Table of Contents

2 What This Book Covers

3 CHAPTER ONE
Datacenter Evolution

8 CHAPTER TWO
The Private Cloud

17 CHAPTER THREE
Creating an On-Ramp to Hybrid Cloud

22 CHAPTER FOUR
Choosing the Right HCI Solution for Your Private Cloud
What This Book Covers
Almost 85% of enterprises plan to adopt a hybrid cloud strategy that fuses private
and public cloud, according to the Nutanix 2019 Enterprise Cloud Index Survey.
An effective private cloud that incorporates the right capabilities—including
self-service, intelligent automation, dynamic scalability, and chargeback—is the
foundation of this strategy.

A properly designed private cloud will increase IT efficiency and accelerate the
pace of digital innovations that enhance the customer experience and streamline
business operations. The right private cloud eliminates complexity, frees up staff
time, and reduces IT costs so that more budget can be allocated to innovation.

However, many enterprises have struggled with private cloud implementations,

falling short of these goals due to inflexible legacy IT architectures with unpredict-
able scaling, complex data services, and incomplete or brittle automation.
Management complexity and poor performance and availability reduce agility,
and the expected budget savings often simply evaporate.

This eBook explains how private cloud can deliver a well-rounded, flexible
experience complete with the agility and security you want and expect.
1 CHAPTER ONE

Datacenter Evolution
Enterprises today are on a digital transformation journey, This eBook describes a smarter approach to assessing
seeking the best strategies and technologies to enable cloud needs and implementing cloud solutions. Deploying
them to thrive in a digital economy. One of the biggest the right private cloud technologies can deliver the agility
keys to success is a more agile approach to IT that can: your business needs now—without sacrificing security or
control—creating an on-ramp to the public cloud that facili-
• Deliver new digital services more quickly and with tates intelligent and cost-effective hybrid cloud operations
higher quality in the future.
• Ingest growing volumes of data and provide
timely insights The final chapter explains why the Nutanix Private Cloud
solution, based on the industry leading Nutanix hypercon-
Cloud technologies play a critical role in solving agility verged architecture, is the ideal problem for solving private
problems. But the results of moving enterprise workloads cloud and hybrid cloud challenges.
to the public cloud have been mixed.

IT IS THE ENABLER OF BUSINESS OUTCOMES

Delight customers for retention,

growth, and advocacy

Rapid innovation Simplify IT operations

to grow revenue for efficiency

Figure 1. The digital economy has expanded the role of IT in all industries.
The Advent of Cloud Computing
The promise of cloud computing is that it increases agility by making infrastructure
and other services available whenever they’re needed with much less friction, while
offloading much of the cumbersome infrastructure management and near-constant
software patching and update cycles that can bog down IT organizations.
Cloud technology may enable your team to:

• Scale quickly and easily

• Respond rapidly to business changes and directives
• Support your developers and DevOps efforts
• Accelerate the process of application deployment and management

However, while public cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS),
Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) create opportunities for
enterprises to innovate and move faster, they can also introduce constraints:

• Costs. Public cloud spending can increase rapidly and may be difficult
to limit without the right tools for cost control.

• Availability. Public cloud availability may not enterprise expectations,

especially for applications that aren’t built to be cloud native.

• Security. Security in the cloud is different than datacenter security which can
result in user errors. A majority of enterprises (60%) said security is the biggest
factor impacting their future cloud strategies in our recent cloud survey.

• Control. No matter how good your cloud operations are, some things
are out of your control. Many enterprises aren’t willing to sacrifice control,
especially for mission-critical applications.
Because of these constraints, a number of different cloud models have emerged.
While terms like private cloud, hybrid cloud, etc. are now part of the IT lexicon, they are
briefly defined below so there’s no confusion about how this book uses these terms.

PRIVATE CLOUD
A cloud-enabled IT infrastructure running in a corporate
datacenter or privately hosted by a third-party service
provider.

PUBLIC CLOUD
Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service
(PaaS) offerings from third-party cloud service providers.
Examples of these offerings are Amazon Web Services
(AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.

HYBRID CLOUD
A combination of private and public cloud environments,
with some level of interoperability between them.

MULTI-CLOUD
An IT environment that uses multiple public cloud services,
with some level of interoperability between them.
Which Cloud Model Should You Choose?
So which cloud approach is best for your organization? While the decision is ultimately one that must be made
based on the requirements of your business, it may be helpful to understand what your peers are doing and why.

