The implications of Nutanix Cloud Clusters on Microsoft Azure

Han Chon, Managing Director, ASEAN, Nutanix

EITN: The industry may still be reminiscing the good old days when Nutanix was the operating system/layer that made hyperconverged appliances run. Would this be a correct view of Nutanix over 5 years ago?

Han Chon: It’s fascinating how Nutanix and the industry as a whole have evolved. We indeed started disrupting IT more than a decade ago by pioneering hyperconverged infrastructure. Through HCI software, we helped simplify datacentre operations and lowered the total cost of ownership for them.  

Building on HCI, Nutanix also saw the potential of cloud computing, especially hybrid multicloud, and steered the company so that it can help companies put their applications and workloads in the environments that make the most sense, including on-premises private clouds and public clouds. We did this by leveraging our own hypervisor product and sophisticated cloud operating system to enable hybrid multicloud ecosystems for our customers. 

Today, we are a leader in hybrid multicloud computing, offering Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) on AWS and Microsoft Azure to help organisations accelerate their hybrid cloud journey. At our core, we are innovators working to help customers operate more efficiently, and NC2 is the most recent example of this.

EITN: What is NC2 anyway? What does it enable for businesses, and why/how does it work with Azure and AWS to deliver the capabilities to businesses now and in the future?

Han Chon: Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) is a hybrid cloud platform that provides organisations with a consistent way to run applications in any combination of private and multiple clouds – all operated and managed as a single cloud. 

One of the most common cloud adoption challenges faced by businesses is the time, resources and costs required to refactor an existing application set from on-premises infrastructure to the cloud. NC2 on Azure and AWS can help to provide simplified and consistent IT operations across clouds, enable hybrid cloud adoption in hours, and lower total cost of ownership when compared to other cloud deployment solutions.

One example is Straive, a Singapore-based content technology company, that leveraged the hybrid multicloud to scale its operations three times as quickly. By adopting NC2 on AWS, they were able to move workloads from on-premises to the public cloud and vice-versa effortlessly. Furthermore, as their company continued to grow and scale rapidly, personnel could access the applications they needed to do their work more swiftly. This resulted in greater productivity and increased satisfaction, with employees feeling that IT is meeting their requirements proactively.

In Japan, the City of Sapporo needed to renew its IT infrastructure while keeping costs down. It also leveraged NC2 on AWS, which helped reduce its IT complexity and operational burdens. This resulted in Sapporo City’s smooth deployment without the impact that could have been caused by delivery delays if additional network equipment, servers and switches were needed due to the recent global shortage of semiconductors. This partnership was also the first hybrid cloud environment used by a local government in Japan.

EITN:  Can you also share your tech and business roadmap for APAC, and especially Malaysia?

Han Chon: As businesses in APAC fully emerge from the pandemic and gear up to tackle headwinds in 2023, our main priority is to help them reclaim control of their cloud infrastructure to successfully build robust, adaptive organisations and scale with agility while keeping a tight lid on costs.

Furthermore, the rising data sprawl continues to pose an increasing risk to businesses in the region. Our core focus will be to enable organisations to take back control of their spread of apps and databases across multiple environments with a hybrid multicloud strategy.

Organisations in Malaysia are no exception and with the new government in place, many are navigating challenges of competing in the market while making smarter investment choices that will help organisations be more efficient, take advantage of new technology capabilities such as AI/NLP, and enable greater agility in the face of ever-changing market conditions. A great place to start is to ensure your platform can abstract its resources for maximum flexibility and continuity.

Across APAC, we aim to continue replicating the success we’ve seen with companies like Straive, as mentioned previously, and MaxMoney, a Malaysian money exchange and remittance services provider. After the migration to the Nutanix platform, MaxMoney now enjoys 100% system availability and dramatically improved response times for digital services at their branches by 2 minutes, thus improving customer service. The company also has the flexibility to seamlessly move data from one server to another, ensuring redundancy, load balancing and security of its data.