Greg Smith, Vice President, Product & Technical Marketing, Nutanix, Madhukar Kumar, VP Product and Solutions Marketing, Nutanix & Thomas Cornely, SVP Product Portfolio Management, Nutanix sit down with Stu Miniman at theCUBE Digital studios for Global .NEXT Digital Experience 2020. #NEXTConf #theCUBE @SiliconANGLE theCUBE @Nutanix https://siliconangle.com/2020/09/14/nutanix-rolls-new-vision-hci-multicloud-world-nextconf/ Nutanix rolls out its new vision of HCI in a multicloud world VIDEO EXCLUSIVE BY MARK ALBERTSON Nutanix Inc. took full advantage of its virtual event last week not only to deliver new products, but also to signal a new way of thinking around the future of information-technology deployment. The company concluded its .NEXT Digital Experience last week following a series of announcements that focused primarily on what Nutanix has defined as the “Four Ds.” These encompass the digital hyperconverged infrastructure, or core HCI stack; DevOps and offerings for database automation services; desktop services or VDI technologies for remote work; and data center solutions that include storage. Yet, along with a significant number of newly released products and services, Nutanix has also recognized that the customer need for services from cloud and IT infrastructure has taken on new meaning in this COVID-changed era. And that has impacted the company’s own messaging around the role of cloud technologies in the afterglow of its .NEXT virtual event. “What we rolled out at this conference is a new way to talk about what we do at Nutanix and what we deliver in terms of a set of offerings,” said Thomas Cornely (pictured, far right), senior vice president of product portfolio management at Nutanix. “For us, cloud is not a destination. It is not just accomplishing something. It’s a new era of operating. It’s giving customers options in terms of what they want to deploy, and it’s also a new form of consuming infrastructure, from a Nutanix perspective.” Cornely spoke with Stu Miniman, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, as part of the .NEXT Digital Experience. He was joined by Greg Smith (left), vice president of product and technical marketing at Nutanix, and Madhukar Kumar (center), vice president of product and solutions marketing at Nutanix. They discussed the latest enhancements for HCI architecture to deliver faster performance, extending Clusters to other public cloud providers, new management tools for developers, improved security controls and a less complex IT future. (* Disclosure below.) Faster provisioning and scaling Hyperconverged infrastructure software remains central to how Nutanix delivers innovation to cloud and datacenter markets. Earlier this month, the company advanced its HCI architecture with new storage solutions designed to lower latency and deliver faster performance for input/output-intensive workloads. These included Non-Volatile Memory Express and Intel Optane-based solid state drives to improve virtual machine density. “For Nutanix and our customers, it begins with HCI,” Smith said. “What we’ve seen in the past year is really aggressive adoption for HCI, particularly in core datacenter and private cloud operations. Customers are moving to HCI not only for greater simplicity, but to get faster provisioning and scaling.” How has Nutanix managed to gain faster performance? Among the firm’s latest releases is Blockstore, a file system alternative that bypasses Linux kernel context switches and boosts the speed of storage processing for the Nutanix Acropolis HCI operating system. The new software also uses a Software Performance Development Kit to avoid time-wasting interrupts and kernel processing so that the operating system is free to perform more tasks. “We’ve done this by managing storage space on physical devices in the HCI software rather than relying on slower internal file systems,” Smith explained. “We’re seeing immediate performance gains of 20% to 25% for input/output operations per second and latency. The SPDK allows Nutanix to access devices from use space and avoid expensive systems interrupts and systems calls. That’s the real benefit of moving to HCI.” Clusters now for Azure The company’s latest releases came on the heels of another significant move last month that involved the announcement of general availability for Nutanix Clusters on Amazon Web Services Inc. Clusters is a scale-out, hyperconverged storage offering that integrates into public cloud accounts and allows users flexibility to run applications, improve performance and reduce complexity. ... Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the .NEXT Digital Experience. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the .NEXT Digital Experience. Neither Nutanix, the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)