Rethinking Your Datacenter Strategy: Hybrid Cloud with Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) and AWS

  • Nutanix
Rethinking Your Datacenter Strategy: Hybrid Cloud with Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) and AWS

Webinar

Supply chain constraints and sweeping changes to virtualization licensing have forced IT leaders to re-examine long-standing infrastructure decisions—often on a timeline they didn't choose. The pressure is real, but so is the opportunity.

Join us to explore how the partnership between Nutanix and AWS gives organizations a practical, low-risk path through today's uncertainty. In this session designed for IT decision-makers, we'll cut through the technical noise and focus on outcomes: what these market shifts mean for your budget and roadmap, and the options now available to you.

We'll cover three real-world strategies our customers are pursuing today:

  1. Migrating production workloads to the cloud without re-architecting or retraining your teams
  2. Adopting a hybrid model that lets you modernize on your own timeline while keeping the flexibility to run workloads where they make the most sense
  3. Using the cloud for disaster recovery to protect on-premises workloads without the cost and complexity of a second datacenter
  4. Whether you're currently running a traditional virtualization platform and weighing your next move, or you're an existing Nutanix customer looking to extend your investment into AWS, you'll leave with a clear framework for making confident infrastructure decisions in a changing market.

Speakers

  1. Scott Bekker Webinar Moderator Future B2B
  2. Dwayne Lessner Principal Technical Marketing Engineer Nutanix
  3. Miles Scott Partner Solution Architect Amazon Web Services
Full Transcript Scott Bekker Hello, and welcome to Rethinking Your Data Center Strategy, Hybrid Cloud with Nutanix Cloud Clusters and AWS. Today's webinar is sponsored by Nutanix and produced by Actual Tech Media. My name is Scott Becker with Actual Tech. I'm excited to be your moderator for this webinar. So we've got a ton to cover today. Can't wait to to get us started, introduce you to our to our, our, our speakers. But first, I do wanna go over a few housekeeping details that are gonna help you get the most out of this session. First off, just wanna, call attention to, the tabs on the right. The, the one that's automatically open is that that chat tab. Bunch of you have been saying hello in there. We've got people from, from all over the country. Appreciate those hellos. Love to see where you're logging in from. Feel free to keep those coming. Of course, don't stop there. You know, you can share your thoughts there about today's topic, your your reactions to to things in the presentation, whatever you're excited about. It's also a good place to go if you need to reach out to the actual tech media team in the unlikely event that you have any technical issues during the session. Browser refresh will, dispose of a lot of sort of minor issues. But, if, if that doesn't do it for you, just, drop a note there in the in the chat. I'll be monitoring that along with my colleague, Irina, and, we'll be standing by to help you out. Now the absolute best way to dive in the information we're gonna explore today is by asking your questions. So that's two tabs over. There's a a dedicated q and a tab, and that's where we'll look, during the during the q and a session for, for your questions. So, be sure to drop your questions in there. Make this event your own. Ask, you know, the questions that are that are pertinent to your environment. And, so… And, if we don't get to your questions during the session, don't worry. We'll we'll pass along all these questions to, to our speakers for follow-up as well. Now another stop on our console tour today is the docs tab. There's some great stuff in there, so be sure to click around. Stuff on AHV with, with disaster recovery, Citrix desktop as a service, one on Nutanix cloud clusters on AWS, and a resource on Nutanix platform architecture. So be sure to, to click on those, get them open, in your tabs so, these events end before you know it, and, and and then those those links kinda go away. So, be sure to to open up any that are interesting to you. Also, be aware that we have closed captioning available in 18 languages. If you hover over the lower part of your screen, you'll see that CC option as well as a drop down menu for languages. Finally, you may have noticed the prize icon. We are giving away, an Amazon gift card worth $250 as a prize drawing at the end of our webinar. Of course, you must be in attendance for the duration of the live event qualify for the prize, and you've gotta meet the actual tech media prize terms and conditions, which you can find in the docs tab. Alright. With all that housekeeping out of the way, I think we're ready to get into our session. Really excited to introduce you to our speakers today. We've got Duane Lessner. Duane is a principal technical marketing engineer at Nutanix, where he designs, builds, and test solutions across Nutanix AOS, both on premises and in the cloud. And Duane specializes in Nutanix cloud clusters. Now we've also got Myles Scott. Myles is a partner solutions architect at Amazon Web Services, and he's got more than a decade of experience in IT infrastructure and cloud technologies. Myles works closely with partners to architect innovative solutions that help customers accelerate their cloud adoption journey and maximize the value of their AWS investments. So perfect panel for, for today's discussion. Let me bring them on stage here with me. Alright. Dwayne Lessner Hey, everybody. Scott Bekker Hey, Dwayne. Miles. Welcome. Thanks for being here. Miles Scott Hello? Dwayne Lessner Yeah. This. will be, good. Scott Bekker let me let me pull these slides off and and put your deck up. And then, Dwayne, I'll turn things over to you. Dwayne Lessner Sounds good. Rethinking your data center strategy. In the the words of Bob Dylan, if your time is worth saving, you better start swimming or you'll sink like a stone for the times are changing. That's the good part about being in IT. Nothing's ever boring around, around here. Even even if you're stuck supporting something old, like, it's, it's kinda crazy how things unfold within our environment. So today, we've already introduced ourselves, so we'll pop through. But we're gonna go through, you know, some things that have changed, not everything in the world. But, and then some offer some strategies on how to migrate, whether going hybrid or even using, just a portion of a new environment maybe just to protect your infrastructure and then some decision making along the way. So what what are the main things that are changing? Probably could add a fourth here, but, even if you're from The States and with the the last elections, I'm from Canada, so it doesn't mean much to me. Facebook's building out a big data center not too far from where I am at. But, even any existing projects are still going through if there's a shovel in the ground. So that AI rollout for the hyperscalers or maybe within your own company, Hardware is at a premium. I think we've seen across anywhere from three to four months being on the short end waiting for