that kind of encapsulated into a core operating system that gives us all of the benefits of the cloud, along with that portability and and adaptability for for the future, because we don't know exactly what the future will bring

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Philip Sellers: So I'm gonna ask a hard questions. We're kind of wrapping up today is, you know, we we've worked with a lot of clients, and and arguably our larger enterprise clients suffer from inefficiency.

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Philip Sellers: Lots of silos is this too much of a Nirvana state to really ask for? Can they get there

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: Wow!

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: That's a definite, hard question to to wrap up. But I think getting there

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: is maybe a different target for different customers. I think that

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: all businesses aren't on the exact same cloud journey. I think you need to use the cloud the way it suits you best.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: as of a company as a tool, as a resource, and I think that the end State goal of

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: efficient

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: operations, whether it's in a managed colo or public cloud or private cloud. I think it's up to the customer, and I think it's 1 of those. Where do you need to choose everything to be the perfect customer? No, you need to choose what's right.

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: and that's what you have to define for yourself. And these are obviously guidelines and and constructs and good discussion points to have within your organization. But do you need to have every checkbox completed? I don't think so. I think it's a matter of what's best suited for the customer.

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Philip Sellers: I'm curious to do. You have to have a efficiency mindset to, to really want to adopt this model

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Chris Calhoun | XenTegra: Randy, what do you think

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Andy Greene: Efficiency mindset who doesn't have an efficiency mindset

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Philip Sellers: No, of course we wanna work harder, right?

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Philip Sellers: But you know, just like we, we ended up in multi cloud, I guess. Or multiple clouds through series of unfortunate events. However, we arrived there. We arrived there. I wonder, you know, if

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Philip Sellers: if riding the course you know, you need someone with that efficiency mindset, because I think we're all fighting.

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Philip Sellers: Well, that works. It's good enough.

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Philip Sellers: you know. I I guess my question is, are these benefits strong enough to to rationalize this strategy on its own

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Andy Greene: I I believe so. You know we we've talked about a lot of different reasons for this. We know that our clients want to eliminate shadow it Philip, you brought up a great point earlier about mergers and acquisitions, and how that brings many different tools into the fold. So, having that that single platform that can unify all of that, bring bring all of that into a single platform into a single core operating system. May. Maybe a Nirvana state is the right word for that

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Philip Sellers: Hmm, yeah, I think that's a you know, it's

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Philip Sellers: it's 1 of those things we want to strive for. Maybe one of those things that that

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Philip Sellers: is the goal we may never get there. You know the the roadway, the roadmap may continually change before we can achieve it, but

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Philip Sellers: I do think it's a a great destination for us to chart a course.

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Philip Sellers: Guys, I really appreciate this discussion. Thanks for bearing with me, with my hard questions at the end, too. But for everyone listening, we appreciate your time hopefully. You you've got a couple of thoughts to leave with and noodle on, and we'll continue the discussions and podcasts to come. So on behalf of Andy, Chris and myself, I want to say thanks for listening, and we will catch you in the next episode have a great day