In this episode of Nutanix Weekly, Phil Sellers is joined by Andy Greene and Chris Calhoun from XenTegra to break down Nutanix Multi-Cloud Snapshot Technology (MST) and how organizations are using it to modernize disaster recovery without overspending on infrastructure.

The conversation explores how MST enables organizations to replicate snapshots to S3-compatible storage providers like AWS S3, Azure Blob Storage, Google Cloud, Wasabi, Backblaze, and Nutanix Objects to improve resiliency, optimize storage costs, and simplify long-term retention.

The team also discusses:

• Nutanix Instant Restore in NCI 7.5.1
• Faster VM recovery and improved availability
• Ransomware and clean room recovery strategies
• Pilot light vs. zero compute DR models
• Hybrid cloud resiliency
• Long-term snapshot retention
• Balancing recovery objectives with budget realities

Whether you are building a modern DR strategy or evaluating new approaches to cyber resilience, this episode provides practical insight into how Nutanix MST helps organizations stay available when it matters most.

But in the interest of fairness, we wanted to share some of the most compelling reasons to move to HCI from your SAN solution.

If your goal is to accelerate your digital transformation so that you can improve customer experience and help your business evolve, then Nutanix HCI is your perfect match. Nutanix helps you automate IT operations, consolidate all your workloads, and easily extend to the cloud. Which could be cool, if you’re into that sort of thing.

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-Host: Jirah Cox

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-Host: Jirah Cox

Blog: https://www.nutanix.com/blog/how-a-complete-and-open-kubernetes-platform-can-future-proof-your-business by Dan Ciruli

Host: Phil Sellers, XenTegra

Co-Host: Jirah Cox, Nutanix

Co-Host: Andy Greene, XenTegra

Co-Host: Chris Calhoun, XenTegra

Blog: https://www.nutanix.com/executive/thought-leadership/a-c-suite-guide-to-distributed-hybrid-infrastructure

Host: Phil Sellers, XenTegra

Co-Host: Jirah Cox, Nutanix

Blog Post: https://www.nutanix.com/blog/enhanced-backup-and-restore-for-nutanix-prism

Host: Phil Sellers, XenTegra

Co-Host: Chris Calhoun, XenTegra

Co-Host: Andy Greene, XenTegra

Blog post: https://www.nutanix.com/blog/the-next-release-of-nutanix-unified-storage-is-here from Ujwal Datta & Alex Almeida

Host: Phil Sellers, XenTegra
Co-Host: Jirah Cox, Nutanix
Co-Host: Andy Greene, Nutanix
Co-Host: Chris Calhoun, Nutanix

Blog post: https://www.nutanix.com/blog/breakout-year-for-nutanix-container-management by Steve Carter

Host: Phil Sellers, XenTegra
Co-host: Jirah Cox, Nutanix
Co-host: Chris Calhoun, XenTegra

Blog Post: https://www.nutanix.com/blog/announcing-nutanix-cloud-clusters-on-google-cloud-public-preview

Host: Phil Sellers, XenTegra
Co-Host: Jirah Cox, Nutanix 

Host: Phil Sellers, XenTegra
Co-Host: Jirah Cox, Nutanix
Co-Host: Ben Rogers, Nutanix
Co-host: Chris Calhoun, XenTegra
Co-host: Andy Greene, XenTegra
Special Guest: Tom Powell, Nutanix

Blog post: https://www.nutanix.com/blog/multiple-clouds-or-multicloud-understanding-the-key-differences

Host: Phil Sellers, Practice Director for Modern Datacenter
Co-host: Andy Greene, Solutions Architect
Co-host: Chris Calhoun, Solutions Architect

Embracing the concept of containerized apps requires a significant paradigm shift across every aspect of an organization—but with the right cultural mindset and the right tools and platforms, a cloud-native approach can set you up for current and future success.

Based on blog post - Going Cloud Native: Build Apps Once, Deploy Anywhere, https://www.nutanix.com/blog/build-apps-once-deploy-anywhere

Host: Phil Sellers
Co-Host: Harvey Green
Co-Host: Jirah Cox
Co-Host: Ben Rogers

Host: Philip Sellers
Co-host: Harvey Green
Co-host: Jirah Cox
Co-host: Ben Rogers

In today’s digital age, data is the lifeline of businesses. It drives decision-making, influences strategies, and unveils market insights that can propel any organization ahead of its competitors. However, much of this data is unstructured, creating challenges with data visibility, and making it more vulnerable to cyber attacks and insider threats. 