gear, and then everything else going on in the world, you know, diesel… The cost of diesel raising prices. So in order to respond efficiently, save on money, you know, it's causing businesses to relook at how they're going to do things. And one of those other disruptions, I don't think it's new to anybody at this point and it's probably why you're on the call. Certain companies have changed the licensing, with their software bundles, forcing customers to move. I… Like, you're either you're either moving with staying and doing an upgrade, which will be a new architecture, or you're going to move to a new platform. So, it just really matters where you're going to end up. Licensing, as well, if you have older hardware, it could cost a lot more money since the minimum for, other vendors has increased quite a bit. Reddit is full of crazy posts of customers saying what their renewal cost will be, with moving, and then a big one around VMC, in AWS not taking any other, subscriptions on. So you are going to have to move. So just really a matter of planning it, and we're kind of used to doing that. But how can we do that in a way that we're not going to disrupt our whole business? I think, there is a risk involved staying or going, and I think Nutanix along with AWS is in a really great position to limit the amount of time, hence the risk, having a way to fail back if you need to, and that's all going to lead to saving money at the end. So one of the roles that I do here at Nutanix in technical marketing is in c two, Nutanix Cloud Clusters. Simply put, Nutanix Cloud Clusters is our software stack just running on bare metal in AWS. So regardless if you're you're on a… In a private data center, whether that's on your own gear at a different service provider, and then you're looking to… You can take that… Deploy that same software stack onto bare metal in AWS. That gives you the same management layer. And possibly, even if you were, a VMware customer, you could take a lot of backup software, as an example, supports both, vSphere and our hypervisor, AHV. So there's a good opportunity that you could even reuse your backup software, you know, have gear… Have a workload running on NC two and AWS, and then just back it up to… Could be another Nutanix cluster. It could be s three. You could use our snapshot technology, which we'll talk through. And one of the benefits of running n c two on AWS, it's in your own account. So any any, benefits you're getting from the AWS side will be inherited in that account. You've probably already spent time configuring security in that account, so we can slot right in with the native, AWS security groups. The big one is networking. It's fully routable, not only back to your private data center, but to all of the AWS services within your environment. So whatever you spin up in, AWS, you're going to be able to consume AWS services. It's going to give you a great opportunity to migrate and then modernize on whatever stack makes sense. Maybe it could be multiple different things, especially if we look at large organizations. You know, there's no one size fits all, and typically, you'll have, a best of breed depending on what your business outcomes are. The other thing that we don't really talk… It's pretty new, but we do also have, this software called government cloud clusters g c two, more for public sector, think federal government, you know, DOD, where you need the… All the the best security footprint. And the the big difference between the two platforms, NC two has NC two portal, which allows you to self provision, scale up, scale down. With government cloud clusters, we have removed that self-service portal and embedded it into the deployment in the government cloud, regions. So there's no outside communication, so you can have, like, a fully air gap solution. And it does make… Like, we can't say that we make the certification for a variety of solutions better, but we do remove a barrier because now you're not having to worry about this SaaS portal or credentials leaving. So, it has been a a really big thing for those customers. I'll hand it over to Miles now to talk about the many regions and hardware types that AWS provides. Miles Scott Yeah. Yeah. Thanks, Dwayne. Yeah. So, I mean, I I think the the biggest thing that I wanted to cover on this slide, is is honestly… Dwayne mentioned it earlier. Lead times for hardware, are are are getting kinda crazy. I'm a I'm a gamer at heart. Right? So, I'm very upset about it because it's it's hard to get memory and and GPUs for myself. And I'm sure that problem for you guys has only been, you're you're experiencing it in orders of magnitude larger. So, knowing that AWS has, has bare metal e c two capacity, basically, where you guys want it. I mean, obviously, it's not gonna be in the immediate city you need, but, regionally close, AWS should have a region with at least three availability zones, you know, that segment our data, you know, data infrastructure out. There should be one that's near you kind of wherever you're wherever you're tuning in from. We're launching these things all the time. You know, we we launch a few a year, and and each one of those are are built out on redundant networking, redundant power. They've all got, you know, the the availability zone concept, that allows you to kind of, have regional, inside of a region, you can have kind of different blast domains for your for your architecture. The good thing about Nutanix is it it slots directly into this AWS infrastructure. As Dwayne mentioned, it it runs in your own account. It runs on top of e c two bare metal, and you're really just taking advantage of infrastructure that already exists today. You don't have to buy it. You don't have to ship it. You don't have to, have it burnt in, you know, from a rack and stack and, disk burn. And I know those those things were, they came up and it added time to deployments when I when I worked on the on prem side. The NC two solution gets rid of all of that. We have clusters go up in in about an hour and a half. If you… You know, for protesting, if you have a a true deployment, you wanna take a little bit more time and plan it, but, we're talking days, if not weeks, not weeks if not months. And so having that capacity there when you need it is kind of the value that AWS brings. But so where do customers actually start? This next slide. Yeah. So, we've really got three different kind of use cases that, that that we're seeing customers, take advantage of of NC two with. Honestly, the first one is is migrate. We've also got this… The idea of hybrid cloud. I think you… Your Nutanix is the the pioneers of this right there. They're the people that, you know, that the industry is is looking at for guidance on this. And then that last one is is Dwayne, kind of alluded to earlier is really the protect rates, so the disaster recovery for for on prem workloads. Now these steps, they're not they're not a ladder. You don't, like, kind of… You don't migrate from one to the other or graduate from one. They're really about an operating choice and and what makes sense for you and your environments. Most of our customers are are starting with one. I see a lot of customers start with Doctor, kind of move into that migration. But but it's not