According to a recent Nutanix study, 52% of enterprises However, simply adopting a strategy in no way guarantees
surveyed are already running private cloud in some form. success. A successful cloud strategy should combine:
A 2019 Forrester survey found that 79% of IT leaders are
investing in private cloud. Up to 75% of enterprise workloads • A properly designed and architected private cloud
are predictable, making them well-suited for a cost-efficient • Targeted public cloud deployment for select applications
private cloud. and services
• Mobility of applications and data between environments
To deliver on the promise of digital transformation, 85% • Unified management across clouds
of enterprises surveyed said they plan to adopt a hybrid
cloud strategy that fuses private and public cloud while These topics are explored further in this eBook.
supporting technology trends such as distributed and edge The following chapter digs deeper into the reasons and
computing. This is often the best way to enable your IT requirements for a private cloud, while Chapter 3 explains
organization to: how to extend private cloud success to hybrid cloud.

• Deliver the services and user experience customers want

• Flexibly support new technologies and data driven analytics
• Avoid the problems associated with shadow IT
• Move from CapEx to OpEx through use of subscription-
based software services. Subscription models offer the
agility required to meet changing needs.

75% 79%

Up to 75% of enterprise 79% of IT leaders are investing

workloads are predictable and in private cloud
well-suited to private cloud
Swineburn University
turns to Nutanix for
Self-Service Private Cloud
With Nutanix, Australia’s Swinburne University was able to build an all-encompassing
private cloud, complete with automation capabilities to make their lives (and the lives
of their students) much simpler. Solution benefits include:

• Students can choose and deploy necessary development stacks with ease.

• A more predictable spending model enables fairer, more effective resource

provisioning.

• Swinburne’s IT team is better able to identify and assess where time is spent,
which workloads need to be automated, and which could use human help.

“ Nutanix has become part of our self-service suite,

within which students can browse and pick development
stacks they need for their projects and deploy them
with one click, similar to an app store. ”
— Simon Naughton, IT Director, Swinburne University
2 CHAPTER TWO

The Private Cloud

Designing an effective private cloud requires careful planning • Frees up budget. In most enterprises, traditional IT still
and consideration of your current and future needs and consumes the majority of the IT budget, leaving only a small
priorities. A private cloud for enterprise needs should be percentage to dedicate to innovation. Gartner reported
built on a foundation of HCI and should provide self-service that traditional IT accounted for 81% of spending on average,
capabilities, app-centric security, and reliable data protection with just 19% going to cloud spending. Traditional spending
and disaster recovery. is forecast to drop to 72% by 2022. If you can drive down
spending by shifting workloads from traditional IT to private
This chapter explores a number of topics that affect cloud, more budget becomes available to allocate elsewhere.
private cloud decision making:
• What constitutes a private cloud? • Frees up staff time. If your IT staff spends all of its time
• What business needs does private cloud solve? on infrastructure management tasks like provisioning,
• Where are enterprises running applications and updates, data protection, and troubleshooting to address
services today? operational requirements and satisfy user requests, that
• What challenges are associated with private cloud? leaves very little time or focus for innovation. Rationalizing
• How does hyperconverged infrastructure solve private and automating operations with a private cloud and en-
cloud challenges? abling self-service so that developers and other users can
satisfy more of their needs themselves can get your team

The Business Need for off the treadmill.

Private Cloud • Eliminates complexity. Traditional IT environments often

There are two pressing needs for any enterprise to succeed have silos of dedicated compute and storage infrastructure
in the digital economy: around important applications like databases, an approach
• Increase IT efficiency that is both complex and inefficient. Silos of storage for un-
• Enable digital innovation structured data—including file shares and object storage
—add to operational complexity. Established enterprises
A properly designed private cloud helps address both of may have heterogeneous infrastructure and technical debt
these needs. Increasing IT efficiency is a prerequisite for dating back years. This is not only expensive, it’s a sub-
accelerating innovation. A successful private cloud: stantial barrier to innovation.
Unless you can remove the friction from your on-premises operations, your digital transformation will never be complete,
and your business objectives will remain at risk. A properly designed private cloud fosters innovation by:

• Enabling self-service access to resources. Many deve- • Facilitating data access and analysis. A private cloud
lopers say the biggest impediment to their productivity is should help consolidate your data and make it more
lack of access to resources. Developers and testers, for accessible and easier to integrate, accelerating analysis
example, need easy, on-demand access to development and deepening insight.
and test environments—with up-to-date test data—to
be productive. A private cloud that enables self-service • Supporting both traditional and cloud native applications.
access to these resources, can reduce time to market, Established enterprises often have tens or hundreds of
increasing the cadence at which your company delivers traditional business applications that they need to continue
new services and features. to support, even as they make new investments in cloud
native applications. You may need a private cloud that
Many IT teams rely on IT service management (ITSM) flexibly supports both models with a common operational
services such as ServiceNow. Your private cloud should model and a single management console.
integrate with any ITSM solution you use.
Not all innovation projects are destined to succeed. Failure
• Rationalizing deployment. Accelerating the rate of soft- is a part of innovation. A private cloud makes it easier to
ware development is little use if it takes days or weeks to resource new development and application projects quickly.
stand up a production environment for a new application. Fruitful ideas grow and add resources by scaling out,
By standardizing infrastructure services—and developing unsuccessful ideas release their resources and make
with those services in mind—a private cloud can support room for the next effort.
more rapid deployment and enable CI/CD.
To sum up, private cloud makes IT operations more efficient
• Increasing automation. As enterprises run more and more by freeing up budget, saving staff time, and eliminating
applications and services at scale, manual tasks and work- complexity. It fosters agility by enabling fast and easy
flows become a huge impediment. It’s impractical, and resource access, simplifying deployments, supporting
quite likely impossible, to grow your IT staff at the same traditional and cloud native application models, and
pace as infrastructure services. A private cloud should delivering meaningful automation.
enable automation so that IT teams can deploy, operate,
and scale infrastructure and application stacks with less
effort, while providing IT-as-a-Service (ITaaS) to empower
development and business teams.
Where are Businesses Running Apps and Workloads?
So where are enterprises on their cloud journeys, and where do they run important apps and workloads today?
This is a question that has as many answers as there are enterprises, but, once again, it’s instructive to understand
the trends. As you already learned, the lion’s share of enterprise IT budgets are still being spent on-premises,
but let’s examine some of the macro trends around public cloud, software-as-a-service (SaaS), private cloud,
and traditional infrastructure.

PUBLIC CLOUD
Enterprises utilize the public cloud to address a variety of use cases, such as:

• Customer-facing apps. Global public clouds can enable However, the public cloud is not suitable for all types of
you to get apps and services “closer” to the customers workloads or use cases due to:
that need them.
• Data gravity. Applications have to run where the data is
• Disaster recovery. Many enterprises opt for DR in the generated. Moving data far from its source—whether the
cloud as an alternative to maintaining secondary data- source is applications, machine data, or employee and
centers for DR. customer data—can be expensive and time consuming.

• Software development. Developers often utilize • Legacy design. It can be difficult and expensive to
public cloud resources to accelerate delivery of new move legacy applications to the public cloud. Even when
apps and features. you succeed, they may not run as well as they did in the
datacenter.
• Peak resource demands. Many enterprises use cloud
resources to address peak demands rather than purchasing • Regulatory concerns. Regulations, including GDPR and
and deploying the necessary equipment in a datacenter. others, may severely limit your ability to run applications
in the public cloud or store data there.
• Geographic limits. Cloud resources can be used to
support operations in geographies that are far from • Loss of control. Many IT teams are unwilling to give up
an existing datacenter. control to the public cloud when it comes to deploying
and operating custom applications.

• Unpredictable cost. Egress charges and getting data

out cannot be overlooked and costs can be quite high.
SaaS
Almost all enterprises are adopting software-as-a-service for some applications,
offloading the management burden for these services from datacenters and IT
teams. This trend came across very clearly in our 2018 report:

88% of respondent organizations have adopted at least one “as-a-service”

product. This could be as simple as Dropbox or could indicate adoption of
Office 365, Salesforce, WorkDay, or some other software-as-a-service tool.

As enterprises focus on digital transformation and operating agility, SaaS is a

way to “clear the decks” so that teams can focus attention on critical services and
innovation in areas that provide the greatest differentiation for your business.

DATA GRAVITY & LEGACY APPS REGULATORY CONCERNS LOSS OF CONTROL UNPREDICTABLE COSTS
Make migrations hard plus fear of That do not permit hosting data From being able to deploy Overruns due to limitless resources
vendor lock-in where data resides outside of an org’s geography custom solutions to protect and high egress charges
your apps and data

Figure 2. Enterprises report a number of impediments when it comes to public cloud.

PRIVATE CLOUD AND TRADITIONAL IT
Private cloud and traditional IT are combined under a single When the same survey asked respondents about these cap-
heading because the line between the two remains a bit abilities, only about 27% indicated that they had fully imple-
blurry. This is because not everyone defines private cloud mented each feature or were close. Roughly 50% said they
the same way. When we asked about infrastructure environ- were getting there, while 22% didn’t have the capability or
ments, 52% said they were running on-premises private were just starting. While it’s up to you to define the capabili-
cloud, 37% said they were running hybrid cloud, and only ties of your private cloud, Nutanix believes that these four
11% said they were running traditional IT. capabilities should be priorities for anyone planning a private
cloud deployment.
However, the 52% number for private cloud still seems
optimistic. This number is likely more aspirational than
a reflection of the current reality. By most definitions,
a private cloud should include capabilities such as:

• Self-service
• Automation and orchestration via APIs
• Dynamic scalability
• Chargeback/showback

Private cloud on-premises

infrastructure

Non-private cloud
on-premises infrastructure
11% 52%

WHAT TYPE OF
INFRASTRUCTURE ENVIRONMENT
ARE YOU RUNNING?

