Nutanix Weekly: Dell PowerStore Coming to Nutanix

The Nutanix Cloud Platform solution will soon support Dell PowerStore, our flagship enterprise all-flash storage platform —introducing a new virtualization option for external storage that brings together Dell’s trusted innovation with Nutanix’s modern cloud architecture.

Blog Post: https://www.nutanix.com/blog/dell-powerstore-coming-to-nutanix

Host: Phil Sellers, XenTegra

Co-Host: Jirah Cox, Nutanix

Co-Host: Chris Calhoun, XenTegra

Co-Host: Andy Greene, XenTegra

Transcript

0:02 - Speaker 2
Hello and welcome to another episode of Nutanix Weekly, one of the many podcasts here at XenTegra. We like to call it content with context. And that's because we take the best content on the web and bring it to you, break it down, and add context from our real-world experiences. As always, I can't do this alone. I'm your host, Phil Sellers, and I'm joined with a number of different uh uh co-host today, um folks from the XenTegra team and also uh our friend Jyra Cox. So uh wanna say welcome to you guys. Jyra, how have things been going here lately for ya?

0:46 - Speaker 4
Uh going well. Um I'll try to stay coherent here and not sound too allergy medicated. It's that time of the year.

0:55 - Speaker 2
Yeah, um the leaves have started to change and things are starting to uh get a little Cooler. Um, we had a a thoughts fall, I think uh a little bit in August, and then um it warmed back up again, and uh we're we're now starting to see the actual fall, I think, hit.

1:14 - Speaker 4
Um All I know is I drove home from a series of meetings last week, I think it was. I drove back four hours to my house. I turned onto the main street outside my house and sneezed five times in a row. Like I had a very normal couple of days, and then also just this fresh reminder that I was home.

1:30 - Speaker 2
Yeah, I I had a coworker and and we used to call his sneezes atomic sneezes because uh it would shake the walls in the entire uh cubicle farm where we were working. So uh I've inherited those now, uh so I feel your pain. Uh we're also joined with Chris Calhoun, uh solutions architect here at Zintegra. Um Chris, uh what what did you do interesting this weekend?

1:56 - Speaker 3
Uh sneezed, as a matter of fact. Uh quite often or Ironically, uh I will add to that. Uh I went to the doctor's office uh or doctor first thing this morning for that very purpose. So yes, uh spent a lot of the weekend sneezing and uh so yeah, fit right in with this uh discussion, as a matter of fact.

2:18 - Speaker 2
And to round things out, we've got Andy Green, also a solutions architect here at Zintegra. Andy, um, you and I got to spend some time together on Friday. We had the annual Zintegra services. Now golf tournament up in Raleigh, North Carolina. Um we had good weather and if I recall, I didn't see you sneezing.

2:39 - Speaker 1
Uh I you know, I I'm feeling the allergies a little bit myself. Uh you might hear it in my voice, but uh but no not not too bad. And and great weather, especially when you compare it to last year.

2:50 - Speaker 2
Oh yeah, yeah. It was a complete washout last year in Raleigh. We had beautiful weather. Uh Andy and I got to run around on golf carts for most of the day. Ferrying people around, uh, making sure people could get around the course. We held it at NC State's uh golf course. It was in great condition. Uh, and like you know, we we try to do, we brought together about a hundred different uh vendor partners, customer partners, and uh just had a really nice day. Uh some golf, some barbecue, Eastern North Carolina vinegar-style barbecue, um, the real barbecue, according to North Carolina. Carolina folks. So uh Texas don't hate us, but uh real real barbecue is it's pork.

3:36 - Speaker 1
So I'll give a shout out to the collard greens as well. They they were on point.

3:42 - Speaker 2
Absolutely. Well, guys, um we've got a great uh blog post to talk about today. Um one of the newer products inside of Nutanix is portfolio, it's a product called Nutanix Central, and so we're we've got a blog post here. Uh you can find it on Nutanix.com. The name of the blog post is Nutanix Central on Premises, bringing cloud simplicity to your data center. Shout out to Adharsh, Praveen, uh, Ruhi Segal, and uh Mayak uh Gupta. Uh those guys authored this uh blog post that we're gonna be talking about today. And uh uh let's dig right in. Uh we're talking about Nutanix Central, and so I feel like we need to level set because There's probably folks listening uh who don't even recognize Nutanix Central. So Gyro, what would you say in in just a few sentences? What is Nutanix Central?