The complexity of defending unstructured data from ransomware is a key obstacle hampering an organization's security posture. Protecting only the endpoints and employing network-centric tools, and device authentication is no longer sufficient. For organizations, it's imperative to deploy a holistic approach to data security, ensuring that the very essence of their business—its data—is safeguarded from these evolving threats. 

Starting with Storage: Laying The Foundation for Robust Data Security

To protect against ransomware and other malicious threats, IT and Security leaders should look beyond endpoints. To achieve true ransomware resiliency, an organization needs to be able to detect attacks from within the data layer, block the activity, determine the scope of the affected systems, and recover quickly. 

The Nutanix Data Lens™ SaaS-based data security solution helps proactively assess and mitigate unstructured data security risks by identifying anomalous activity, auditing user behavior, and adhering to monitoring requirements - all at the primary storage layer, where your data is stored. Additionally, global data visibility across clouds helps with intelligent decision-making and lifecycle management of unstructured data stored on the Nutanix Unified Storage™ (NUS) platform

The latest release packs powerful features for cyber resilience, permissions visualization, risk scoring, and support for the  Nutanix Objects Storage™ product

What’s New Today?

• Threat Containment Window:  Proactively detect and block a threat, defend from further damage and get alerted to begin a One-Click Recovery process within 20 minutes of exposure. Don’t just take our word for it, read this report to see how Data Lens delivers on the promise. 
• One-Click Recovery: Seamlessly recover from the last good snapshot available and restore your data and operations swiftly.
• Permissions and Risk Visualization: Identify the root cause of access control risks and monitor the risk score to track vulnerabilities within your data and user groups.
• Objects support: Nutanix Data Lens has increased its coverage to include Nutanix Objects Storage, enabling customers to effortlessly access S3-available data, providing an intelligent understanding and forensic capabilities similar to those available for the Nutanix Files Storage™ product today. 

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-host: Philip Sellers
Co-host: Harvey Green
Co-host: Jirah Cox

So without further ado, drum roll please…Nutanix™  Files Storage now supports establishing a metro cluster with our 4.4 release. This is not a drill and you are not seeing things, this isn’t a mirage, it’s here. This capability is built on top of our already mature and customer validated Metro offering that has been used for years now to protect applications running on our hyperconverged platform. I know what you are thinking: how does it work, so let's dive in! 

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-host: Philip Sellers
Co-host: Jirah Cox
Co-host: Ben Rogers

The enhancements, which became available to Nutanix customers as part of the AOS 6.6.2 release, include support for compute-only nodes running either VMware ESXi or Nutanix AHV along with best practices for optimally configuring hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) database clusters using a combination of compute-only and storage-only nodes.

Host: Philip Sellers
Co-host: Jirah Cox
Co-host: Ben Rogers

Blog Link: https://www.nutanix.com/blog/introducing-the-optimized-database-solution

As investment in public cloud resources increases, the need for robust cost management across hybrid multicloud endpoints also grows. Gartner estimates show the magnitude of the savings opportunity with “Worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services forecast to grow 20.7% to total $591.8 billion in 2023, up from $490.3 billion in 2022.” 

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-host: Harvey Green
Co-host: Philip Sellers
Co-host: Jirah Cox
Co-host: Ben Rogers

As organizations are rethinking their infrastructure strategy, they are looking to leverage new opportunities and innovations to gain agility, simplify management, drive operational efficiencies, and better equip their IT teams with the resources and skills needed to be competitive, all while keeping costs in check. The options are overwhelming. And if placing 100 percent of your workloads in the public cloud isn’t the answer, what is?

IT workload environments aren’t “one size fits all.” Many IT leaders are finding success with hybrid IT infrastructure, where applications and data are spread and shared across a combination of on-premises, colocation, and public cloud environments, based on the unique characteristics, resource utilization, performance specifications, and security requirements of each application. Hybrid IT strategies offer a host of benefits, not the least of which is that IT leaders regain control of their data, making it easier to support a remote workforce, scale their operations, increase agility, and protect critical assets, all while being cost-efficient.

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-host: Harvey Green
Co-host: Philip Sellers

We encourage you to take a fresh look at AOS 6.5 while keeping three key things in mind: 

1. Performance-hungry business-critical applications and databases are coming to HCI 
2. Cyber-resilience is ideally built-in to storage architecture - not bolted on   
3. Granular snapshots and replication data services are a key buying criteria  

Host: Harvey Green
Co-host: Jirah Cox
Co-host: ben Rogers

This blog post are two posts combined. First is the in-place conversion of ESX to AHV and the second is how to enable and configure Leap.

