Nutanix today rolled out three products to help remote IT deploy, upgrade, and troubleshoot cloud software from home or a central office.

These new tools, which are all available as part of the Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) software stack at no extra charge, provide an immediate benefit to IT managers that are now working remotely because of the COVID-19 pandemic. And, if Nutanix CEO Dheeraj Pandey’s predictions prove accurate, they will continue to give Nutanix an edge in the HCI space post-pandemic, too.

Even after scientists develop a vaccine, Pandey, in an earlier interview with SDxCentrall, said he expects companies to continue supporting a more hybrid work environment where employees more frequently work from home — or from wherever. “We do not see the shift as temporary,” he said. “And in fact, we see the future world changing permanently.”

All of Nutanix’s new capabilities support this new normal. The first product, Foundation Central, is a software orchestrator that allows IT teams to deploy private cloud infrastructure from a single interface (Nutanix Prism), and from any location. After installing non-configured appliances or servers on site, Foundation Central then takes over to image and configure Nutanix nodes and install any Nutanix software.

“It works at very large scale that allows us to support any size customer,” said Greg Smith, VP of technical and product marketing at Nutanix. “Foundation Central automatically creates new IT environments remotely with zero touch. So this means that an IT manager can install or upgrade new tech software on either purpose-built appliances or using off-the-shelf servers. The single administrator can create multiple ROBO [remote office/branch office] sites, for example, in a single task and do it from any location.”

Nutanix also supports this remote capability across multiple hardware vendors, including Dell EMC, Hewlett Packard Enterprise [HPE], Lenovo, Fujitsu, and Inspur. Smith said this gives his company a competitive advantage over other vendors’ remote IT software. “Not only are we agnostic in our capabilities, but we really protect the customer’s freedom to choose the right solution for any deployment," he explained.

The second product, Lifecycle Manager, is an application that enables one-click upgrades to the Nutanix software stack and appliance firmware without any application or infrastructure downtime. It can automatically determine any software and firmware dependencies, prioritize updates, and orchestrate the entire upgrade process. It also runs anywhere to manage Nutanix environments.

And finally, Insights provides predictive health and automated support services. This new service analyzes telemetry from customers’ cloud deployments, including all clusters, sites, and geographies to identify on-going and potential issues that could hurt application and data availability.

It also provides recommendations to fix any potential problems. “And these recommendations are based upon best practices that Nutanix has assembled in our support of thousands of customers for many years,” Smith said. “What we’re particularly proud of is if we discover an issue that should be addressed in that data center environment and for which there’s no current recommendation, Insights can automatically open a support ticket on behalf of the customer, assign a support engineer, and then the customer can elect to automatically upload diagnostic logs from the effective time period.” Early Insights customers have used this service to resolve about 30% of issues without opening a support ticket, Smith added.

As the pandemic pushed employees out of offices, companies’ first priority was ensuring that their employees had the connectivity and the resources to work productively from home. “What’s been overlooked is how one supports the IT team,” Smith said. “How does the IT team do their job if they don’t have ready access to the data center, to the remote sites, to any of their IP locations? It’s put a spotlight on not just can I deliver applications and service to users, but it’s put a spotlight on how can IT managers not only do their jobs but be more innovative, more effective when they’re working remotely.”