4:41 - Speaker 4
Yeah, so Nutanix Central, uh, we launched that last year. Um and it offered a global uh browser tab to review your entire fleet of Nutanix whatevers, um HCI, uh file services, uh other things, right? Whatever you've got that is Nutanix flavored, all rolled up in one single spot to view stuff like health and capacity and um uh find stuff that you've got in the fleet um in one uh browser tab delivered as a SaaS service.

5:15 - Speaker 2
That's great.

5:15 - Speaker 4
So manager manager of managers.

5:18 - Speaker 2
Yeah manager of managers yeah single pane of glass the the thing that we've been searching for for 25 years in IT that one place to manage everything the one screen to roll them all Um that was a uh Lord of the Rings reference for reference acknowledged.

5:36 - Unidentified Speaker
Yeah, yeah.

5:36 - Speaker 2
Okay, cool.

5:37 - Speaker 2
All right. So um this launched last year is SAS, um, and uh really is just kind of a central roll-up point uh for all of your Prism Centrals. You know, as we do our work, guys, uh Chris, Andy, um you know, we we do a lot of Prism Central deployments. There's a lot of value that comes. From PC and it's now kind of a required part of our deployments because licensing is run through Prism Central. What what is the difference, I guess, of uh as you look at Nutanix Central versus Prism Central? Andy, I'll kind of throw it to you, you know, what's the difference of levels here?

6:20 - Unidentified Speaker
Sure.

6:21 - Speaker 1
Yeah. So um, you know, I I remember when Prism Central came out and uh and at the time that was our manager of managers, so to speak, but over the time We've seen it evolve a little bit. And the way that I think of Prism Central today is uh it's really that tool that establishes an availability zone for a particular site. So you know, we want to create these availability zones, we want to automate and orchestrate that failover between sites. Uh, but I think that opens the door for another tool to now manage all of our availability zones. And that's where I see new Nutanix Central really come into play.

6:55 - Speaker 2
Yeah, that's great. Um so um the new News we've got today, Chris, is SaaS only is now broken, right? We now have the ability to do it either as a SaaS platform or on premises. Um what's um what's the key kind of uh rationale or or use case there that that on-prem is gonna really enable?

7:21 - Speaker 3
I think as part of our earlier discussion, um thinking about the approach where uh those folks didn't necessarily want and as a service to tie in from cloud back to on-prem. Having that on-prem gives you the the all of the capabilities of the uh last year's launch, let's say, but delivers it with uh a Kubernetes container-based solution that um like our discussion earlier was um the foundation of Nutanix going forward is being able to make the solutions portable in the sense that as you build on a container-based solution, the management is just uh a simpler approach that allows a flexibility of single instance reaching out to multiple PCs in a sense of keeping um the software platform de bloated, um, I think would be a good way of of putting that so that you don't have, hey, we've got an instance over here, instance over here, and all that does is raise resources. Required for your PCs or any of your management suites. So I think that's uh helpful in itself from um initial uh thoughts about the release.

8:42 - Speaker 2
Yeah so you mentioned containers uh I I doubt all of our listeners actually know that Prism Central has undergone open heart surgery while running uh over the last couple of years. It's been refactored into containered services and and there's been a huge architectural shift. Um that's that's been going on how long, Jyra?

9:06 - Unidentified Speaker
Hmm.

9:07 - Speaker 4
Yeah, a couple years, two or three, I think. We've been kind of taking it slow and steady, uh, working on SERS at a time. It's been mostly invisible to users, right? Because I still I saw certain pixels in Prism Central for a service. I saw them there afterwards, but in the interim, right, we we sort of um reinvented PC into like a single VM or maybe a cluster of three VM container host. Right. So that the applications inside of PC, uh, things like, you know, call it self service, cost governance, uh, the flow uh functionality for microsec and network controlling, um, the apps themselves get containerized and therefore um uh have even more possibilities open to them. And then yeah, like like Chris said, right, this ability for now running Nutanix Central on prem, right, and even as a containerized workload is so exciting, right? Because now we can actually kind of drink our own champagne, right? What we help customers do for their best of breed modern apps, right? Moving in in into containers, getting scalability, getting agility there. Guess what? Now our apps can start to benefit from that as well.

