Nutanix Adds Google Cloud to NCM Cost Governance
By Charlie Boyden and Maqbul Khan
As organizations continue to rely on hybrid and multicloud deployments to run applications, the need for a cost governance strategy becomes even more critical. In fact, cloud spending grew ~25-45% for the AWS® and Azure® clouds year over year during the pandemic[1].* As part of the Nutanix Cloud Manager™ (NCM) portfolio, the Cost Governance™ (formerly Beam) tool is Nutanix’s solution to helping IT teams manage rising costs associated with managing hybrid multicloud environments. Over the last fiscal year, our development team has made several significant releases that we’d like to highlight here.
Improved Cost Metering:
NCM Cost Governance is well known for giving end users a single pane of glass into their on-prem and cloud spending. Nutanix added a significant improvement for Total Cost of Ownership that included amortization support for Nutanix® software costs, like costs associated with Nutanix’s Prism Central™, Self-Service™, Flow™, Files Storage™, Objects Storage™, and bundled AOS™ offerings (ROBO and VDI), allowing customers to get a full scope of their Nutanix costs. Furthermore, service categorization and spend visibility for compute services like Nutanix Virtual Machine, Nutanix End User running AOS, and more were added. A later update expanded on this release to include support for software costs from Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure™ (NCI), Nutanix Cloud Manager™ (NCM), and Nutanix Unified Storage™ (NUS) tiers, thus expanding cost control flexibility to our 2.0 portfolio.
Enhanced Spend Visibility for Major Public Clouds:
Last year, Nutanix introduced support for spend visibility, chargeback, and budgeting for the Google® Cloud Platform (GCP). Customers can now analyze GCP spend across Projects, Services, Usage types, Labels, and more directly from their account. Furthermore, users can allocate their GCP resources to cost centers, business units, and scopes, further enhancing financial governance over their business.
This year the Cost Governance team introduced support for spend visibility, chargeback, budgeting, reporting, save, and purchase for Microsoft® Azure Customer Agreement (MCA) billing accounts. Customers can now utilize our functionality to further optimize unused or underutilized resources and view purchasing recommendations which can lead to increased savings in their MCA accounts. Customers now have the flexibility to optimize billing accounts for both Microsoft Azure Customer Agreements (MCA) and Microsoft Azure Enterprise Agreements (EA).
Better Analysis Capabilities:
In addition to the improvements in spend visibility listed above, Nutanix added the option to analyze cloud spend data over 12-month periods across all filters and cloud views and enhance the budget machine learning algorithm to provide improved estimates. Other improvements include the ability to analyze cloud spending grouped and filtered by cost center and AWS cloud spending being grouped and filtered by chargetype, giving end users more options to drill down into their public cloud spending.
Nutanix also enhanced its budget APIs to support pagination, adding budget search capabilities to see the status of individual budgets. Cost Governance now supports “In” and “Not-In” filters enabling customers to filter spending by specific services they wish to view. Furthermore, Nutanix enabled users to view spending by the invoice period allowing customers to compare cloud spending with the invoice according to the billing period rather than viewing spend by usage.
Lastly, Cost Governance now supports international currencies, enabling customers to see spending in invoice or a default currency. Customers can choose the default currency from the configure section, which allows them to view all the spend values in the multicloud view based on the selected currency.
What’s Next?
Nutanix continues to enable customers to take full advantage of their private and public cloud investments while maintaining strong governance overspending. As IT spending increases on-prem and in the public cloud, NCM Cost Governance will continue adding new features and support to assist our customers in their hybrid multicloud journey. Lastly, try out these new features with a 90-Day Free Trial where users can input existing Private and Public Cloud resources or leverage pre-built environments to understand how NCM Cost Governance functions. We think you’ll agree that with NCM Cost Governance, you’ll be in a better position to grow your business while maintaining visibility over your hybrid multicloud spend.
Reference:
*Nutanix Cloud Usage Report 2021. All rights reserved.
© 2022 Nutanix, Inc. All rights reserved. Nutanix, the Nutanix logo and all Nutanix product, feature and service names mentioned herein are registered trademarks or trademarks of Nutanix, Inc. in the United States and other countries. Other brand names mentioned herein are for identification purposes only and may be the trademarks of their respective holder(s). This post may contain links to external websites that are not part of Nutanix.com. Nutanix does not control these sites and disclaims all responsibility for the content or accuracy of any external site. Our decision to link to an external site should not be considered an endorsement of any content on such a site. Certain information contained in this post may relate to or be based on studies, publications, surveys and other data obtained from third-party sources and our own internal estimates and research. While we believe these third-party studies, publications, surveys and other data are reliable as of the date of this post, they have not independently verified, and we make no representation as to the adequacy, fairness, accuracy, or completeness of any information obtained from third-party sources.
This post may contain express and implied forward-looking statements, which are not historical facts and are instead based on our current expectations, estimates and beliefs. The accuracy of such statements involves risks and uncertainties and depends upon future events, including those that may be beyond our control, and actual results may differ materially and adversely from those anticipated or implied by such statements. Any forward-looking statements included herein speak only as of the date hereof and, except as required by law, we assume no obligation to update or otherwise revise any of such forward-looking statements to reflect subsequent events or circumstances.