Nutanix Benefit 7: The Freedom of License Portability

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The first rains are hitting the Bay Area which means ski season isn’t far away. In past years, downhill enthusiasts were limited to single-resort season passes with location lock-in that frustrated variety seekers and forced upfront planning and commitment.

Today’s skiers can choose from a new selection of multi-resort passes that open up slopes across the country and even worldwide.  This blog is designed to show how Nutanix is similarly introducing portability that helps IT managers locate and build hybrid cloud infrastructure to meet the changing needs of applications over time.

The Value of Portability

Performance, cost, and sovereignty concerns challenge IT managers who struggle to plan where applications will run over time.  But this is not easy to do, particularly with addition of cloud resources and the growth forecasted in the Edge.

In fact, Gartner® predicts by 2027, 85% of the workload placements made until 2022 will no longer be optimal, due to changing requirements.¹  There’s expansion in the cloud, multicloud, and a growing edge.  So the value of flexing where applications and infrastructure are delivered over time is increasing as location options expand. The ability to deliver application mobility relies on flexible infrastructure.

Fortunately, the modern hybrid cloud has standardized on server infrastructure and Nutanix allows full portability of our software stack across the server-based hybrid cloud.  Customers with an on-premises environment can shift resources to the public cloud or to the Edge as requirements change.

How It Works

Nutanix has licenses that can be deployed on any supported server-based deployment. If a customer buys licenses for 100 nodes of Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure, for example, and only runs 75 nodes in their on-premises data center, the remaining 25 licenses can enable nodes in the public cloud.

For companies moving workloads from on-prem to public clouds such as AWS and Azure, it’s a simple process to decommission on-prem side nodes and re-deploy licenses in the cloud of choice. For companies considering workload repatriation, there’s now the opportunity to efficiently run in the public cloud and flexibly shift to on-premises for performance, cost, or data sovereignty reasons. And for companies worried about the implications of the Broadcom acquisition on VMware support and pricing, it’s now possible to bring Nutanix software to supported vSAN Ready Nodes. 

Why Does This Matter?

Uncertain times increase the value of portability and there’s no doubt that these are uncertain times. Nutanix opens up location optionality for managers of modern infrastructure. This flexibility allows Nutanix software value to be delivered as needed across server-based infrastructure that can be running at the edge, in a datacenter, or in the public cloud. 

We don’t all have the luxury of skiing at different resorts. But Nutanix makes it possible for IT managers to easily shift where workloads will run over time. So, while other vendors continue to treat HCI as a hardware business with location lock-in, Nutanix gives the flexibility you’d expect from a software business model to help IT managers move mountains.

1Source: Gartner®, Workload Placement in Hybrid IT — Making Great Decisions About What, Where, When and Why, May 2022

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

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