Nutanix Announces Early Access of Nutanix Data Services for Kubernetes (NDK)

Today at Nutanix .NEXT, we are announcing Early Access to Nutanix Data Services for Kubernetes (NDK). As the adoption of cloud native applications continues to grow, there is a pressing need to address the challenge of providing application-aware data services for Kubernetes. 

Nutanix Data Services for Kubernetes (NDK) simplifies and unifies the entire lifecycle management of business-critical applications by extending enterprise data services to containerized applications. For developers, NDK speeds time to value and reduces operational risk by introducing a cloud operating model. For business owners, NDK increases cost efficiency and simplifies the delivery of resilient infrastructure. NDK will work with most Kubernetes, including our preferred choice for enterprise full stack Kubernetes, Red Hat OpenShift. NDK extends Nutanix and Red Hat joint engineering and provides a seamless support experience. 

Accelerate operations with application-level data services

Infrastructure administrators and architects struggle to provision and manage applications as scale and complexity increase. Kubernetes storage drivers today provision and manage at the container level with little to no awareness of the application. Properly managing services at the Application/Namespace level often requires third-party tools that increase time to manage, reducing efficiency, and causing headaches in migration, backup, and data recovery. 

With NDK, you can easily manage day 2 operations for the entire application, regardless of location. Compared to existing tools that offer services for storage volumes only, NDK provides data protection, recovery, migration, cloning and copy data management for modern apps on Kubernetes. Nutanix extends data services to create an application-aware solution, reducing recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) from days to minutes without the need for Kubernetes expertise. 

Deploy NDK with an easy and intuitive three-step model:

1. Define the application/namespace.
2. Define a governance policy.
3. Define the protection plan. 

Reduce risk through simplification & unification

The dynamic, distributed nature of Kubernetes can add complexity and risk to operations. One-to-one storage mapping to a container with storage drivers creates an incomplete solution for application-level protection. Application provisioning is difficult at scale, and day 2 operations and monitoring are similarly challenging, leading to a constant challenge that gets more complex as the environment grows. The larger the environment, the more risk encountered.

The easiest way to mitigate this risk is by simplifying and unifying operations at the infrastructure layer. With NDK’s policy-driven management for stateful applications, infrastructure teams easily abstract multiple Kubernetes clusters and Nutanix storage services into a single management plane to ensure application governance and standardization. NDK unifies application/namespace level monitoring, capacity planning and role-based access control (RBAC) with one dashboard, Prism Central. See for yourself:

Enable cloud operating model

Kubernetes Administrators and Developers require automation through APIs for on-premises infrastructure to operate similarly to the public cloud. NDK extends existing Kubernetes CLI (kubectl) and APIs, removing the need for additional training & tools.

In addition, traditional legacy infrastructure often doesn’t allow for role-based delegation and developer self-service of modern applications. Organizations require the ability to automate operations & location transparency. NDK solves these issues by: 

• Delegating infrastructure responsibility to Kubernetes and IT admins with policy-based guardrails.
• Enabling self-service workflows to eliminate the dependency on provisioning infrastructure that increases application deployment velocity by creating governance policies for operations and data protection.
• Providing application/namespace mobility from on-premises to the cloud without the complexity of multiple tools, synchronization, and manually restoring container and application/namespace metadata.

Increase cost efficiency

Cost-efficient operations are increasingly paramount. A lack of visibility into current and future resource consumption leads to wasteful expenditures and mismanaged infrastructure budgets. Organizations today struggle to properly implement modern applications cross-cloud, wasting time and budget.

Nutanix lowers management costs by simplifying the operations of cloud native applications at the container, namespace, and application levels. NDK abstracts away infrastructure complexity, on-premises and in the cloud. Remove the risk, optimize resource allocations, and save money through streamlined operations.

Next steps

For more information including how to participate in our NDK Early Access Program, please see our Cloud Native Solutions page.

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