Nutanix announced new capabilities in the Nutanix Cloud Platform to enable customers to integrate data management of containerized and virtualized applications on-premises, on public cloud, and at the edge. This includes comprehensive data services for Kubernetes applications as well as cross-cloud data mobility. 

According to IDC, by 2025 there will be 750 million new logical applications, more than the past 40 years of computing, all generating large amounts of data across clouds*. This means it will be paramount for organizations to integrate management of data for both containerized and virtualized applications as well as across multiple environments.

"According to the Enterprise Cloud Index, nearly all enterprises have started using Kubernetes for their containerized applications. Now IT teams need to find a way to both enable their developers with self-service data services, while also ensuring governance and security policies are applied uniformly," said Thomas Cornely, SVP, Product Management at Nutanix. "With Nutanix Data Services for Kubernetes, the Nutanix Cloud Platform will extend storage provisioning, snapshots, and disaster recovery operations to Kubernetes applications to help accelerate containerized application development in the enterprise."

Data Services for Kubernetes

Currently, developers and administrators are faced with gaps and complexity for stateful Kubernetes® applications, necessitating multiple third-party tools or complex DIY projects to solve for the application and namespace layers. Announced today, Nutanix Data Services for Kubernetes (NDK) will give customers control over cloud-native apps and data at scale. 

Initially delivered as part of Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), NDK will bring the full power of Nutanix's enterprise class storage, snapshots, and disaster recovery to Kubernetes. This will help accelerate containerized application development for stateful workloads by introducing storage provisioning, snapshots, and disaster recovery operations to Kubernetes pods and application namespaces. NDK will empower Kubernetes developers with self-service capabilities to manage storage and data services, while also enabling IT with visibility and governance over consumption. NDK is also designed for use with Red Hat OpenShift.

"Application modernization is a key aspect of our digital transformation journey to continually deliver a better experience for our customers," says Yongju Jo, Chief Manager, IDC Business Dept, Shinsegae. "We believe Nutanix Data Services for Kubernetes has a big potential to deliver simplified enterprise-grade storage provisioning, snapshots, and disaster recovery for our Kubernetes deployments."

Cross-Cloud Data Mobility

Nutanix also introduced the Multicloud Snapshot Technology (MST) capability to deliver cross-cloud data mobility. MST will extend Nutanix hybrid multicloud data services by enabling snapshots directly to cloud native object stores, starting with the AWS S3 object storage service. This will unlock hybrid multicloud data protection, recovery, and mobility use cases, such as the ability to seamlessly protect and migrate stateful Kubernetes applications and data across cloud infrastructures with NDK leveraging this technology.

MST will enable several use cases including disaster recovery and backup for both containerized and virtualized applications, the ability to create a snapshot and instantly recover it anywhere, cross-cloud data migration, the ability to share data for workflows like test/dev, long-term retention for compliance, and more. This will also help many customers manage costs of their primary infrastructure enabling them to easily store snapshots in a less expensive storage medium, and just as easily recover them, across any infrastructure 一 private or public cloud. 

In addition to these new capabilities, the Nutanix Objects Storage solution now integrates with Snowflake, the Data Cloud company, to allow organizations to leverage the Snowflake Data Cloud to analyze data directly on Nutanix Objects. This can help to ensure data stays local, accelerates time to value, and delivers faster insights. Additionally, a single namespace in Nutanix Objects simplifies access to globally distributed data.  

NDK and MST are under development. The Nutanix ObjectsStorage and Snowflake integration is currently available to customers. More information is available here.