In This Episode I’m with Nikita Maheshwari (Nutanix Product Marketing Manager), and we talk about:

– Latest announcements from Nutanix: Acropolis and Prism
– How the end user can take advantage from the multi hypervisor support
– Nutanix Community edition

Here the full transcript of the show

Enrico: Hello everyone and welcome to a new episode of Juku.Beats. Today I’m with Nikita Maheshwari, Nutanix product marketing manager. Hi Nikita, how are you?

Nikita: Hi Enrico, I’m doing great. Thank you for having me today.

Enrico: That’s my pleasure. I think you don’t need to introduce the company because everyone knows about Nutanix and what you actually do. If you want to say something about the latest news. I know that you have a couple of new products that came out in June at your event. If you can talk about acropolis and prism and then I will ask you questions.

Nikita: Sure, that sounds great. Yeah, as you mentioned last June, we actually made some major announcements around acropolis and prism. Let me actually go ahead and define what these are so the users that are new get a sense for what it is. Acropolis is a new software offering that we put out. It actually consists of three parts. Something first, the distributed storage fabric. This is really our core storage fabric that’s defined our hyperconverged platform. It’s an enhancement of our distributor storage architecture, includes our distributed system as well as all our storage services. Our enterprise storage services, snapshotting dedupe tiering et cetera. That’s really the first product, the Acropolis product. The second is the App mobility fabric. This is our newly designed open environment. This let’s you really provide VM placement, migration and conversion across multiple hypervisors, with a long term vision to include over time different clouds as well as containers.

Companies, as they think about their data center, have a lot of flexibility over time, do I want to be on premise? Do I want to be on cloud? This is a fabric that lets you easily do that. Finally, the acropolis hypervisor. This is our new built-in hypervisor. It’s based on KVM but we have done a lot of customization and hardened it to provide better enterprise security, management and a whole host of new features.

Enrico: Can you give us an idea on how end-users are actually using acropolis and how they can take advantage of this multi-hypervisor infrastructure.

Nikita: Sure. Acropolis works just like the rest of our product. It’s a software based implementation. It’s a backing service which allows for workload and resource manage and provisioning in and operations and it’s all managed through our UI prism. For end-users who want to test out acropolis, they actually can try this product out using Nutanix community edition. We can speak to that a little bit more later in the podcast. Essentially, just how you would choose any kind of hypervisor, you would choose acropolis hypervisor with the Nutanix product and you can run your virtual machine on top of the Nutanix acropolis hypervisor and then actually manage it through our UI prism.

Enrico: You also mentioned prism. Actually, I don’t really know what it is, looking at the website it’s part of the architecture of course but it looks like a management tool. There is something more in it, what is actually is?

Nikita: Yeah, sure. Let me talk first about why we made these announcements and I’ll quickly go into prism. The reason the acropolis hypervisor, acropolis and prism, these advancements are really what we’re calling act two of Nutanix. The goal was to elevate infrastructure from compute and storage and the feedback that we had gotten was, “You have a great hyperconverged solution and how can you prepare enterprises for the next evolution?” Right, how do we look at companies as they think about moving to different clouds, as they think about moving to different hypervisors. You look at a lot of the traditional hypervisor solutions, they’re fantastic solutions, they’re mature but they really, the technology is above have them. The migration, the management, it’s a lot of piecemeal technologies that have developed years after and we want to really re-design this whole stack and say, “If we had to prepare our customers for a world of multi-hypervisors, public cloud and amazing management, where would that come? That’s really where acropolis began and where origin is with prism.

What prism is it’s a HTML file based management UI. From the beginning, a big piece of Nutanix has been, let’s think about the end-user and let’s think about what’s in it for them. There’s been a big concentrated effort at Nutanix to bring consumer grade UI and we actually hired a lot of consumer grade engineers to build our user interphase. Prism currently, it’s a management plan and it’s as crucial to our product as the core underlying IP. The next phase of it is quite exciting. Prism now includes the beyond management, it allows you the ability to create, provision, scale, migrate the end without the need for external management tools. The upcoming prism releases, they’re focusing a lot more on analytics. You’ll see a number of one-click technologies coming out including capacity trend analysis, root cause analysis, remediation recommendations.

The goal is that it really grows into a comprehensive datacenter management platform and breaks down datacenter silos. You don’t need a lot of different products, you don’t need different products to do analytics and different products to manage and provision VMs. It’s really a one-stop shop and I’m really excited about this because I … I think this year is going to be huge for prism. You’re going to see a lot of announcements coming out with it later this Fall. This is a big engineering effort at Nutanix. It’s as important as our core storage functionalities. There’s a lot coming this year on the roadmap for prism.

Enrico: Yeah and sounds great. You mentioned earlier the fact that you have this community edition. Can you give us an idea on it’s scope actually and how it works and how people are using it?

Nikita: Yes. Community edition is a zero-cost software offering that Nutanix put out. We made this announcement in May and essentially what it is, it’s a software based offering that any end-user can just download and run on their own home labs. It’s essentially, has some constraints. You can run it on one, three or four Notes and it’s based on the acropolis hypervisor and the acropolis software offering. You would run it and everything would be … It’s one package offering so you have the acropolis hypervisor and then you have all our software functionalities. The nice thing is that it’s really giving you flexibility about how you want to, what kind of hardware you want to use with it. We’ve put out some minimum hardware requirements but there’s no strong HCL. You can essentially take a look at the minimum requirements and see, do I have enough SSD, do I have the right CPU support and simply just get it running in about 15 or 20 minutes.

The complete product, it’s supported through our Dot Next community, so this is not a paid offering, it’s really designed for the community and end-user, just to test all our software functionalities. We have a forum community called the Next Forum and you can actually go through that and type any questions you have and [inaudible 00:07:40] we’ll answer it. The great thing is that really all our key software functionalities that’s in a single site deployment is available in community edition. You have the ability to really test out all the nitty-gritty details of Nutanix product, our prism UI, our acropolis hypervisor, all these key functionalities are available to you and you can test it out for yourself, you can go to Nutanix.comcommunityedition and just sign up and start playing with it right there.

Enrico: Thank you very much for the time you spent with us. Wow, it sounds really interesting stuff. To close to this episode, can you give us a couple of hints on can we contact you on Twitter or on Nutanix website.

Nikita: Definitely. You can reach me, my twitter handle is @Nikitamah, N-I-K-I-T-A, Mah, M-A-H. You can also follow Nutanix twitter handle @Nutanix, this is where we send out all our key product news, latest documents, exciting updates et cetera. Finally, like I mentioned, really to try our product and see for yourself all the goodness that it has offer. You can simply go to Nutanix.comcommunityedition and just sign up and get going with the product yourself.

Enrico: Thank you very much again. Bye, bye.

Nikita: Bye. Thank you Enrico for having me.