What If You Could? … Achieving Hybrid Multicloud Nirvana

You have applications running on-premises and in the cloud, so what’s stopping you from benefiting from the full potential a hybrid multicloud can offer? If you’re finding that managing more places where you have your apps and data is complex, you’re not alone. As demands on IT increase across every industry, organizations must deal with more applications, more data, and more uncertainty about the future than ever before.

Consider this: According to IDC¹, there will be more than 750 million new applications by 2025. That’s a lot of applications to manage, plus massive amounts of data generated across the entire infrastructure. It can also mean an increase in IT silos – which in turn leads to greater complexity, cost, and business risk. But with those challenges come more opportunities to succeed as well. 

To achieve success, organizations are searching for better ways to modernize applications to stay competitive, often driving them to modernize on-premises applications to reap the benefits of the cloud. The result of this is they end up using one or more clouds in addition to their on-premises architecture.

There’s a lot of talk about hybrid multicloud in the IT industry and how it can deliver the best of both worlds—datacenter-like control over cloud deployments and cloud-level scalability and flexibility across the entire infrastructure. But the concept of true hybrid multicloud has a few subtle nuances that some organizations might miss: 

• Managing on-premises infrastructure and a public cloud deployment does not equate to managing a hybrid cloud. 
• Having multiple infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud deployments does not equate to a multicloud architecture. 

Achieving a true hybrid multicloud infrastructure takes more than simply having a combination of on-premises and public cloud infrastructures. Without a consistent, unified management platform and a common operating model, a multiple cloud infrastructure is just a collection of silos that your IT team must manage and operate separately with separate skillsets, toolsets, processes, and procedures. 

Siloed systems that span the cloud and on-premises datacenters take a lot of time and effort to manage and are likely preventing your organization from making the most of any of those environments. They also create increased architectural complexity, cloud sprawl and potential for increased costs, difficulties in disaster recovery across multiple platforms and systems, and complications in managing networking and security policies.

Hybrid Multicloud Eliminates Silos 

The business and IT benefits of a true hybrid multicloud are enticing. It’s all about eliminating silos so systems work together across on-premises and multiple cloud environments and even out to the edge. 

Consider this. What if you could:  

• Manage, secure, and protect your workloads on a single control plane across all clouds?
• Build enterprise-grade modern apps once and deploy or automate their deployment anywhere?
• Get instant visibility, showback, and chargeback across your entire hybrid multicloud spend?
• Move or automate movement of workloads seamlessly between datacenters, public clouds, and the edge?
• Have a secure, AI-enabled edge?

It’s all possible with true hybrid multicloud. But before we get into the details of the benefits, let’s take a closer look at what we mean by “hybrid multicloud.” 

What Does Hybrid Multicloud Mean, Exactly?

It’s worth stating again that simply adding a cloud deployment to your on-premises environment does not equal a hybrid cloud. And having multiple cloud deployments doesn’t equal multicloud. Most enterprises today have deployments across multiple public clouds as well as their on-premises datacenter, but they still haven’t achieved hybrid multicloud.  

A true hybrid multicloud includes:

Multicloud control plane 

This is a single cloud control plane that spans all public and private cloud deployments. It provides a single consistent way to manage all resources, from on-premises datacenters to the edge to multiple public clouds.

Container development 

When managing containers, there are two factors to consider. One, where will the control plane that manages containers reside, and two, where will the containers run? Application containers do not have to all be run in the same location, as they can be run in one or more locations but managed from the same instance. This provides flexibility for ideal placement of resources as needed. You should be able to create a container management plane to support running your workloads anywhere, managed from a central location, whether in your datacenter, on the public cloud.

Multicloud cost governance 

If your deployments span across multiple clouds and on-premises data centers, it's crucial to maintain a unified view for optimizing savings, right-sizing resources, accessing reserved instance recommendations, implementing chargeback mechanisms, and managing budgets efficiently across cloud environments. 

Multicloud automation

You should be able to automate VM and container workload deployments across your datacenters and infrastructure deployments, as well as scale-outs and back between and across public clouds. 

Multicloud AI platform 

You should have a single platform to support AI workload modeling and inferencing that can be deployed from on-premises environments, out to the edge, and across multiple clouds. 

In short, hybrid multicloud allows you to treat your entire ecosystem—datacenter, multiple clouds, and the edge—as a single environment that can be controlled and managed easily through a central control plane. It means no more silos and a lot less complexity. 

Multicloud license portability

You should have a cloud platform licensing structure that enables license portability, providing IT teams with the agility for intelligent workload placement as needs evolve. Move applications to a cloud location where they are optimized for their needs, rather than hosting them on an infrastructure just because your platform licenses reside there today.

Only Nutanix Makes Hybrid Multicloud Simple and Cost-Effective

More than a decade ago, Nutanix pioneered hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) to break down datacenter infrastructure silos. We provided software consolidation of compute, storage, and hypervisors into a scalable form factor—and enabled consistent management across different hardware vendor platforms and one-click automated operations to accelerate service delivery. 

Today, we’re breaking down cloud silos with a hybrid multicloud platform that offers: 

• Simple hybrid multicloud interoperability
• Consistent IT operations across private, edge, and public clouds
• Effortless scale and flexibility with just-in-time provisioning 

The Nutanix Cloud Platform™ solution makes hybrid multicloud simple and cost-effective 

Run all your apps

You have the freedom and flexibility to run a wide variety of applications and workloads, including business and mission-critical services. From enterprise or cloud-native apps to analytics and machine learning workloads to databases, desktops, and critical services, Nutanix makes it simple to run them all.

The simple, open, hybrid multicloud capabilities of Nutanix Cloud Platform includes comprehensive data services that allow you to create, run, and manage any applications. Regardless of where apps are deployed, you’ll get predictable performance that scales with your apps—without the concern of “noisy neighbors'' on shared public cloud instances. 

One platform to run apps and data anywhere

With a single hybrid multicloud platform that allows apps and data to be run anywhere, you have the ultimate workload portability with complete freedom of choice. Intelligently place workloads across datacenters, public or private clouds, service provider clouds, or edge locations without the need to retool or refactor. 

Wherever your apps are located within your infrastructure, you also get peace of mind with self-healing, data protection, and disaster recovery capabilities. One-click management makes infrastructure—even the cloud—virtually “invisible” so it’s simple to troubleshoot and upgrade systems without disruptions. 

Unique hybrid multicloud license portability

The agility provided by a hybrid multicloud means IT has the freedom and flexibility to run apps anywhere, and as such, an equally flexible cloud licensing structure is required to support these portable applications. Nutanix greatly simplifies this for IT leaders with its portable licenses so they no longer have to link license budgets to specific platforms or IT deployment locations. Now they can allocate licenses according to evolving demands and transition their investment focus to keeping operations seamless, cost-effective, and manageable. 

License portability also simplifies cloud operations and helps you achieve a lower total cost of operations (TCO) because you can move workloads to where you need them, and the original license stays valid. IT teams are not constrained by licensing changes and costs accrued by switching platforms. 

Stay Tuned for How You Can Succeed with Hybrid Multicloud from Nutanix

Making hybrid multicloud simple and cost-effective is a continuing priority for Nutanix. As the first installment in the What If You Could series, this article defined what a true hybrid multicloud is and why the Nutanix Cloud Platform is the smart choice for freedom and flexibility. In our next installment, we’ll take a closer look at why multiple cloud deployments aren’t true hybrid multicloud, and cover the additional benefits that come from using a single pane of glass to manage all your apps and data wherever they are. 

1  IDC, 750 Million New Logical Applications: More Background, Doc #US48441921, Dec 2021

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