that… It's not necessarily… You you don't have to. Right? You can you can be an on prem Nutanix customer, light up an AWS region for disaster recovery, and live there comfortably for, for perpetuity, honestly. It… It's it's really about what makes sense for your environment. So the migrate one, like we talked about, you know, it's it's it's… You've got some sort of a deadline. I think Dwayne mentioned some licensing concerns that a lot of our customers are seeing. We're seeing data center closures, people that are wanting to get out of the data center business. They don't wanna maintain data centers. They don't wanna have to carry a a colocation, contract where they're they're they're either paying for, you know, directly or indirectly that that infrastructure. And they're really taking advantage of, of the cloud and AWS to to perform the migration. Those hybrid workloads, so this is where you've got, you know, some level of workload that wants to move, but you've also got, other workloads that would need to stay on prem. Nutanix provides that, you know, we always call it the single pane of glass. Right? So you can you can manage, you know, consistently across multiple environments. They've got a really, really slick solution for that, and it it… It's really helping a lot of our customers with, the ability to scale out into multiple regions, to to multiple different cloud providers, or to on prem, on prem infrastructure. It's it's really one of the core value props that we see. And then the last one is the the Cloud Doctor. So, the the thing I'll say is as as we're as we're going through the rest of this webinar, you know, think about which one of these, is is what your company is going through, where are the pressures you're feeling. Like, are you guys… Do you guys have a renewal day with licensing coming up? Are you are you trying to simplify some new complexity in your operational model across multiple different sites and multiple different environments? Or or or do you have that Doctor site that you just don't wanna pay for anymore? So the good thing is is Nutanix got… Nutanix and AWS have this this joint solution that, that that are pretty good for for most customers. So with that, we'll we'll start with the the first strategy. This is the, the migration, strategy. Right? So this is this is for all of you that are, you you… You've got a clock running. You know, you've you've got that licensing renewal. You've got a data center that you wanna close, or if you've got hardware that's end of life, right, to tie it back to the the the increases in cost and the the the delays in shipping that we're seeing with hardware. You know, that, you know, this is really that ability to to to change the infrastructure first, but keep the workloads kind of as they are. So you don't have to refactor things. You don't have to get things in the microservices. This is about moving with speed and efficiency, and getting out of, something that's aging or something that where you've got a time concern around. Yeah. So lift and shift, without refactoring. So this is kind of one of the common, you know, one of the common migration strategies at Amazon we talk about is lift and shift or rehost. This is simply just taking something that runs in a VM, and moving it into into the cloud. The nice thing about the way Nutanix works is you get to keep that operational model. Right? So you you don't have to learn about VPC networking, and you don't have to learn about IAM, you know, security groups and, all of your roles and stuff. Nutanix can help with a lot of that stuff. It can give you this, this well architected platform that runs directly on AWS. And it lets you guys keep all of the the decades of experience you have in managing virtualized infrastructure and that that same kind of core framework that you're used to with hyperconverged if you're using it. Or if not, you know, just around virtualization stacks, the flexibility to, to deploy a one vCPU 64 gig memory, instance. Not that you would ever wanna do that, but you theoretically could. So there's there's a lot of benefits that that come with this. Now I will say, I I do think that native cloud has its place, and there are definitely workloads that you should look at moving, to native. But Nutanix can definitely be that bridge. It can help you with a lot of it. And for a lot of the customers I see, Nutanix does hold a place that will continue on with, with the long term strategy for customers. So, really, you know, what I would recommend is you you get out there. You look at what workloads are right to refactor, and then you also look at, you know, kind of Nutanix as a a way to to move everything else. The nice thing about it, and we'll talk more about this later, is when you're when you're thinking about refactoring, Nutanix themselves have a a lot of opportunities now and a lot of new solutions that allow you to to kind of move into these modernizations, we'd like to call them, kind of, paths. So with NC two, though, you know, it's it's… You know, some of the big benefits that we see around this kind of not needing to to refactor, IP address, you you don't have to change IP addresses. This is big for a lot of customers. If you've got hard coded IP addresses or if you just don't wanna have to manage an IP address change, in your applications as part of a move, Nutanix with their their flow virtual networking, they can really help you kind of manage IP space in AWS and kind of move those networks in a in a very, very, very easy and simple way. The the biggest thing, though, is making sure that you're you're sizing your workloads to fit. Nutanix, Dwayne mentioned, we've got a lot of different instance types at Amazon. So, I think I think we're up to… Doing our way, like, 26 or 28 now, different instances that you can select from. Dwayne Lessner Yeah. Miles Scott And I think Dwayne Lessner pretty large with all of the Excel versions. Miles Scott you… Yeah. Yeah. We've got the, like, the… Our CMR instances, our I instances, and then we've even got some GPU enabled instances. So if you've got those, if you got those, like, either virtual desktop workloads or, you know, or, if you get, like, some limited ability to do AI infrastructure with with NC two, but there's… NewTanks has an AI solution that that kind of builds on top of that. But, there's there's… The good thing is there's a choice out there for you. And with that large selection of instances, you you you can kind of right size, you're not stuck in these, you know, very, very large. We've got kind of the small, medium, and large kind of sizes that you can kind of get, that you can put together to build a cluster out. But… So so standing up the cluster is really only half the job. Right? So you… You've actually gotta do the migration. And and this is really where, Nutanix move is is the the the show stealer for me. Right? It it makes it makes migration simple. So if you if you look at the left side, the the the… One of the best things is it's not just, you know, our friends that are on, ESXi and and, you know, VMware stack. It can obviously handle that. It can handle, you know, vSphere systems. It can handle Hyper V, and obviously Nutanix. But it also handles, cloud native workloads. So if you've got stuff