Hybrid cloud (combination

of on-premises/private cloud and public cloud)
37%

Figure 3. How enterprises report using on-premises infrastructure Source: Nutanix State of the Enterprise Report
Private Cloud Challenges
An on-premises private cloud should provide your business the same agility as the public cloud—with the slight exception
that your IT team is responsible for physical infrastructure. As you’ve seen, overarching private cloud goals are to make
your IT operations more efficient and to enable greater innovation.

However, it probably won’t surprise you to learn (assuming you don’t already know) that enterprises have struggled
with private cloud implementations, falling short of their goals in important ways. Many existing private clouds suffer
from one or more of the following challenges:

• Inflexible architecture. Your private cloud may need to • Inadequate performance and/or availability. In a private
adapt to a variety of application needs from traditional cloud environment, you may have less visibility of the
enterprise applications to cloud native applications. performance requirements of each workload, and work-
Inflexible infrastructure software and 3-tier architectures loads can also change more quickly as users start and
can make that difficult. stop VMs and applications. As a result, one workload may
negatively impact the performance of another. If your
• Complex data services. Enterprise environments typically private cloud is poorly architected, it may also introduce
have a need for a private cloud with block and file storage single points of failure, bottlenecks, and other flaws that
services in addition to the object storage common in the affect availability.
public cloud. Meeting those needs may require deploying
and managing different hardware for each data service, • Unpredictable scaling. In a busy and growing private
adding cost and complexity. Separate storage pools cloud environment, it can be difficult to predict when you’ll
decrease overall capacity utilization and limit flexibility. run out of performance, especially I/O performance. With
With data playing such a critical role in digital transforma- multiple types of storage needed, scaling can be disruptive
tion, the importance of addressing this challenge shouldn’t and expensive. The right architecture should simplify
be overlooked. scaling, and the right tools should simplify monitoring
resource consumption and facilitate capacity planning.
• Brittle automation. A private cloud with an inflexible
architecture and complex data services inevitably makes
automation harder. As a result, it is more time consuming
to create automations, automation failures are more likely,
and troubleshooting and maintenance is more complex.
In addition, private cloud implementations may fail to provide a number of things
that enterprises need. Shortcomings may include:

• Lack of “enterprise” services. Traditional enterprise applications often rely on

external data protection and DR services. Private clouds modeled on public cloud
may lack the robust snapshots, replication, cloning and other services that many
enterprise IT teams utilize and may not integrate with existing third-party data
protection solutions.

• Lack of public cloud integration. Finally, you will eventually want your private
cloud to integrate with public cloud services. A private cloud environment that
lacks integration points makes this more difficult and private cloud versus public
cloud operations remain disjointed.

The more of these challenges and deficiencies your private cloud is burdened with,
the more complex the environment is to manage and the more expensive it becomes
in terms of both CapEx and OpEx.
Hyperconverged Infrastructure at the Core
It can be a struggle to implement a private cloud on top of When Nutanix compared enterprise HCI adopters to non-
traditional 3-tier enterprise IT infrastructure with separate adopters, we found that HCI adopters were much further
servers and storage connected by storage networks. Despite along in delivering the key private cloud capabilities identified
its familiarity, this type of infrastructure leads directly to earlier: self-service, automation, dynamic scalability, and
many of the challenges described in the previous section. chargeback. We believe this is because HCI makes it simpler
Different VMs may impact each other and it is difficult to to deliver those capabilities; some HCI offerings include
scale, slow to respond to business needs, and complicated these capabilities out of the box.
to manage. Traditional infrastructure is one of the primary
reasons that many early private cloud deployments have As Figure 3 illustrates, HCI adopters were far more likely to
not delivered on their promise. report that they had fully implemented the key capabilities,
and much less likely to have reported little or no progress.
Enterprises are discovering that they can achieve better
private cloud results more quickly using hyperconverged The simplified HCI architecture lends itself to self-service,
building blocks that provide compute capacity and storage automation, and dynamic scalability. Chargeback can also be
capacity on each node—similar to the approach used by much easier to implement since everything is under a single
many of the large public clouds. The right hyperconverged point of control. As you’ll learn in chapter 4, the right HCI
infrastructure (HCI) solution provides the cardinal virtues of architecture eliminates the most pressing private cloud
cloud including self-healing, simplified capacity planning, challenges with a flexible architecture that adapts to a
easier automation, and reduced management overhead. variety of needs and greatly simplified management.

WE ARE VERY CLOSE OR HAVE FULLY IMPLEMENTED:

Active project or Open to, but have not adopted We have no plans to adopt
already adopted HCI hyperconverged infrastructure hyperconverged infrastructure

SELF-SERVICE 38% DYNAMIC 45% AUTOMATION AND 40% CHARGEBACK

SCALABILITY ORCHESTRATION OR SHOWBACK 36%

30% 27%
20% 26%
24%
17% 25%
26%

Figure 4. HCI adopters are far more likely to have implemented key private cloud capabilities Source: Nutanix State of the Enterprise Report
Bottomline Technologies
Relies on Nutanix for Online
Payments Processing
Businesses around the world depend on Bottomline Technologies solutions to help
them make complex business payments simple, smart, and secure, including some
of the world’s largest banks, and private and publicly traded companies.

