RedHat and Nutanix

An overview of the partnership and what it really means.

Redhat

Both RedHat and Nutanix have a long history of innovation, contribution to the Open Source community and integration of intellectual property from mergers and acquisitions. This has led them both to become powerhouses in their respective markets. When you think of enterprise Linux, RedHat is the first thought that comes to mind with RHEL and the strong ecosystem of support, security and stability that defines the needs of both the largest organizations in the world, and the most agile ones. RedHat is a big part of the reason that Linux is by far the standard for server based operating systems in the world (when included both paid and unpaid deployments). In terms of the market share of paid non-Microsoft server Operating Systems, RedHat has nearly double the market share of all other competitors combined.

There are many reasons why Linux is the de-facto standard, such as having independently auditable code for security and performance, ease of deployment, robustness, resilience, and its reliability. But when you scale into the enterprise, you also need to consider availability / security monitoring, lifecycle management, deployment automation and support. This is where RedHat really shines in the market place. They have a full suite of offerings that can address these requirements comprehensively.

RedHat however, has a much bigger strategy than just providing RHEL as an OS, and that is when we start looking at the full stack from OS to applications at scale. Move away from monolithic application architectures and into the realm of highly available, distributed and highly scalable application architectures. The benefit of this change in architecture is that it reduces performance / availability bottlenecks, risk, and it is portable to any infrastructure from a single laptop, to a global scale offering serving billions of users and trillions of transactions. This is world of webscale architecture and cloud native applications. The evolution of this can be seen in the levels of the cloud application maturity model. Enterprise organizations generally have a mix of these different levels of maturity if they have existing for more than 5 years, or were not startups “born in the cloud”.

RedHat is leading the way to help Enterprises to increase their cloud application maturity. They are able to do this by providing an infratructure agnostic stack that can scale from the OS to microservices, to service mesh, and the application layer. This is done primarily with RHEL for the OS running in VMs, RedHat CoreOS for the OS running containers and OpenShift to fully manage the container platform.

See below for an overview of OpenShift in 30 seconds.

Nutanix

Nutanix has its origins from the cloud. The original concept was to take the core tenets of the public cloud, and make those available to Enterprises. Nutanix was fundamentally contructed as a web-scale architecture that was highly resilient, highly scalable, with excellent performance that was deployable on any X86 architecture as a software defined storage solution. This what was originally called “Hyperconverged Infrastructure”, or HCI 1.0. The evolution of that in the last decade has moved to a full sofware defined infrastructure stack called “Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure” or HCI 2.0.

A summary of the differences can be read in the following article.

Hyperconvergence 2.0: Next Generation HCI Powers Shift to Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure

IT departments use HCI to lower total cost of ownership (TCO), increase performance and scalability of IT services and improve overall productivity. Today, the technology and the meaning of its acronym are transforming. 

– Manosiz Bhattacharyya, Nutanix senior vice president of engineering

When it comes to HCI, Nutanix created the market segment in 2009, and 13 years later, still remains the leader.

With HCI 2.0 Nutanix has NCP, or the Nutanix Cloud Platform. This includes:

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI)

Get your compute, storage and network demands covered with built-in disaster recovery, container services, security, hypervisors, virtual networking, and scale-out HCI storage

https://www.nutanix.com/products/acropolis

Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM)

Infrastructure and application automation opens a critical path to accelerate the speed of IT services, eliminate unnecessary overhead costs, and introduce time-sensitive efficiencies

https://www.nutanix.com/products/cloud-manager

Nutanix Unified Storage

This industry-leading alternative to your aging fleet of legacy storage servers solves today’s data growth challenges and simplifies management from a single platform of shared resources.

https://www.nutanix.com/solutions/consolidated-storage

Nutanix Database Service

It’s now possible to get fast and easy multidatabase management across multiple clouds and clusters. You’ll simplify operations through increased scale and reduce unnecessary overhead costs

https://www.nutanix.com/products/era

End User Computing

Make private cloud apps, virtual apps, and desktops available to users worldwide from AWS, Microsoft Azure, and the Google Cloud Platform or on-premises with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure

https://www.nutanix.com/solutions/end-user-computing

RedHat and Nutanix Relationship

There are things that each company can execute on very well, and when working together there is a truly a partnership that is more than the sum of its parts. So what is the real value of the relationship? In my perspective, I think it relates to 4 things:

  1. Decreasing time to market
  2. Operational simplicity
  3. Resiliency and scalability
  4. Enabling technologies
  1. Decreasing time to market:
  • RedHat provides the solutions for businesses to build modern applications with modern workflows. This allows companies to be agile, focus on business objectives and iterate quickly to innovate.
  • Nutanix removes the time and operational effort required to deploy infrastructure at scale, with core tenets of performance, resiliency, scalability, and with low operational overhead. This allows businesses to reduce silos of infrastructure, reduce costs associated with KTLO (keeping the lights on), reduce costs and risks associated with hardening the infrastructure for a stronger security posture, and focus more on initiatives that align with furthering business objectives and innovation.

2. Operational simplicity:

  • RedHat has streamlined the complexity associated with running Kubernetes and all the supporting services. Manually piecing all the open source components together in a way that incorporates security and lifecycle management, can be a daunting task. RedHat delivers on this.
  • Nutanix can be thought of as the cloud, anywhere. It is the core infrastructure that needs to be immutably reliable and easy to use. It provides the hypervisor that RHEL and RH CoreOS run on, the distributed storage and CSI drivers that provide unified storage to VMs and Containers, the capability to view / interrogate and isolate layer 3 and layer 7 network traffic, microsegmentation to provide granular security policies, and the glue to tie together disparate systems and workflows into a single platform.

3. Resiliency and scalability