that's in EC two native that you wanna move over and and consolidate things onto MC two, you can do that. It also handles VMware running on cloud service providers. So our, our older, VMware cloud on AWS solution, if you've got environments that are still sitting out there, you know, there's there's a few different options, but Nutanix can help you get those over to NC two on AWS. And and the best thing about this to me is it's it's very simple. Setting it up, it's it comes as a as an OVA appliance. You essentially install the appliance typically on the destination as our our recommendation. But you you map it to your source vCenter, Nutanix Prism cluster, what… You know, wherever your source workloads are, as well as your destination NC two cluster. And then it'll go out, and it'll actually import all of your VMs. So you can kind of drag and drop them. It's all… It it can be either UI based or, if you wanna do it programmatically, you can. But it's you you build up migration plans. It's it's very, very simple and intuitive, which is nice. And then behind the scenes, once you actually tell it to start migrating that data, it'll, it'll behind the scenes start copying data over, ahead of time. So you're not doing a copy as part of your migration window. You can you can actually take advantage of, kind of prestaging all those VMs. So when you when you actually go to do the migration, because all that data is over there, it's prestaged. It's a it's a pretty fast process. When you actually define your cutover window, you know, it'll… You you you click the one click button. It'll power down your… Something just happened on my Python just popped up on my computer. That's weird. Not sure what that is. When you go to power, power your… Or, well, I'm sorry. When you go to initiate the Dwayne Lessner being. attacked by AI. Miles Scott As we speak, here it comes. No. So when you actually go to to initiate the migration, you… You'll click the button. It'll power off your source VM. It'll do a final sync of the data just to make sure everything's kind of, synced up behind the scenes. It'll actually tag the source VM as, like, hey. Don't don't repower this on. You don't wanna have an IP conflict later on. You don't wanna have kind of split workloads or split brain for those of you that are familiar. And then it'll actually, it can actually bring up that, destination workload in Nutanix for you. So it it truly is a one click migration. It's it's very simple, very straightforward, and that precopy allows you to keep those windows, very, very short. Some of the other benefits in Move, we talked about IP address, you know, preservation. Move can preserve IP addresses so you can you can bring your own IPs and not have to to to rearchitect all of your IP schemas. The other thing it can do is, it can also bring MAC addresses. So, if you have software that is tied to specific MAC addresses, Nutanix can help you kind of move that software without having to go through a a somewhat arduous support process I've heard with some of the some of the the vendors that still have that licensing model. So, but that that really… I I wanted to focus really most of the slide on that early copy. So, like, just being able to to reduce these migration windows. Again, I came from operations. I I hated being up at, at 2AM kind of sitting there watching data copy. So the ability to do that ahead of time, it really lets you move fast with these and kinda minimize the amount of downtime, that you have to take. And so with that, it leads us to some customer references, and and that's exactly what these customers did. Right? You know, they they leverage Nutanix, the move tool, and AWS behind the scenes to spin up hardware quickly. And so, like, you can see with board riders, their their existing virtualization licenses, they were expiring or they're at least close to expiring, and they didn't wanna renew that contract. So, they moved their entire European retail environment over to NC two and AWS in a single weekend, which is pretty impressive. They had a forty eight hour cut over, and they were able to, maintain all of those IP addresses, and SAP integrations with with the NC two and AWS solution. And so for any of you is that… For any of you that work in retail, you know, broken SAP integrations, mean lost revenue. So the ability for for board riders to keep those in place, not have to do a lot of prework, and post work to test and qualify and validate that they're gonna work, it really made that a a simple and easy and fast migration for them. And and that's really why they they made the choice to go with NC two. They didn't wanna redesign stuff in the middle of the migration. The other customer that wanted to highlight today, Tokyo Fudasan, they they had, you know, 260, 270 VMs, on the AWS, you know, the VMware cloud on AWS environment, and they were able to move all of those over to NC two and AWS within six weeks. It took a little bit longer. They they had a a a more slow and deliberate approach to doing it. But, you know, the the point is if you've got, your VMware cloud on AWS infrastructure that's still out there or VMware on prem or and, you know, Nutanix on prem and you're looking at this, this really is your playbook is is leverage MC two and AWS, with the move tool, and and then just kind of apply that, you know, that stack for migration to to your workloads. But in both cases, the the the key thing to call out here, redesign, you know, they didn't have to redesign everything from the ground up. They didn't wanna go into microservices. They didn't wanna get into containerization. They wanted to really move fast, and that's what Nutanix on n c two… That's what Nutanix on AWS or n c two will let them do. I let them keep operations running. So with that, I'll turn it back over to you, Duane, to to cover the next two, sections. Dwayne Lessner Thanks, Miles. We'll let you go find that AWS gift card in your TCL trunk. Miles Scott Oh, Dwayne Lessner Warm that. up for the end of the the end of the show. Alright. Strategy two, going hybrid on your own timeline. Didn't mention it at the start, but, you know, one of the pieces where people like NC two is picking your favorite t shirt size. Along with that, you also… As those older applications move on to this new infrastructure, you're not having to… Not only like… Yeah. You don't have to move it to containers, but they're also getting from AHV. So as you… Our nodes are spread out through the AWS data center. Node goes away. Those workloads are going to come back up, through our software stack. Having the same software on both sides as Miles mentioned with the networking, that's going to be able to stretch the networking across to provide a layer two to do that migration so you're not having to change IPs, allowing you to do testing. I think probably the biggest one where Nutanix has spent a lot of time recently is moving everything, to our v four APIs. So regardless of what's out there, you can take your favorite coding, harness, you know, point it at a Nutanix APIs, and you're going to be able to automate a lot of your environment. Just as an example, last Friday I deployed NDB. I didn't even download the software. I had the agent download the software from the portal. It deployed