10:09 - Speaker 2
Yeah, absolutely. You know, the and and this is, you know, our previous episode was really around um, you know, it's been a huge year in new teenage container management. Um, and so, you know, calling back to that episode, this is just more of you guys uh really embracing that new style of app development. And it may not it may not click immediately, but all this refactoring we're talking about is really a benefit for the customer because now we can innovate faster. Those microservices that make up the applications that have been broken apart, you can optimize one or the other or make changes in them. And as long as you do that in a way that the APIs don't break, then now you've actually actually enabled velocity. So there's huge advantages to a customer receiving this software from Nutanix because you're going to now be able to get new features and feature requests and things like that much faster.

11:14 - Speaker 4
Yeah my my standard um my standard truism right around containers is containers are simply like uh a fashionable way of installing software. But once it gets containerized right, more boring upgrades, faster, more predictability, scalability, right? It's huge Huge benefits.

11:30 - Speaker 2
Yeah, a hundred percent. Um, so I know we we talked a lot about Prism Central, but we're really wanting to talk about Nutanix Central. Um, next section of the blog post goes into what Nutanix Central helps to achieve. Jar, I'm gonna throw it to you. First thing up here is a true single pane of glass for the entire enterprise.

11:51 - Speaker 4
Yeah, so the what's neat here is the connective tissue from every deployment you have flows up via PC. With every PC you have, Prism Central, you get to register that with Nutanix Central. Central as that global plane. So whether that's of course, you know, the SAS plane we launched with, this new one that you can run on-prem as well. You register each Prism Central, which is ND called out, right? It represents a logical availability zone in your infrastructure. So therefore, as Nutanix Central learns more and more about your stuff, I can then help you find what your stuff faster, right? So it gives you global visibility to see where are all my clusters, where are all my VMs, where are all my applications like files or things like that. Um and then um and then flow up that uh that visibility around stuff like how full is each cluster, what's trending towards out of space, uh, what has some active health alerts on it, uh, where did I leave that one VM? Right. Without this, you have to remember um which cluster or which availability when you built a certain VM in to be able to go to that PC and find it. With this, you can start at the top, right? I guarantee there's one way to find your VMs now. Start at NC, search for it. Cross-launch into the associated Prism Central and now you're working directly on your VM. Um so that can help customers um with very large estates um find stuff faster and get launched into it.

13:13 - Speaker 2
Yeah, uh it absolutely does. I mean um you know, Prism Central when you're managing multiple clusters is a great roll up of that. This is now that global viewpoint uh of the entire estate. Um the This is this is great. Um yeah, the next point of the blog post is achieving ultimate data sovereignty and flexibility. Um Andy, I don't know that this one necessarily applies to a lot of our US-based companies, you know, but certainly our global customers, you know, they they face a lot of data sovereignty sort of regulations. And so this is a huge, huge thing for them. Um can you tell us a little more?

13:59 - Speaker 1
Yeah, definitely. You know, what I see here with this on-prem version of Nutanix Central is it just gives us that alternative deployment option. Uh if you're an enterprise that, you know, has some strict data residency, uh, regulatory requirements, things like GDPR, uh, NIS2, et cetera, um, you know, this gives you that choice and control over where the management of that data resides as well.

14:24 - Speaker 2
Yeah, and and you know, I know working with our globals, especially here. Europe and GDPR, that can be a huge point of contention. Um, you know, our British customers versus what needs to be in mainline Europe, um, you know, since uh Brexit and things like that. It's only become much more difficult. And we run into it even in Canada to some degree uh with our division as integrated or our company Zintegra Canada. Um, so you know, this is this is becoming a bigger. Issue. We've seen the trend of acquisitions and mergers that have led to these global organizations, uh, you know, international ownership over US companies. You know, we're we're dealing with this on a daily basis. Chris, I know um this is something we we have to keep in mind for our customers. Um what um well, I lost my train of thought on that one. So let's move on to our key benefits uh for Nutanix Central on premise. Chris, I'll throw it to you. What what's our first key benefit?

