South African organisations are faced with managing forever increasing complex IT infrastructures, clouds challenges and significant traditional three-tier on-premises workload performance issues.
This is according to Kalogo Morare, Pre-Sales Engineer at Axiz, who says growing numbers of applications, larger data volumes and workloads and infrastructure both on-premises and in multiple clouds are making management of environments more challenging.
“According to Vanson Bourne’s report, with a survey on 1 700 IT decision-makers worldwide, the pandemic changed how nearly all organisations operate, though complexity – from security to data integration, cost management, performance challenges with network overlays and other operations – remains a challenge,” says Morare.
“Customers are looking to solve the complexity of a three-tier architecture and challenges that came with the new ways of operation, with nearly most planning and/or migrating to cloud,” he says.
Morare believes that while cloud adoption has accelerated, a significant proportion of workloads will remain on-premises for the foreseeable future.
“There are several key reasons for this,” he says. “Organisations have found that where there is a lot of ingress and egress – large volumes of data moving in and out of the cloud – it increases costs significantly. This can be a serious problem for those with large amounts of data bouncing up and down, so they tend to keep this on-premises. Another reason is latency with cloud applications: moving data between the cloud and the end-user depends on the networking, so there can be bottlenecks with multiple users trying to access data at same time. There are also concerns – especially in highly regulated industries – around data sovereignty, oversight and governance when data is in the cloud.”
Managing this environment requires a hyperconverged system with extensive hybrid cloud capabilities and features, he says.
The Nutanix Hybrid Cloud Platform simplifies cloud complexity with an open, software-defined hybrid cloud platform comprising hybrid cloud infrastructure, multicloud management, unified storage, database services and desktop services, to support any application and workload, in any location.
Says Morare: “With Nutanix it becomes seamless – it has APIs and instances that can be plugged into all major clouds, so it is very flexible. It centralises all the management across all the environments and allows it to be seen through one management console – Prism. And when they say they deliver single pane central management, they mean it. You don’t need different consoles for physical devices, VM workloads and applications. With Nutanix Prism, you can manage clusters, scale out clusters, complete upgrades non-disruptively, manage infrastructure in an ‘invisible manner’ with no constraints, pull reports on how apps are doing, and see how everything is set up. It gives you a holistic view.”
He notes that Nutanix is also focusing on automation to support enterprises running more applications and services at scale. “As enterprises strive to meet and exceed their time-to-market goals, layers of complexity and hardware-defined infrastructure make this impracticable; Nutanix addresses impracticalities with ever growing automation support, helping enterprises automate their application life cycles” he says.
Morare says South African customers are welcoming the Nutanix solution: “Feedback from our customers is that this alleviates a lot of time spent on infrastructure management. They have been able to refocus resources from managing infrastructure to other business priorities that require attention. Management is easy, and it is non-disruptive when it comes to maintenance and upgrades; so is the deployment of services and applications. Their opex has shrunk and they can now do more with fewer resources,” he says.
In addition to addressing the challenges of managing increasingly complex environments, Morare says Nutanix is priced within reach of even mid-sized enterprises and is available in flexible packages. “Customers can procure just the software, which is not locked into a specific vendor’s hardware, or they can acquire the whole software and hardware package. Another big plus is that the hypervisor comes included with the software. Cloud bundles and as-a-service solutions are also available,” he says.
Contact us: https://goaxiz.co.za/technologies/nutanix/