NDB and then it went off and deployed, Postgres database. So, it can really be that quick, and it… It's really the consistency of API. So once you have built something, you can make a skill, and then that skill can be used throughout your whole environment. So I think that's, a huge win for a lot of people as we're, you know, having to do more with less. I think regardless of what you think what's happening with IT staff, you know, there… There's probably not gonna be more of us in organizations per se, but we're going to have to do more. And so I think Nutanix is really well positioned. When you are starting to move, you can just, you know, get the tech debt out of the out of the bag from wherever you're coming from, get it on 10 c two, and then at that moment in time decide, do I want to do I want to use a EKS cluster? If I have headroom on my n c two cluster, maybe I can deploy MKP there. I can start looking at, running AI within my own environment. You know, AI doesn't mean GPUs, but most of the time it does. We we did just release some work with Intel, on text to text and embedding where the AMX from Intel did really well. So it… It's not a always thing. So you do have a lot of opportunity on how… You know, depending on what you want to do. So lots of flexibilities. You're not going to be locked into anything once you're on n c two because end of the day, everything can reach the network, and so you can build it out how you see fit. Now part of AI is really… A lot of it is Kubernetes. So Nutanix has its own flavor of Kubernetes called NKP. Along with that, we have a platform, which I mentioned, Nutanix database service. So an easy way to build out your variety of databases. You know, Postgres being one, like, more in terms of licensing with other hard… You know, hardware providers that, you know, that was like a a way to do it. But not only can you provision, we help with the maintenance, and updating. And then, really, in AWS, let's face it. You're gonna probably most likely use s three for object storage, but Nutanix has object storage. But that object storage from on prem can be tied in a single name space with s three. So you're building applications in AWS. You maybe wanna fill over or have a backup plan to an existing environment. It's all going to work, together. So a lot of a lot of room to move within the ecosystem. And with that, if you're looking at AI and, you know, how can you get started? Well, we do have Nutanix Enterprise AI, which allows you to have a gateway. It does two parts. There's a gateway and an inference part. But on the gateway side, step one, you can just get it up and running. It needs a Kubernetes cluster, so that could be on EKS. It could be on Nutanix without GPU, but a gateway to start controlling who has access to your models. It will give you a unified endpoint, meaning on that unit… On that endpoint, you just hand it to an application or a chat. Regardless if what's behind the model or behind the endpoint, you can switch it out. You could use hosted models from Amazon Bedrock, and you could do private inferencing. If you decide, yeah, what I'm doing, I don't wanna take any chances of that going into training for another model. Well, you can just swap the the the AI models on the back end without changing the unified endpoint, and then you're left with the ability to do load balancing or, fail back. So if one if one model gets… There's an outage or you take it down for whatever reason, your users can keep working. So this can run directly on Nutanix or EKS. In Nutanix, so obviously, we have an engineering department. We're just like everybody else needing to use AI to, enhance what our current engineering staff is doing. So we… It's a news article. You can find it. Maybe should add a link handy, but, we follow this 8020% rule. So not every task needs a Frontier model. And when you have your own gear, whether it's on prem or if you want to consume AWS gear and run, you know, your models, your private models on that, you have unknown token cost. You're not gonna wake up one morning and, you know, figure out there's a couple extra million dollars on the end of a bill because the hardware itself is controlling that. Now that's only good if you can run the gear twenty four seven. And so Nutanix not only… You know, you can keep running all of your different queries, your models. That's fine. But we also have a batch interface. So when your… Most of your staff go away, you can hibernate those unified endpoints. You can bring up batch endpoints, and all you need is NFS share, Nutanix files. You can have that work staged and then run it. So, like, a a good example would be help desk tickets. So if you have all these help desk tickets at the end of the day, you can run through them, and either fine tune a model. So, like, when your users get results back, they're very specific to their use case and not something that would be generic. And, of course, that other 20¢… Percent, you're filtering it through unified endpoint. When you need access to models from Bedrock, I actually don't know if the new Fable 5.2 is out, but, you know, even Opus 5.5, you can get access to that, you know, do great work, do do the planning. And then once that's planned out, use those lower models to do most of your work. Four ways to run NAI on AWS. Just with a gateway license, go deploy it on EKS. You don't need to do inferencing. You're just controlling token cost, security. If you don't measure it, you're never really gonna know what you're dealing with. And then as you progress, you can run an AI, full stack without NKP. So everything that EKS will do their management. Now you have access to GPU nodes because AWS has a plethora of different hardware types and cards. Obviously, based on availability, just like everybody else, the GPUs are in high demand, but, you can get reserved instances. And then as you progress, you can run NKP on EC2. You could actually get NKP to manage, EKS as well if you want to to to go that route. Then what you get from adding MKP onto the platform is fleet management. Whether you have Kubernetes cluster on prem in AWS, you'll probably have more than one. You're going to get all of the management. All of the 25 plus open source projects that actually takes to run it. We're going to shoulder that burden for you. And then the the kit and caboodle, if you're already running NC two, you already had headgear. You probably put a management cluster on NC two. Then if you needed, you'd probably create separate GPU based, EC two node, like, take those nodes and form a cluster with them. And so we do see customers doing a variety of the… It really depends on their journey, and how they got started with n c two or without n c two. So just, a lot of different flexibility, how you wanna tackle that. So Doctor. This is probably… Well, I think I I came to Nutanix as a VDI jockey, like, fourteen years ago, but then my next thing was Doctor. And I stayed there for a long time, so it's exciting to get into the public Cloud with Doctor. That didn't really pan out on the old slide over, but… So we have we have Nutanix everywhere. You can go from a Nutanix cluster on prem to a Nutanix cluster in AWS, another cluster. You can take one copy and send it multiple places. That one