15:34 - Speaker 3
Through the reading through the blog, it obviously talks about data control. Um, that kind of aligns with uh the discussion of the data sovereignty. So uh knowing where and thinking like Jara mentioned, hey, if I'm an uh an admin and I need to work on a specific VM, I've got a trouble ticket. If all the details aren't there, uh here's uh one source of data to go uh start with. A tab browser that has connections to your full scope environment is really key uh to understanding um basically compliance. So if you've got a format of hey, this is the way that we uh label our VMs, you can uh organize those and I know that we did in the past either per business unit or per region. That kind of was something that was uh effective in helping to understand um where to look. So I think that that's something that's pretty helpful too. Um uh next is uh listed here in the blog post about operational control. Um I think again, um keying into roles-based access, which is something that's really important at the PC level, um, having the right visibility at the right level uh from both an operational perspective and a security perspective too. Um I think it's it's key. So that's something that to me makes sense in an organization that would need something like a uh Nutanix Central to make sure that um the right users have the right visibility. If that makes sense.

17:14 - Speaker 2
Yeah it absolutely does. You know you you mentioned RBAC or role based access control. That's that's an evolving part of Prism Central. But I'm going to take a slightly different take on it too, maintaining authority over your infrastructure. You know, when we talk about on-prem Nutanix Central, you know, this is probably a use case for customers who aren't necessarily cloud friendly. And so maintaining that level of control it is probably very appealing to them. It may be a reason why they're not in the cloud today. You know, you you give up a certain level of management and delegate that out to your cloud provider. Um and so this is this is probably a big consideration uh from a um control standpoint, don't you think, uh uh Gyra?

18:09 - Speaker 4
Yeah, very much so, right? What I mean cloud friendliness can vary, but even some customers like would love to be able to use more cloud, but you know, they're like, you know, sometimes they'll say, like, we're open to using any cloud provider that meets our stringent or ultra stringent security controls, right? Which not all cloud providers can, right? So this ability to say now you get the cloud like benefit of the software and of the access model, but you can put it behind your already pre-hardened border, right? So you get that full sovereignty, full governance over it. Um, and it gets to follow your environmental risk acceptance you already have for hosting uh solutions there.

18:43 - Unidentified Speaker
That's just a win.

18:45 - Speaker 2
Well and you know it it may not be an obvious choice, but you know, the internet is just one of many networks that that exist in our world. And so there are some of those that are private. And you know, and on think of it almost like a dark site. You you get into these, you know, private networks and things like that that can exist. And you know, it may be for research, it may be for you know other purposes. Um yeah, it's great to be able to have a centralized view in it, that distributed network, multiple different regions, multiple different sites, um, but it's not internet connected. So SaaS is an alternative, uh isn't an alternative. I love the next one. Uh the next key benefit is simple management. Um, this is something Nutanix does extremely well. Andy, I'm gonna throw to you, you know, simplicity is kind of part of the core DNA inside of Nutanix, you know, orchestration, workflows, things like that. Simple management within Nutanix Central.

19:50 - Speaker 1
Yeah, I you know, I I think simple management has always been a big part of what Nutanix brought to the data center. Um, you know, we used to talk about Nutanix bringing that iPhone-like simplicity to the to the data center. And this is just another good example of that. It gives us that central governance, gives us that ability to optimize our operations, be very efficient, but also in a very easy to use and intuitive GUI as well.

20:20 - Speaker 2
Last key benefit here, cloud flexibility. Hybrid environments can be managed consistently without dependence on a single cloud provider. Um that's another key benefit again, uh slightly differently, you know, from an on-premises standpoint, but you know, you may need to own that uh metadata about your cloud and and make decisions and things like that for a predominantly on-prem environment. But there may be pockets of you know public cloud that go along with your state. So uh next up on the the blog post, we talk about enterprise grade governance. Um, you know, uh what what is here from a capability standpoint in Nutanix Central uh gyro?

21:05 - Speaker 4
Yeah, so um both a combination of granular RBAC so that ability to write rules around who is allowed to see what and do what to it but also the federated IAM right so IAM in this case being identity and access management, right? So um rich ways you can even authenticate to the environment. Obviously you can bring your own LDAP, but of course um a new feature we launched That I think is mandatory for the SAS deployment model is SAML authentication, right? As well. So you actually are required to be vouched for by some other external identity provider. So that, you know, that's where you can easily get, you know, dual factor, multi-factor, you can get really crazy with the challenge system to prove an employee's identity and then only then allow them access to the infrastructure to be able to do stuff.

21:55 - Speaker 2
The next one up, scale without complexity. So this is a GA release, but Nutanix Central on premises, how many uh Prism Central Domains can we support?

22:11 - Unidentified Speaker
Uh Annie or Jyra, whoever.

22:16 - Speaker 1
I'll take it. Uh 25 Prism Central Domains. Um so I you know I think the goal here is just increased control, increased visibility, and and with that we should get increased agility as well.

