Remote IT solutions for cloud infrastructure management

While IT teams have been working overtime to deliver remote work solutions for businesses worldwide in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, they’re not always able to do so themselves. Managing IT infrastructure, troubleshooting issues, and updating software often requires IT teams to be on-site at their datacentre, something even more challenging with social distancing requirements.

“Nutanix was founded with a vision — to make IT infrastructure management so simple, that it essentially becomes invisible,” said Greg Smith, VP of Technical and Product Marketing at Nutanix. “These new capabilities will offer an even more seamless experience from day one and beyond — from anywhere. Nutanix’s simplified management as well as a more secure and resilient IT infrastructure, whether from home or a remote location, is something that is now more important than ever.”

These Nutanix solutions will allow IT teams to remotely manage cloud infrastructure throughout the entire software lifecycle.

New or Expanded Cloud Infrastructure Deployments

Managed through the Prism interface, Nutanix Foundation Central allows IT teams to deploy private cloud infrastructure on a global scale from a single interface, and from any location. After quickly installing non-configured appliances or servers on-site, Foundation Central then takes over to image and configure Nutanix nodes, and install any Nutanix software solution.

In addition to automating and centralising infrastructure software deployment, Foundation Central enables organisations to simply scale existing infrastructure capacity to keep pace with business growth.

Predictive Health and Intelligent Support

Nutanix Insights will provide predictive health and automated support services to streamline IT operations globally. The new service will analyse telemetry from customers’ cloud deployments, including all clusters, sites and geographies, to identify ongoing and potential issues that could impact application and data availability.

Once identified, the Insights service can provide customised recommendations to optimise the health and performance of the infrastructure. These recommendations are based on established IT best practices, as well as a deep knowledge accumulated by Nutanix in supporting more than 16,000 enterprises around the world.

Additionally, the Insights service can automatically open a support ticket with Nutanix, have a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) assigned, and optionally collect and upload all relevant customer log files for analysis — all without any manual interaction. Preliminary internal data reveals that Insights will enable customers to resolve about 30% of issues without opening a support ticket, resulting in fewer support cases for a healthier IT and cloud infrastructure.

“Not having a ticket to open is already a good thing. But the ability to see the potential problems and how to solve them is great. It's the same philosophy that made the one-click upgrade so valuable,” said Olivier Massoni, Systems Engineer at Compass Group France.

One-Click, Non-Disruptive Infrastructure Upgrades

IT infrastructure upgrades have become increasingly complex and error-prone, especially in environments with multiple vendors and products. The necessary planning, testing and the out-of-business-hours execution required to mitigate outages to mission-critical applications also make the update process costly. This often results in IT teams delaying necessary upgrades and opening themselves up to possible security issues.

Nutanix Lifecycle Manager (LCM) will deliver seamless, one-click upgrades to the Nutanix software stack, as well as to appliance firmware — without any application or infrastructure downtime. LCM can automatically determine any software and firmware dependencies, intelligently prioritise updates, and orchestrate the entire upgrade process removing guesswork, and resulting in a more secure and resilient infrastructure. And, as with other Nutanix solutions, LCM will be able to operate anywhere to manage Nutanix environments globally.

“At NetDocuments, we have 12 co-located datacentres to support our customers all over the world, so simplicity, scalability and ability to manage the infrastructure remotely are paramount,” said Todd Burris, System Engineer at NetDocuments, a leading content services and productivity platform. “Nutanix delivers on all of these aspects and helps us keep our customers happy. Products like Foundation Central and LCM are key to our ability to deploy, manage and troubleshoot issues remotely.”