copy can be our multi Cloud snapshot technology, which is just the Nutanix snapshot going to object storage. That object storage could be AWS s three. So, a lot of different models on how you can protect your workloads at different cost tiers. You could just use s three as a way to archive older snapshots from your cluster to save on capacity on prem, or you could straight back up. You could have, what we call, zero, pilot light or or zero touch cluster in AWS, meaning that you have no cluster running. You're just gonna… At the… When the bad thing happens, you can then restore it, with a cluster. So you could have it pre provisioned, lot of different options. We do have hibernate where you could configure all of your security on your cluster, hibernate it, meaning it'll get shut down. All of the data will go to s three. The EBS snapshots used for the hypervisor in the CVM, would get a snapshot, and then you can bring it back up, when that event occurs. So just a lot of ease of use. And to boot with that multi cloud snapshot technology, we do have instant restore, which we'll talk about briefly as well. So the two models, pilot light, is really good for… You're gonna have a small cluster running. So your important workloads, whatever the CEO wants up and running, that can be failed over in seconds because it has the data right there, the cluster is running. While that's happening, I'm restoring from backup. I'm going to add additional nodes, which I could automate through the MC two portal API. I could use our Nutanix cloud manager, which could run playbooks, have orchestration, send you an email to Slack or or a message to Slack. You could approve it. And then the zero compute, what I was talking about before, nothing there. The lowest, obviously, a longer time to recover, but, you know, I I still think the industry average. It's, like, near 50% or it might even be a little over that have no Doctor plan. So you can get a Doctor plan today. It might not be, you know, five nine type of a thing, but you'll have a way to protect your business and yourself in, whatever comes to head your way. And I have been my own worst enemy. I can chat about a SQL fupa that I did back on the customer side. So, you know, choose the path that fits your tight deadline. Go ahead migrate. You can start with a pilot. Get that done. If you just need capacity, you can start small with n c two. You can build that up over time. Right? Shrinking and, expanding for n c two is perfectly fine. Lots of different ways to, do Doctor with multi cloud snapshot. We do have instant restore. So even though that stuff's sitting on s three, which would be slow, s three is not really that slow. But as you get the data on the cluster, we only need about 25% or less of that actual virtual machine to bring it back up because as it comes back up onto the Nutanix cluster, it's going to be writing those new rights. So it'll probably be the ones that get read again, and it can always read from s three. Existing Nutanix customer, you can reuse your licensing, and you can just add more licensing on. I'll hand it back. He's found the gift card. He's gonna come off mute, and he'll tell you all the ways to lower cost while moving to n c two. It's. a. Miles Scott Sorry. I was… Yeah. I struggle with the mute button there. Interesting. Thanks, Wayne. Yeah. So we… We've talked a little bit about, you know, some of the common use cases, where we see customers really leveraging n c two and AWS, you know, to be successful. We obviously talked about, you know, some of the the market trends that are happening to kind of, you know, you know, allow customers the opportunity, to, to look at migrations in a more kind of accelerated time frame. Duane talked a little bit about some of the day two modernization stuff that they've got going on with, the NKP and NAI and NDB solutions, and then, you know, how some of the the the benefits of NC two on AWS, can provide that cost optimized approach to, to disaster recovery. But but this slide is is really all about how, you know, how we can help you guys, you know, look at, you know, cost optimization. So on on the AWS side, we have quite a few different approaches to where we can, we can help with this. At the AWS, the map program, so this is the migration acceleration program. This is essentially a funded assessment. You know, there's three phases to it. You know, we we do an assessment phase, we do a mobilize phase, and then we do a a migrate phase. It basically takes you end to end from, hey. I have this idea where I wanna get to the cloud. AWS will help you. We'll we'll do an assessment. We'll bring new, you know, great partners like Nutanix in as part of that. You know, whether you have, VARs or SIs that you work with, they can also be included to help with professional services. But AWS will actually fund a lot of these things, you know, for you to make it cost optimized for you. And then at the, you know, at the very end of it, we'll also help with some, you know, some credits on the AWS side, just because we recognize that for some period of time, you'll be running, you know, on premise workloads or, you know, workloads on other environments as well as cloud workloads. We wanna make sure that you guys have a good experience while you're moving to Amazon. That's… You know, our our entire ethos is about, you know, customer centric, you know, you know, kind of, your thoughts. You you… We do have, enterprise discount programs, you know, and private pricing agreements. You know, if, you know, as you guys grow in AWS, you know, when you talk to your account managers about this, what we can… You know, we have, you know, pricing agreements where we can, you know, discount, you know, AWS services beyond what's publicly available. We also have savings plans, which are kind of publicly available, you know, discounting mechanisms where you'll you'll commit to a certain amount of time and AWS will give you… I think we see up to, like, 72% off on on EC two spend with some of our, some more and more fine tune. So, like, if you guys are looking at on demand pricing, it can be a great option for things like disaster recovery. But if you're looking at a migration, make sure you're talking to someone from AWS about how to how to cost optimize for migrations. One of the programs that I'll call out, and I think AWS does an absolutely phenomenal, phenomenal job here is we call it an optimization and licensing assessment. This is a no cost program to to our customers to really help you understand your environment, look at ways to to optimize it both from, like, rightsizing workloads. I mentioned a few times I came from on prem, you know, infrastructure management. And I remember the first thing I did when I had a problem was I would I would give give a server more memory. Right? Because memory was free. I owned the… In the cloud, if you give something more resources, you pay more. So we wanna make sure that we're only resourcing what's needed. This program will find over provision workloads. It will help you cut those costs and really optimize. The other thing that we'll do is it focuses on third party licensing. So things like Microsoft Windows, SQL Server, Oracle, These can be very impactful to your total cost when you're