First up, an interactive session with Rajiv Ramaswami talking about all things Nutanix but before that Cameron Stockwell (Director, Product Management for LCM and Foundation) happens to be here from Australia and Sarabjit Principal Product Manager at HQ from India.
Recapping the upcoming developments announced at Barcelona .NEXT 2024 – Multi-Cluster LCM – empowering Prism Central to have wider visibility of managed clusters to have much greater control of updates especially as the breadth of supported products is ever increasing.
Foundation, who loves it? Who hates it? Pretty much everyone loves it. We’ve obviously all spent cold days in the datacentre building out clusters and Foundation makes that easier! There’s a very bright future for Foundation, and with Foundation Central being able to build out new clusters with ease.
Session 1 – Rajiv Q&A
Rajiv welcomes us all to the Nutanix HQ, opening with the GA of Nutanix Kubernetes Platform (NKP) as a major interest for folks. Modernising, and refactoring applications into containers where it makes sense.
GPT2-in-a-box 2.0 taking shape too, lots of interest for GenAI, turning internally looking at double digit % increase in productivity across Support, Unit Testing and realising other benefits of eating own dog food.
Seeing huge demand around Nutanix Database Services (NDB), making databases ‘better’ at scale. (recap with Wells Fargo from .NEXT Barcelona 2024 – https://www.nutanix.com/company/customers/wells-fargo)
Patrick asked a question re ‘VMware to Nutanix, how can Nutanix make this easier? Less technical but more about taking stock of the environment to build a migration plan.’ Rajiv explained that there are efforts in place to help here, and partners are providing additional efforts. If customers have a basic VMware vSphere stack its pretty much good to go right now but often there’s a lot more to an environment than just vSphere. Looking at NSX to Flow, Aria Suite, Tanzu, etc. It’s a big task and Nutanix want to help.
Jagdev asked a question ‘Scaling, are there enough people to cover the incoming customers whilst ensuring the existing level of service is provided to Customers – NPS 90+‘ Rajiv confirmed, absolutely. Continual investment in R&D and Support by double digits year on year. A big push onto enabling partners to help customers coming onboard, and to present the landscape back to Nutanix as Nutanix need to see more from the ground to help those customers achieve more.
Phil asked re ‘Kubernetes strategy – are you working with ISVs to improve the landscape for the Nutanix ecosystem?‘ There’s a huge push in some sectors to bring databases, line of business applications to a containerisation solution. Rajiv keen to point out that the Nutanix Kubernetes Platform (NKP) solution is 100% open source, and is inherently supported with a wide ecosystem but there is still more to do.
Ken asked re ‘GPT in a box version 2 – and whether there are any vertical specific use-case engagements e.g. Healthcare?‘ Largely horizontal use-case analysis occurring today, welcomes vertical use-case input to see how Nutanix can help.
Rene asked re ‘Crystal Ball, the next 5-10 years, AI, Quantum Computing, what do you think is going to happen?‘ Hybrid, and Multi-Cloud is the future, modern applications, cloud native (SaaS) or containerisation. We want to be the platform for today and tomorrow, a big focus in being relevant in a Hybrid world, and partner for the clouds. A recent discussion was a customer migrating from the VMC on AWS to Nutanix NC2 on AWS – described as a fairly easy migration being bare-metal in AWS ‘simply’ changing the software platform within the cloud.
John asked re ‘Should we be looking further into Nutanix for Cloud Service Providers?‘ Absolutely, Nutanix are working on multi-tenant capabilities across products to help. Some customers will always need Private Cloud, whilst some customers may not be large enough, or have diverse needs that lend themselves better to a service provider cloud. Nutanix wants to provide options for every customer to consume services in the way that makes the most sense to them.
Cloud Disaster Recovery as a Service – Xi Leap EOL simply because it made more sense for partners to offer this service as it benefit from depth of understanding to deliver more than just DR. Nutanix has provided the tooling for partners to build their own solutions for their customers adding more control.
Phil asked ‘Move is great, is there a roadmap to add more functionality e.g. Flow networking?‘ Absolutely, increased investment coming into Move to do even more. Big discussion from the room on NSX networking being re-created within Flow as a sticking point right now as its a very manual process recreating everything and migrating. This is a tough one but need to look at automation to help reduce manual work and human error. Move emphatically loved within the room, some great stories of successes.
‘Are vendors taking more interest in Nutanix thanks to changes within the Virtualization space?’ Yes, Nutanix sees increased interest as time goes on. Vendors are increasing compatibility and more importantly certifying their software on Nutanix. This is improving and will continue to build as momentum grows.
At the end of the session Rajiv was presented with the inaugural ‘Nutanix Tech Connect Summit 2024’ T-Shirt by Angelo.