Infrastructure Solution for Hybrid and Multi-Cloud Computing

Nutanix is a leading enterprise cloud corporation that sells hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) appliances and software-defined storage. It delivers its customers a simple, flexible, and cost-efficient cloud platform that offers freedom of choice and enables true hybrid and multi-cloud computing.

Nutanix built its market leadership on powerful software that transforms a company’s on-premise physical servers into a unified, scalable private cloud.

However, they were constrained by the limitations of physical, on-premise data centers:

• High Total Cost of Ownership (TCO): Owning physical data centers requires significant capital expenses on hardware, plus ongoing operational costs for real estate, power, cooling, and specialized staff to manage the infrastructure.
• Inflexible Scalability: Expanding capacity was a slow and costly process. Ordering, installing, and configuring new physical servers could take weeks or months, leading to lost business opportunities while waiting for resources.
• Significant Security & Resilience Burden: With on-premise servers, the customer was solely responsible for all security, from physical access to the server room to managing risks like power outages and internet disruptions, which could terminate business operations.

To retain its customers and capture a new market segment, Nutanix needed to bridge its best-in-class software with the public cloud, offering a seamless hybrid solution that combined the best of both worlds. This complex technical and architectural migration was their biggest challenge.

Quantum participated in designing the core of a new, hyper-converged infrastructure solution. The goal was to allow customers to build a Nutanix cluster directly on public cloud infrastructure (like AWS bare metal instances) without needing a physical data center or to seamlessly extend their existing on-premise cluster into the cloud.

This gave end-users flexibility to create clusters anywhere – one on AWS, two on Azure, and connect them with their on-premise environment, all managed as a single entity.

Quantum’s engineers integrated with Nutanix’s teams, contributing specialized knowledge in the following solutions:

• Papiea: The core orchestration solution that powers the entire Nutanix Clusters product, managing the complex lifecycle of cloud-based clusters.
• BMaaS (Bare Metal as a Service): The product that integrates with cloud provider services (Azure bare metal), handling the automated imaging and network setup required to run the Nutanix platform.
• File Analytics (Data Lens): A virtual machine installed on the Nutanix cluster that analyzes your files, allowing you to work with sensitive data, analyze access levels, detect anomaly behavior, and provide statistics.

Our work with Nutanix was a partnership designed to augment their skilled team and help move their goals forward. While Nutanix was already on a clear path to success, our role was to integrate with their teams, providing specialized skills and additional engineering capacity to help accelerate development.

• Accelerated time-to-market: we provided a fresh perspective and specialized engineering skills that helped accelerate Nutanix’s development timeline and shorten their path to market.
• Enhanced team flexibility: we enabled scaling engineering resources on demand, allowing the client to meet critical project deadlines without the delays associated with internal hiring.
• Deep technical contribution: our expertise in multi-cloud architecture, automation, and distributed systems directly enhanced the platform’s scalability and overall quality.