looking at, you know, at migrating. This program will give you prescriptive guidance on on how to how to optimize for that. Then Nutanix obviously has their own promotions. I think you guys still have a if you do a multiyear commit, there's some sort of incentive there for, you know, helping you get over to to n c two on AWS. And then the last one I'll mention here is, there is, there's a proof of concept that we that we have. Nutanix has some free trial software, and then on the AWS side, we also have credits that can help, cover the cost of that as well. So if you guys are if you guys are ready for that, it's a great way to start. You know, reach out to your AWS rep or your Nutanix rep. There's also… And I'll flip over to this next slide, but there's also, Nutanix has a a test drive component, which is a a bit of a lower cost, entry. Dwayne, I'll I'll let you, add some more color into that, but I thought that was a good transition into the into the test drive for you. Dwayne Lessner Yeah. It's a easy way to get access to see a deployment. You can see how Doctor is going to work from on prem, and Doctor also means migrate because it's the same tooling without using move. So lots of different ways to to get that done. See a bit of the networking as well. And then if if you're also headed to Las Vegas, come by the booth. Check out one of our sessions with that QR code. We will be there all week. We also have some exciting other events happening around AWS, and we would… We'd love to have you. And also check out other demos at the booth. And I may have said that Miles is going to help you, and it's practically free with all of the things that Miles offered. Well, here's the legal disclaimer. I might have been saying something not a 100%, but pretty close. So just to cover our butts. With that, I would like to thank everyone for coming to the event. We have time for some questions. Scott Bekker Yeah. Great. And we've got we've got a couple of questions that have come in here. And, if if you have a question, if you haven't asked one already, drop it drop it in the q and a, and, and we'll try to get to as many as we can. And while we do the questions, I'm just gonna pop up this this QR code just so people can can grab it. But, let's see. The first one we have here, they're wondering how does Nutanix move, take a VM from vSphere or or on prem AHV into NC two on AWS? And and what does the cutover look like in terms of wave planning and and network design before the start? Dwayne Lessner Once you get past the magical fairy dust… Now the, our guidance was always putting that move appliance on the source side. If you don't have access to the v d k, which, Broadcom removed for most customers, appliance will actually go on to the the VMware side, and it will actually go out. There's, so we've updated the move software essentially, and it it will be able to get that work even without it. And so the the wave planning is really, like, you can deploy as many appliances as you want. So if you're a large customer, you can decide based on the the hardware. There's gonna be some impact of copying and network, so you can plan that out. And based on the throughput that you have available, you could have two or three appliances running in the background, and then you can… Even the move appliance has an API that you could code against, so you could get really fancy with it. Miles Scott Yeah. I'll add I'll add in terms of, you know, the things I've seen customers do to be to be super successful in migrations, in terms of networking, networking is always the the crux of of of these things. Right? It's it's the the big rock that everybody needs to get past. I I play a networking engineer on TV. I am not a networking engineer. But where I've seen customers be really, really successful is Nutanix ProServe. SI partners have, professional services. They have these things called, like, design and deployment workshops. They are absolutely phenomenal. It's like a one or two day workshop where they'll come in, they'll they'll put someone in a meeting with you for eight hours. They'll understand your network. They'll help you map all of your, either VM or on prem, you know, kind of, core, you know, foundational things to Nutanix concepts, and then help you actually build out your first Nutanix or NC two cluster, on top of AWS. So that… That's kind of the the the starting point. Move behind the scenes will then take over and actually let you do the wave planning, or let you do the migrations. And that can all be tied in with with, you know, these SI partners, in terms of that map program. So AWS can help you fund those those kind of activities in terms of, planning and and, you know, mobilization, wave planning, you know, application mapping, all of those things that can, it can really add up in time. So having having an external party come in and help you be successful is is always been very, very valuable. Scott Bekker Okay. Alright. Excellent. And for this next question, I'm gonna… Is there… Well, before I do that, let me let me just… I'm just gonna kinda cycle between these two, these two slides just to… If anybody missed that QR code just to… So you've you've got access to them. So this one is the the test drive. But this next question, they're wondering, where are most customers starting with NC two? Dwayne Lessner Yeah. I think it it really does vary on what the challenge is, but I think the easiest one is just Doctor sending Nutanix snapshots somewhere to be protected. But I would say probably recently, it's probably majority are are migrations happening from VMware environment. So it's, you know, standing up new, like Miles mentioned, getting the networking right, which is super flexible. But most most times, it will involve a transit gateway with flow virtual networking, but but stuff like all can be planned for. Miles Scott Yeah. I mean, I I work with customers every day, and I… It it it really just… It… You know, I think I mentioned it earlier. It's, you know, these these aren't these aren't things you graduate from one to the other. It really depends on kind of what your use case is. I do see a lot of customers start with Doctor, just because, you know, they've already got… They've got on prem. You know, they've got something running on prem typically. You know, for Doctor, it's either they're an existing Nutanix customer or they're a a not Nutanix customer that's moving to Nutanix, and they don't wanna buy infrastructure for Doctor. So they'll they'll they'll kind of look at that. But at the same time, I see, you know, we've seen hundreds of customers that have have have kind of, you know, bitten off the whole Apple, and they're they're moving directly into NC two and AWS. They don't wanna manage the data centers anymore. They don't wanna be woken up at 3AM to replace a hard drive or, you know, they they want AWS to handle that for them. And so, those are those are kind of the two big ones. I haven't seen as much of the, like, the the burst to cloud stuff in in full disclosure, but, I I I do expect that we will be seeing more and more of that as, if if hardware prices and lead times continue to to kinda go the way we've seen in the last couple months. So Scott Bekker K. Alright. And, you know, once once workloads