The company now runs core business applications that are responsible for revenue
generation on Nutanix Enterprise Cloud, replacing its legacy server and SAN
environment. With Nutanix, the company:

• Delivered its cloud-based service from a secure datacenter environment

• Increased customer adoption and satisfaction by eliminating the need for

on-premises infrastructure at customer sites

• Significantly reduced support and maintenance, freeing resources for other projects

• Quickly and easily handles service growth with predictable, linear scaling

“ As far as the customer is concerned payment processing

is all done in the cloud but with none of the security,
governance and compliance issues associated with
public cloud platforms. ”
— Peter Marshall, Head of Infrastructure, Bottomline Technologies Inc.
3 CHAPTER THREE

Creating an On-Ramp to
Hybrid Cloud
Although some enterprises are migrating applications back on premises, public cloud still
plays an important role in your overall IT strategy. In this chapter we’ll explore:

• Why hybrid cloud is the preferred enterprise model

• How private cloud choices affect hybrid cloud success
• Practical ways to move from private to hybrid cloud
• Deciding where to deploy an application

Why Hybrid Cloud?

If you’ve made—or are going to make—the necessary investments to deploy an effective private
cloud, it’s natural to ask whether you need a hybrid cloud at all. Although you may not be ready to
adopt hybrid cloud today, what if your dev team comes to you in 6 months with a new cloud native
customer application that is expected to see huge traffic during the holiday season? Where will you
get the resources to support it? Enterprise IT teams have to be ready for these types of surprises.

It’s become clear that hybrid cloud is by far the preferred operating model. As already noted,
our 2019 study found that 85% of enterprises rank hybrid cloud as the ideal IT operating model.
This extensive report surveyed 2,650 IT decision makers around the world about where they’re
running their business applications today, where they plan to run them in the future, what their
cloud challenges are, and how their cloud initiatives stack up against other IT projects and priorities.
Assuming that your private cloud is able to run all your work- The results you ultimately achieve depend on how mature
loads, why would you need a hybrid strategy? A hybrid cloud your hybrid cloud operations are.
gives you access to the resources of both your private cloud
and the public cloud. This has a number of advantages: Increasingly, applications incorporate data and services from
multiple places. For instance, in a 3-tier application stack, the
• Flexibility and agility. Ready access to resources to presentation service might be on a public cloud close to the
support new applications, accommodate development and consumer, the application service might reside in a private
testing projects, or to quickly address unanticipated needs. cloud, while the database service might remain on legacy
Your private cloud flexibly meets resource needs for most infrastructure. Hybrid cloud should give you the flexibility
situations—with access to unlimited public cloud resources to bring together the right application components based
if and when needed. on capabilities and needs to deliver each application at the
optimum cost.
• Elasticity. The hybrid cloud model gives you the ability
to respond elastically to seasonal resource demands.
Also, some individual applications experience big resource
fluctuations and run best in a public cloud where they can
grab resources when they are needed and release them
when they are not.

• Cost control. Designing datacenters to accommodate

peak loads only to have infrastructure sitting idle much
of the time is a poor choice versus using public cloud
resources to accommodate peak loads.

• User experience. You can’t defy the laws of physics. Trying

to deliver IT services to customers or employees from a
distant datacenter simply introduces too much latency to
be effective. Public cloud can make it possible to expand
quickly into new geographies where you don’t have a data-
center and to bring digital services closer to customers.
Private Cloud is an On-Ramp The ideal private cloud solution includes tools that simplify
and unify management of the private and public cloud
to Hybrid Cloud components of your hybrid cloud environment, including:
Having a well-architected private cloud will make your
hybrid cloud deployment easier and help ensure success. • Application and lifecycle management
Some of the reasons for this are just common sense. If your • Security governance
private cloud is burdened by the challenges described in • Cost governance
Chapter 2, your team is going to have a lot less time to
devote to hybrid cloud as well. Hybrid applications that are By choosing the right private cloud solution, you effectively
dependent on services from your private cloud will suffer the create an on-ramp to the hybrid cloud that makes hybrid opera-
effects of its limitations, especially performance, automation, tions easier and more cost effective, delivering better results.
or integration challenges.
A Practical Approach to
The right private cloud solution should actively facilitate
integration with the public cloud. This includes tools for
Hybrid Cloud Adoption
copying, replicating, or migrating VMs and data from one Guidelines for assessing hybrid cloud maturity stress the
location to another, support for different hypervisors, need for automation, visibility, and consistency across all
and the ability to support both VMs and containers. environments, private and public. But, most approaches to
hybrid cloud are based on just trying to figure out how to
One of the biggest challenges for any hybrid cloud deploy- get all the pieces to work together. Based on the realities
ment is that your private cloud and public cloud(s) may of the current cloud environment, Nutanix recommends
have completely different management environments. a different approach:
This makes deployment and ongoing management more
difficult and increases the potential for operator errors, • Choose a single framework—a “cloud operating system”
security vulnerabilities, and cost overruns. It can be difficult —that will let you manage workloads both on-premises
to size equivalent VMs and storage across environments and in the public cloud.
or map functionality in your private cloud to equivalent • Deploy your private cloud using that framework.
functionality in a public cloud. • Choose only public clouds compatible with that framework.