22:29 - Speaker 2
Yeah, I I agree. 25's good for a general release. I'm sure like anything else it develops over time. We'll see uh more uh capabilities and more scale over time. Um let's talk a little bit about the deployment. That's what's up next. Uh how does Nutanix Central on premises deploy, Gyra?

22:52 - Unidentified Speaker
So that's the beautiful thing about it.

22:53 - Unidentified Speaker
It's just in the Nutanix marketplace, right?

22:55 - Unidentified Speaker
So just like um, you know Calling back to my previous comment about containers being uh the fashionable way to install software, right?

23:03 - Unidentified Speaker
It makes it pretty straightforward, pretty easy to do.

23:05 - Unidentified Speaker
Um so then yeah, it can become just a button in the marketplace to say click here to get Nutanix Central.

23:11 - Unidentified Speaker
That's awesome.

23:12 - Unidentified Speaker
Yeah, and so the simplicity is truly there, right?

23:15 - Unidentified Speaker
Nutanix Marketplace makes it easy to adopt and deploy.

23:19 - Unidentified Speaker
Um you know, that's that's one of the hallmarks here.

23:24 - Unidentified Speaker
Um I love Marketplace, the app store of Nutanix.

23:28 - Unidentified Speaker
Uh it's just it makes me happy anytime I'm I'm spinning something up and then I can just deploy things to use right inside of the uh UI.

23:39 - Unidentified Speaker
Um so as we kind of take stock of the entire Nutanix Central, um, I'm curious and and let's let's kind of go around the horn.

23:50 - Unidentified Speaker
What's your key takeaways like um use cases or sweet spot for Nutanix Central?

23:56 - Unidentified Speaker
Uh Andy, you want to go first?

23:59 - Unidentified Speaker
Think the thing that excites me the most is uh and I think Jyra may have touched on this earlier, but just that ability to do a global search of of the objects inside of Nutanix.

24:08 - Unidentified Speaker
Whether it's a cluster, a virtual machine, um, you know, the the first step in managing or maintaining anything is to find it.

24:15 - Unidentified Speaker
And uh and I love that ability just to you know have that global con control plane where where I can leverage those search tools.

24:23 - Unidentified Speaker
That's great.

24:24 - Unidentified Speaker
Um Chris, what do you think?

24:27 - Unidentified Speaker
Um to me the high level view of the full landscape in one single view.

24:33 - Unidentified Speaker
Again, that's saying single pane of glass, but that's really the simplistic approach of the the Nutanix way is having that view into your full scope environment in an easy to Read browser interface.

24:50 - Unidentified Speaker
That was uh key terminology from the past.

24:53 - Unidentified Speaker
Uh and they extend that now into the capabilities of a holistic reach for uh all your Nutanix um tools all in one single pane.

25:06 - Unidentified Speaker
Sarah, what do you think?

25:08 - Unidentified Speaker
Uh I'm gonna go with uh alerting, right?

25:11 - Unidentified Speaker
If I ran up to twenty five prism centrals in my company as an admin, uh this would become my Monday morning dashboard, right?

25:19 - Unidentified Speaker
Log in, take a look at that.

25:21 - Unidentified Speaker
Oh, green across the board, cool.

25:23 - Unidentified Speaker
You know, time for coffee.

25:25 - Unidentified Speaker
Yeah.

25:26 - Unidentified Speaker
I'm gonna say the same sort of with View.

25:28 - Unidentified Speaker
I had um, I don't know, 10, 12 monitoring TVs on the wall in my last organization.

25:38 - Unidentified Speaker
And so um that that heads-up display um I think is hugely valuable to organizations to be able to roll everything up into a centralized view.

25:48 - Unidentified Speaker
So um I think the name is apt.

25:52 - Unidentified Speaker
Yep, Nutanix Central is a great name for telling you what this is gonna do.

25:57 - Unidentified Speaker
It's gonna centralize control.

25:58 - Unidentified Speaker
Control, visibility, and uh enterprise grade governance all uh across your Nutanix estate.

26:06 - Unidentified Speaker
And uh it comes at a great time uh with so much happening from a migration from new uh from VMware to Nutanix, so much disruption in the marketplace uh with Broadcom.

26:20 - Unidentified Speaker
Uh these tools just help uh enterprise customers really adopt and fly on the Nutanix platform.