are running on n c two, what does the path to modernization look like? And and where does Nutanix Enterprise AI fit when when the data and the apps sort of already live there? Dwayne Lessner The… I guess the starting… Well, the first step is just controlling whatever from a AI side would be controlling what you're using. Most people… AI typically does start in the cloud as a POC because hardware is limited for majority of people. But then it comes like, what am I going to do with this? Like, what are… Do I need this to be private? And a lot of enterprises do want it to be private. And then there's a discussion whether am I going to keep this running on AWS gear, or am I gonna try to move this back? And that's kinda like one of the values of the NAI gateway because whatever you've done so far, it's super portable because you're just… The endpoint stays the same. You can tie multiple NAI you can tie multiple gateways together. But on the the Kubernetes side, I get… It really… I guess the business needs to decide what what flavor do they wanna support. I think at least from NKP's point of view, and enterprises, it's… It really is fleet management having a single view, and software packages across your entire fleet. So you're not having to figure out what open source component is, you know, gonna come and get you. Miles Scott Yeah. The the the thing that I would add there, and I think I think, you know, those are all super important. I think it's important to know that, like, Nutanix shares that customer centric, you know, focus. Right? They they want you to be successful. And so, to the extent, you know, I I I commonly get asked about move and how, you know, it's so easy to move. The one thing that I think most people forget is, like, Nutanix built in the ability to take a VM running on Nutanix and move it to e c two. Like, they wanna see their customers be very successful. They're they're… Dwayne, I know you guys are always bragging about your 90 plus percent net promoter score, and and and you guys you guys earned that, and you you deserve it because you you truly do care about customers. So whether you wanna move into EKS or AWS native kind of modernization, Nutanix kinda has the ability to to let you do kind of what you want. And if you wanna continue to work with them, they can help you even manage those things like the the NTP management of EKS and, like Duane was talking about with the the AI gateway. So you you still have access to your Frontier models. I I checked. Fable five two is available on Bedrock now. So even if you wanna run the the the latest and greatest, you you can… Yeah. Dwayne Lessner Token. Miles Scott Yeah. It… Yeah. There… There's. definitely cost with those Frontier models, but that… That's that's the beauty of something like, NAI is you can you can actually, you know, do cost optimization with things like your, your self hosted open weight models. So, I think I think Nutanix has got a very a very good strategy that customers are are kinda latching on to when it comes to, that kind of flexibility. Scott Bekker K. Another question here. They're they're wondering, for a team just starting on AI, what's the first practical, NAI use case to run next to migrated workloads, and how do they handle governance and and cost control while they scale? Dwayne Lessner Oh, the per… The first step is just deploying the gateway and running all of your AI through it. Because at the end of the day, you need to know how many tokens you're using so you can make a decision on what you… If it's very sporadic, a Frontier model might be the right solution for you because you're only paying per API call. But if those numbers get high enough, then you can start looking to owning your own… You know, we mentioned security before. Like, that might force you down a path regardless of the cost. But, step one, get it hooked up. It has our back. It has auditing, and then you can start layering on those pieces after the fact. Scott Bekker Alright. Well, there's there's one more question here, that that I'm seeing, and and it's… It looks kind of fun. You know, I've been to a couple of cons, and and this this reminds me of the kind of question that the the celebrity panels always devolve into. Dwayne Lessner Oh, boy. Scott Bekker If n c two was a pizza, what kind of a pizza would it. be? Dwayne Lessner I don't have the exact answer, but I'd like to say there is no way in you know what that it would be a Hawaiian. If you're a pineapple person, I'm sorry to tell you. There is no Hawaiian pizza over here. Miles Scott Oh, we're gonna have to disagree there, Dwayne. Pepperoni and pineapple is my favorite pizza, but I digress. I was trying to think. Yeah. That's that's a that's an interesting one. I would say… I I think that, like, a supreme, I I I would say that it… It's got a little bit of everything. It it it it it it kind of everything blends well together, and it gives you options as as a customer. So, it's kinda got all the things unless you don't like mushrooms, and then… I don't know. It's probably not a supreme. I don't know. Dwayne Lessner Well, it's a lot more thoughtful answer than mine. So Miles Scott Yeah. Scott Bekker Alright. Miles Scott Awesome sense to to our pineapple lovers out there. Scott Bekker well, gentlemen, thank you both. This has been, really interesting and and, and fun. Appreciate the, the thoughtful, responses here in the q and a as well as the the presentation itself. Thanks for being here. Dwayne Lessner Yeah. No worries. Miles Scott Thank you. Scott Bekker Alright. Well, I'm gonna let you guys get on with your day while I take care of a couple of, other pieces of business here. So, before we get to the prize drawing, we do have one quick favor to ask of you all. Arena's opening up a short survey that we'd really appreciate if you could fill out. This is for those of us on the actual tech media teams. Just wanna know how we're doing and and what y'all like and don't like about our sessions. We wanna make sure that we're meeting your needs and the results of this survey are gonna affect how we deliver these events for you in the future. So we'll give you all just a minute to fill out the… That out. And while you're doing that, do wanna remind everybody about all those resources there in the doc section. There's, there's four great resources over there. Plus, Dwayne had mentioned a, a a case study, and and I did find the link for that one. That's that's in the chat area as well. In fact, I'll I'll just pin that to the top of the chat so you can grab that if you want. Okay. And we have one more piece of business before we wrap up. That's the prize giveaway. Today's winner of a $250 Amazon gift card is Max Wilkin from Texas. So congratulations to Max Wilkin. As always, we'll be in touch about claiming your prize after the event. And with that, we have the actual tech media team. I wanna thank, Nutanix for making this event possible. Giant thank you to Dwayne and Miles for for that that chat. And, big thank you to all of you for, for attending today. Really appreciate your time. It was great having you here for this actual tech media event. We look forward to seeing you again next time. Hope you have a great rest of your day.

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