This approach is described in more detail in the recent book,

“Designing and Building a Hybrid Cloud”.
Aligning Applications to Clouds
Enterprises pursuing a hybrid cloud strategy have to decide which applications
(or parts of applications) to deploy in which clouds.

Private cloud infrastructure is usually the most economical option for predictable
enterprise workloads and development needs, while the cloud supports elastic work-
loads, cloud native applications, and accommodates unforeseen resource needs.

When organizations consider which applications and workloads to run in the public
cloud, they often look at the following opportunities first:

• Disaster Recovery and Data Protection. By eliminating the need for a secondary
datacenter with resources dedicated for disaster recovery, DR in the cloud can be
very cost-effective.

• Software-as-a-Service. Increasingly, enterprises choose a variety of applications

to provide non-critical services. SaaS services can often eliminate much of the
infrastructure and administrative overhead, allowing your IT team to focus
onservices that differentiate your business.

• Development and Test. Development work can often be supported economically

in the cloud. This is especially true for new projects that might not succeed.

This is not to say that your organization should move these workloads to the cloud,
just that many organizations see them as potentially low hanging fruit.
How to Best Take Advantage
of Public Cloud
Take a strategic look at what you want to accomplish before considering individual applications
and create a cloud decision matrix that includes all the factors that need to go into your decision
to move an application from your datacenter to a cloud service provider. This includes assessing
likely costs and whether an application is ready for the cloud:

• Does the application consume and release resources as needed or is it persistent?

• What’s the I/O pattern? Steady or fluctuating? High or low?
• Does the application scale vertically or horizontally?
• Does the application consume more and more resources over time in a way that you can’t control or limit?
• Does the application depend on an ecosystem of other applications?
• Does the application have stringent compliance requirements?
• What is the impact to your business if the application is up but unreachable?

These factors tend to be interrelated. High I/O requirements or the need to run as
part of an ecosystem will affect the cost of running an application in the cloud.

Once you have the right cloud decision matrix for your organization, you can evaluate
individual applications against it. Some applications will rank as prime candidates;
some applications will clearly not be well-suited to move to the cloud and will probably
never be moved; others may require work to make them cloud ready.
Fast-Growing Online Retailer
Puts Nutanix at the Core of
Hybrid Cloud
In little over a decade, Netherlands-based vidaXL has grown to become an international online
retailer with multiple fulfillment centers across Europe, Australia, and the USA. The company
chose Nutanix to replace its existing, fragmented infrastructure with a hybrid cloud, combining
best-of-breed public cloud services with on-premises Nutanix infrastructure.

Nutanix now supports a variety of critical workloads including SAP, Linux databases, Genesys
PureCloud contact centre, and Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops. The company saw immediate
benefits from this approach including:

• Integrated management across its distributed private cloud using Prism Central
• Simplified support with a single point of contact across all operations
• Cost savings from reduced footprint, maintenance, power, and cooling
• Reduced virtualization costs due to Nutanix AHV hypervisor
• Built-in tools for public cloud integration as part of hybrid cloud

“ Using the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform to build

a private cloud has enabled us to address all the issues
around performance, scalability, management and support
associated with our previous, diverse and fragmented,
IT infrastructure. It has also made our IT much more stable
and provided a firm foundation for a hybrid cloud, able to
further scale and cope with growth where required. ”
— Bart van Es, IT Manager, vidaXL
4 CHAPTER FOUR

Choosing the Right HCI Solution

for Your Private Cloud
Not all HCI architectures are equally well suited to solve your company’s private cloud and hybrid cloud
challenges. Built on the industry’s leading hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) software, the Nutanix
Private Cloud solution is designed to deliver unparalleled private cloud operations while creating an
on-ramp to hybrid cloud. Nutanix enables you to run any application on one platform in any location.

Nutanix provides a high degree of infrastructure and PRIVATE, PUBLIC, HYBRID. ALL TOGETHER NOW.
NUTANIX CLOUD PLATFORM
application automation, ensuring that your infrastruc-
ture investments keep pace with changing workload
requirements. Simple, scalable infrastructure is com-
bined with consolidated data services, intelligent
operations, and native business continuity options.
End User Database Business Analytics Cloud Native ROBO/ General
Security and governance are built into every facet Computing Critical Apps & Big Data Edge Compute/
of the solution. /VDI Computing Dev&Test

The Nutanix solution is designed to accommodate

all the applications that enterprises care about, SEAMLESS HYBRID CLOUD OPERATIONS PUBLIC CLOUD
from traditional database applications to end-user
computing to the latest cloud native apps.

