Nutanix Unveils Data Management Platform for Kubernetes
At its .NEXT conference today, Nutanix added a data management platform for Kubernetes environments running stateful cloud-native applications.
In addition, the company launched Project Beacon, a multi-year effort to deliver a portfolio of data-centric platform-as-a-service (PaaS)-level services that will run natively on any cloud by leveraging containers and Kubernetes clusters.
Lee Caswell, senior vice president of product and solutions marketing for Nutanix, said Nutanix Data Services for Kubernetes (NDK) will enable organizations that have adopted the Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) platform to provision storage more easily and implement disaster recovery using snapshots that NDK enables. In the longer term, however, Project Beacon promises to make it possible to run NDK on any cloud service.
Nutanix today also added Nutanix Central, a cloud service for monitoring and managing multiple instances of Nutanix platforms deployed in the cloud, on-premises and at the network edge, along with a MultiCloud Snapshot Technology (MST) capability to make it simpler to move data between cloud computing environment using snapshots. The platform initially supports the object storage format for Amazon Web Services (AWS) S3 cloud storage.
Finally, Nutanix also announced that Nutanix Objects now integrates with the Snowflake service for storing data in the cloud to make it simpler to import data collected via Nutanix platforms.
Nutanix has been making a case for a hybrid cloud computing strategy based on its virtual machine software and a portfolio of cloud-native platforms that range from storage systems to a PaaS environment for building and deploying cloud-native applications.
A recent survey published by the Data on Kubernetes Community (DoKC) consortium finds organizations are now running more complex analytics (67%) and artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning algorithm (50%) workloads on Kubernetes clusters. The survey also found that more than half of respondents (51%) are running more than half their data workloads on Kubernetes clusters.
Respondents cited streamlining their IT operations by ensuring consistency (43%) and simplifying management (41%) as top reasons for deploying stateful applications on Kubernetes clusters. Benefits of running stateful applications cited by respondents include ease of scalability (37%), the ability to standardize the way all workloads are managed (36%) and consistency across developers and production environments (33%).
However, challenges remain. The lack of integration with existing tools (35%), followed by lack of qualified talent (34%) and the time and effort required to manage (31%) are all cited as issues by survey respondents.
Despite the increasing number of stateful applications running on Kubernetes clusters, the debate over whether to deploy them on Kubernetes clusters continues. Proponents of deploying only stateless applications on Kubernetes contend it’s simpler to store data on an existing external storage system than it is to manage data in a Kubernetes environment.
It’s not clear how much the rise of stateful applications in Kubernetes environments is being driven by greenfield applications being deployed by IT teams that don’t have access to legacy storage resources. One way or another, there are going to be a lot more of them in the months and years ahead as cloud-native applications continue to evolve.
