Nutanix is looking to end a strong year on a high, unveiling capabilities in its Cloud Platform (NCP) to give users even more flexibility in managing their infrastructure across distributed environments.

Nutanix’s end-of-year updates see NCP now provide orchestrated lifecycle management of multiple dark-site environments, along with on-premises deployment options for governance and control planes.

The move aims to simplify management for isolated environments and reduce complexity in maintaining disconnected systems, providing engineers and developers with increased ownership and local access to management and security systems.

The updates see Nutanix become the latest in an ever-growing list of firms playing the digital sovereignty card, while also continuing to jab at its bête noire, Broadcom/VMware. The vendor touts its NCP updates as helping customers maintain operational flexibility without being tied to a single cloud vendor ecosystem.

“As sovereign cloud architectures become a defining priority for organisations, we’re introducing several enhancements to the Nutanix Cloud Platform that help customers meet these needs without giving up the advantages of a distributed cloud infrastructure,” Thomas Cornely, EVP of product management at Nutanix, explained. “These new capabilities give customers the clarity and control needed to draw their own sovereign boundaries across distributed environments and leverage the resiliency and flexibility that distributed clouds provide.”

Nutanix eyes the government stack

The NCP updates see Nutanix gunning to grow its already burgeoning customer base with folks and firms working in environments that require the utmost control of their stack, like government entities.

In addition to platform updates, the vendor also expanded support across its partner ecosystem to further woo customers in this space.

For example, its Government Cloud Clusters (GC2) offering is now available on Amazon Web Services (AWS), providing support for U.S.-based federal agencies to build and operate a distributed sovereign cloud.

Meanwhile, its Cloud Clusters (NC2) solution on Google Cloud is now generally available, providing customers in 17 regions with more ways to modernize their infrastructure. NC2 is already available on OVHcloud in Europe.

Among those already working with Nutanix is the U.K. government’s Department for Work and Pensions (DWP).

During the recent London leg of its .NEXT tour, Nutanix showcased its existing ties with DWP, which had previously invested heavily in VMware. Now, Nutanix is a core part of the DWP’s hybrid platform, spanning on‑premises and multicloud to handle everything from legacy to modern workloads, and to shield itself from vendor and commercial lock‑in.

“[Nutanix] allows us to be more portable with our workloads,” Paul Booth, head of engineering at DWP, said at the recent vendor event. “We can't move stuff around at will, but it does mean that we are protected to some degree from the commercial pushes and pulls of the market – VMware, really good case in point over the last couple of years.”

Other NCP updates

There are also additions like ensuring security policies stay consistent during failover and live migration. Further, there’s Nutanix Infrastructure Manager, a new automation tool aimed at streamlining deployments using pre-validated design patterns.

A unified network control plane provides a single view of VLANs, virtual networks, and microsegmentation policies to give administrators centralized visibility and control across their entire network.

Other NCP capabilities include tiered disaster recovery options, allowing users to match protection levels to each workload for additional fault tolerance.

There are also updates targeted at management of Kubernetes and AI environments, with NKP clusters now automatically registering into Nutanix Prism Central for immediate infrastructure-level visibility.

“Distributed sovereign cloud is becoming a priority for organizations that must meet regulatory obligations without disrupting operational consistency," Dave Pearson, VP in the infrastructure systems, platforms, and technologies group at IDC, commented. “Models that preserve local control while supporting cloud scalability are attractive to organizations undergoing application and infrastructure modernization, and Nutanix's response to this appetite is to operationalize distributed and sovereignty-aligned architectures, looking to assist with compliance, privacy, and governance needs.”