PRIVATE CLOUD

OPERATIONS AND AUTOMATION

BUSINESS CONTINUITY
Figure 5. Nutanix Private Cloud solution delivers the capabilities to STORAGE CONSOLIDATION
support diverse enterprise workloads and cloud native applications. NETWORK AND CLOUD SECURITY
Run any app on one platform in any location. HYPERCONVERGED INFRASTRUCTURE (HCI)
And Nutanix Private Cloud is easy and fast to deploy and Unlike the traditional piecemeal approach with disparate
scale. You can start small and grow your environment storage, compute, virtualization solutions, the Nutanix
incrementally as needed, and you can accomplish large- Private Cloud solution is optimized to connect and con-
scale deployments quickly—without requiring six months solidate IT silos, streamlining management, accelerating
of professional services. Nutanix uses a subscription soft- the delivery of business services, eliminating complexities,
ware model that delivers economic and provisioning flexi- and simplifying cloud deployment.
bility for your private cloud.
Because Nutanix solutions are 100% software-defined,
As a result, Nutanix delivers the private cloud capabilities you we enable you to create a private cloud that is:
need to succeed in an extremely cost-effective solution.
A recent IDC study demonstrates how Nutanix benefits • Easy. Deploy, expand, and upgrade quickly and
exceed the capabilities of other architectures on a range non-disruptively from a single pane of glass
of important metrics.
• Intelligent. Automate day-to-day operations and place

Designed for Cloud apps and data intelligently to maximize performance

Nutanix infrastructure software is engineered to deliver • Resilient. Secure and protect apps and data and pro-
highly scalable, available, and efficient cloud services. actively recover from failure with less time and effort
Nutanix has helped thousands of customers eliminate legacy
compute and storage silos and modernize infrastructure And Nutanix enables you to integrate with the public cloud
for innovation, while delivering high performance, always- more easily, creating an on ramp for hybrid cloud operations.
on self-service, and efficient storage consolidation from
a single platform.

62% 85% 477% 9 $932,800

Lower Less Unplanned Five-Year Months Additional Revenue
Five-Year TCO Downtime ROI to Payback per Year

Figure 6. Nutanix Private Cloud solution outperforms alternative architectures on a variety of critical business metrics.

Source: IDC, Organizations Leverage Nutanix Enterprise Cloud as Scalable, High-Performing, and Cost-Effective Infrastructure Foundation, January 2020
The Nutanix Architecture
Nutanix’s hyperconverged platform was designed for a digital, software-defined world,
making it an ideal solution for the cloud versus hardware-dependent, 3-tier, and legacy
infrastructure options. With Nutanix HCI technology, simple building blocks result in a
powerful and flexible scale-out architecture. Scaling is predictably linear, so you can
add compute and storage resources incrementally as your needs grow—avoiding large,
unexpected capital outlays.

Virtualization

Servers

Networking

Storage

Figure 7. The Nutanix architecture integrates critical capabilities, accelerating infrastructure deployment
The Nutanix Private Cloud solution gives you greater Consolidated Data Services
choice and greater flexibility including: Nutanix allows you to consolidate all your data services
—including both structured and unstructured data—on
• Platform choice. Choose hardware from leading the same platform, eliminating the need to architect and
hardware vendors or Nutanix NX appliances. manage separate siloed storage solutions for your private
cloud. A single, flexible and scalable storage pool simplifies
• Hypervisor choice. Nutanix AHV hypervisor is included provisioning and management while increasing capacity
with purchase at no additional cost, providing full VM utilization.
and container support. VMware ESXi and Microsoft
Hyper-V are fully supported. Having all your data on a single platform can simplify data
integration and data analysis, yielding greater insight with
• Public cloud choice. Enable hybrid cloud operations less effort.
spanning public clouds.

180+ SERVER PRIVATE, HYBRID, BLOCK DATA FILE DATA OBJECT DATA
PLATFORMS PUBLIC CLOUD • Virtual Machines • VDI • Retention
• Databases • User Directories • Analytics
• Email Systems • App Generated • Dec & DevOps

