In hopes of wrangling the “accidental” hybrid and multicloud world that modern organizations have inherited, Nutanix introduced Nutanix Central and Project Beacon at its .Next event. The releases represent a resolution to the headache of distributed environments “in a time where you've got more applications coming online than ever before,” Nutanix SVP of Product and Solutions Marketing Lee Caswell told SDxCentral.

Customers want and need to run any workload or application in any environment as they cope with the growing need for a cloud operating model that spans multiple data centers, the artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled edge and multiple public clouds. “Customers are looking for how do they control this sprawl,” Caswell noted.

To that point, the SVP touted Nutanix Central as a cloud-delivered service management model designed for federated endpoints, which is now available in Early Access. The Nutanix Central console offers visibility and monitoring capabilities for public cloud, on-premises, hosted and edge environments.

From an observability and management standpoint, “this now allows us to consolidate different clusters across the hybrid [and] multicloud environment,” providing customers “with a single pane of glass across all of these endpoints,” Caswell explained.

Nutanix Central also provides access to capacity utilization and alert metrics on the domain and cluster levels, along with individual domain navigation based on unique user role-based access control (RBAC) and integrated deployment of solutions from Nutanix and its partners.

Nutanix Central is available to customers through their Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure licenses.

The vendor also introduced Project Beacon, which represents Nutanix's ability “to move beyond just classic [hyper-converged] infrastructure into hyperscaler infrastructure directly,” Caswell said. The project's multi-year efforts are focused on developing a hybrid multicloud platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering to decouple applications from data and underlying infrastructure.

According to Nutanix, the project will allow developers to build an application once and run it in any combination of environments. “We're decoupling our app and data services – that PaaS layer that we have – from the underlying infrastructure itself,” Caswell explained.

Traditionally, Nutanix's PasS-level services are tied to its storage and hypervisor stack. But “going forward, we're going to be demonstrating our intent to have app and data services move into hyperscaler infrastructure directly,” he said. Project Beacon “says, we're going to go and move beyond the infrastructure we control today.”

In reality, that will look like the vendor offering its database-as-a-service, for example, as a tool that runs directly on a public cloud like Amazon Web Services (AWS) “without requiring a customer-controlled hypervisor,” Caswell explained. “That's a very interesting way to start thinking about our intent over time,” he pointed out.

“With Project Beacon, Nutanix aims to reduce lock-in and increase application development simplicity through unified management, automated mobility and the ability to write applications once and deploy them as-needed on appropriate infrastructure,” Dave Pearson, IDC RVP for infrastructure systems, platforms and technologies, added.