Nutanix Previews Storage Platform Running Natively on Kubernetes Clusters
Nutanix today at its .Next conference made available under an early access program a storage platform that runs natively on a Kubernetes cluster.
Previously known as Project Beacon, the company’s Cloud Native AOS platform leverages Kubernetes application programming interfaces (APIs) to provide access to a range of data services, including disaster recovery capabilities that can now span multiple availability zones, multiple clouds and on-premises IT environments.
Scheduled to be made generally available this summer, the Cloud Native AOS platform is initially being made available on the Elastic Kubernetes (EKS) service provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Lee Caswell, senior vice president of product and solutions marketing, said Cloud Native AOS is the first storage offering from Nutanix that doesn’t require a hypervisor to be installed.
Ultimately, Cloud Native AOS will be made available on multiple platforms, including instances of Kubernetes running at the network edge, said Caswell.
As the number of stateful applications running on Kubernetes clusters continues to increase, Nutanix has been extending its storage reach beyond its own hypervisor. As part of that effort, Nutanix at the end of 2023 acquired the assets of D2iQ, a provider of a platform for managing Kubernetes clusters. Nutanix in 2024 followed up with the launch of the Nutanix Kubernetes Platform (NKP), which, as of today, is now certified to run on the Ubuntu operating system from Canonical.
It’s not clear how many stateful applications are being deployed on Kubernetes clusters without a hypervisor, but eliminating the need for that hypervisor should improve the overall performance of cloud-native applications.
Cloud Native AOS is arriving at a time when Nutanix is trying to convince VMware customers to migrate to either a Nutanix hypervisor platform or transition to a Kubernetes platform. In some cases, organizations might opt to migrate applications from the VMware hypervisor to a Nutanix hypervisor. Alternatively, organizations might opt to refactor an existing monolithic application to enable it to run on a Kubernetes cluster, or may simply decide to focus on building and deploying new applications on Kubernetes clusters.
Regardless of approach, many of those applications will require access to local storage resources versus relying on an external storage system to remotely store and access data. That’s critical because many applications now need to process and analyze data as close as possible to the points where it is being created and consumed.
It might be a while before organizations fully transition Kubernetes environments. In the foreseeable future, most organizations will be running a mix of monolithic and cloud-native applications. Nutanix is positioning itself as a provider of multiple infrastructure platforms capable of supporting any type of application IT teams need to deploy.
The challenge, as always, is determining what level of I/O throughput any one of those applications is going to require not only today, but also as it continues to potentially scale up or out in the months and years to come.