ISCSI NFS / SMB S3

TRUE
LICENSE
PORTABILITY

PLATFORM SERVICES

MULTIPLE SOFTWARE,
HYPERVISORS PURPOSEFULLY
BUILT APPLIANCES

Figure 8. Nutanix solutions provide greater choice to accommodate Figure 9. The Nutanix Private Cloud solution integrates block, file,
diverse enterprise needs. and object data services as part of the platform.
Intelligent IT Operations, Automation, and Self Service • Simplified CI/CD. Your teams can deploy and maintain
With Nutanix, your private cloud benefits from streamlined a fully automated CI/CD pipeline with continuous appli-
IT activities across the infrastructure lifecycle. Intelligent, cation deployment across multiple on-premises and
one-click operations take the pain and effort out of daily cloud locations.
activities, including software installs, upgrades, and work-
load placement. Backup and Disaster Recovery
Nutanix provides native data protection that simplifies
• Infrastructure optimization. Nutanix provides advanced your infrastructure, eliminates bottlenecks, and streamlines
analytics and intelligent insights into your private cloud backup management. Full integration with third-party
environment, so you can quickly identify under-utilized backup solutions lets you continue to use your preferred
resources, overprovisioned VMs, and other cost sinks. solution or standardize operations across your entire
environment.
• Multi-cloud management. Nutanix brings one-click
simplicity to hybrid cloud environments, enabling you Monitoring, Metering, and Chargeback
to deploy and manage applications in nearly any cloud Nutanix provides deep visibility into consumption patterns
without losing control, visibility, or capabilities. across your private cloud and public cloud deployments.
From a single pane of glass, you can optimize cloud spend,
• Flexible task automation. Nutanix provides a code-free, perform compliance checks, and provide 1-click remediation.
visual approach to task automation, enabling any adminis-
trator to build, maintain, and troubleshoot automations.

BUY
• Self-service with no loss of control. With Nutanix Calm,
you can create blueprints that model applications and
DEPLOY IN
tasks and publish them to a marketplace. Application HOURS
owners and developers request these IT services from
the marketplace whenever needed.

PLAN FOR
GROWTH
SIMPLE TO
MANAGE
AND USE

NON-DISRUPTIVE
ONE-CLICK UPGRADES
REAL-TIME INSIGHTS
AND REMEDIATION

Figure 9. Nutanix simplifies every aspect of infrastructure deployment and management.

Security and Governance Easier Application and
Ensuring that a private cloud meets security, corporate Workload Mobility
governance, and regulatory requirements is a significant
Enterprises place increasing value on having the flexibility
challenge. Nutanix provides native capabilities that greatly
to match a given application or workload to the best infra-
simplify the process of ensuring infrastructure security.
structure resource dynamically; 85% say app mobility across
Powerful security automation monitors the health of your
clouds is essential. Nutanix simplifies hybrid cloud operations,
storage and VMs, automatically healing any deviations from
providing the ability to easily move applications across clouds
the security baseline. Nutanix complies with the strictest
with less time and effort. And Nutanix tools make it easier
international security standards, and an ecosystem of security
to assess the cost of an application both on-premises and
partners makes it simple to add other security services to
in the cloud.
your environment.

In private cloud environments—where you may lack full Getting Started with
workload visibility and control—data encryption and policy-
based microsegmentation are extremely valuable:
Nutanix Private Cloud
To learn more about how Nutanix can help you transform
• Data Encryption. Nutanix provides flexible methods for your private cloud, visit nutanix.com/private-cloud. You can
encrypting data at rest for compliance and security. contact Nutanix at [email protected], follow us on Twitter
@nutanix, or send us a request at www.nutanix.com/demo
• Policy-based Microsegmentation. Protect individual to set up your own customized briefing.
applications and groups of applications, from internal
and external security threats. Fine-grained microsegmen- You can also take a test drive of Nutanix infrastructure with
tation rules control east-west traffic between VMs. Policy no hardware, setup, or cost. Experience the simplicity and
definition is made simple with Nutanix’s ability to visualize agility of public cloud combined with the performance,
traffic flows within the private cloud environment. security, and control of private cloud via an easy-to-follow
guided tour.

START YOUR TEST DRIVE

Trek Bicycles Modernizes
with Nutanix Enterprise Cloud
Trek is a 40-year-old, privately held company that is world renowned for its
high-quality bicycles. After an extensive proof-of-concept, Trek enlisted the help
of Nutanix Consulting Services for its datacenter infrastructure modernization
project. Trek now relies on Nutanix to run all of its on-premises workloads, including
the company’s design and manufacturing applications and product lifecycle
management (PLM) software, delivering substantial and far-reaching benefits:

• 66% reduction in number of employees needed to manage infrastructure,

lowering IT costs and allowing focus on strategic projects

• Cut turnaround time for IT requests from weeks to hours, freeing engineers
to work on innovative new products

• 75% reduction in storage/compute datacenter footprint, lowering overall

datacenter costs significantly

• Provided Trek employees with positive work-life balance

“ Technology goes into every part of designing and building

a bike—making it more efficient, aerodynamic, lighter,
stronger, and faster. Our bikes are as advanced as possible
and all of our design and manufacturing processes are
now being powered by Nutanix. ”
— Dane Sandersen, Global Security and Infrastructure Director, Trek Bikes