Host: Harvey Green
Co-host: Jirah Cox
Co-host: Ben Rogers

It can be done! A Nutanix customer, an international retailer, not only survived, but thrived when harnessing HPE GreenLake with Nutanix Era for database management to simplify their database administration, enable rapid deployment, and move to a true consumption-based cost model. HPE GreenLake in combination with Nutanix Era helped this retailer deliver the outcomes that their business demanded.

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-host: Harvey Green
Co-host: Jirah Cox

There are 3 major benefits of building a Nutanix + Citrix technology stack at your institutions.

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-Host: Jirah Cox

Generic USB Redirection further expands Frame’s support for USB peripheral devices, including advanced/specialty devices such as Bloomberg® keyboards!

In this blog we will demonstrate the seamless integration of Bloomberg multi-function keyboards within a Frame session via the Frame App. For those unfamiliar, Bloomberg keyboards are specialized devices used by financial services customers to interface with the Bloomberg Anywhere™ solution. The keyboard not only includes Bloomberg-specific function and menu keys, but also built-in speakers as well as an integrated biometric fingerprint scanner for multi-factor authentication into Bloomberg Anywhere.

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-host: Harvey Green
Co-host: Jirah Cox
Guest: Kevin Cooke
Guest: Michael Yannotti

There’s still time to catch up on all that you missed. As Ben Gibson, Nutanix CMO, shared at the inception of the event, this is .NEXT on Your Terms! Dress in your favorite leisure wear items and set yourself up in the coziest part of your home to delve into all that .NEXT has to offer you in the way of leading-edge cloud strategies and technologies.

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-Host: Harvey Green
Co-Host: Jirah Cox

We’re excited to deliver this new release so that you can test out the infrastructure that thousands of companies rely on every day for fast, efficient datacenter operations. With just a few clicks, you’ll accomplish tasks that used to take days or even weeks.

This is just one of many releases that we have planned for the year. This initial phase will allow you to explore three areas across the Nutanix solution portfolio.

Take a guided tour and then get moving on your own with a deep dive hands-on lab. And if you have questions along the way, connect with an expert through our chat system. Get ready to experience IT at a whole new level of simplicity!

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-Host: Harvey Green
Co-Host: Jirah Cox

Blog Post: https://www.nutanix.com/blog/engineered-differently-built-in-security-across-platform-data-network-and-apps#

Host: Phil Sellers, XenTegra

Co-Host: Jirah Cox, Nutanix

Co-Host: Andy Greene, XenTegra

Co-Host: Chris Calhoun, XenTegra

Blog post: https://www.nutanix.com/blog/why-moving-from-vmware-isnt-as-scary-as-you-think by Nicholas Holian

Host: Phil Sellers, XenTegra

Co-Host: Chris Calhoun, XenTegra

Co-Host: Andy Greene, XenTegra 

Host: Phil Sellers, XenTegra 
Guest: Subbiah Sundaram, HYCU

Digital workspaces are not a new idea, but too often deployment and operational complexity have kept organizations from realizing the benefits these solutions offer. Fortunately, there are solutions that can help significantly reduce this complexity.

Building a simple, secure, and performant digital workspace solution requires choosing the right technologies at every layer of the stack. In this seven-part blog series, we discuss how running Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops on Nutanix Hybrid Cloud Platform simplifies your solution, delivering an excellent user experience, improved productivity, greater business agility, lower risk, and higher ROI.

Each installment of the series addresses a key aspect of a complete digital workspace solution. We discuss the traditional challenges that administrators face, and explain how a Citrix-on-Nutanix hybrid and multicloud solution helps you to avoid the pitfalls that have bedeviled admins for years, resulting in interminable delays, substandard performance, poor user experience, and excessive operational overhead and costs.

Host: Harvey Green
Co-Host: Jirah Cox
Co-Host: Jon Spallone

The infrastructure for Nutanix Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) supports a tenant cluster and a production virtual private cloud (VPC) for each customer. Customers generally have production VMs running in their on-premises cluster, which is connected to the DRaaS VPC using an IPsec tunnel. This is used by the DRaaS workflow to replicate on-premises production data.

During a disaster recovery situation or while running disaster recovery tests, VMs will failover from on-premises to the DRaaS cluster. When this occurs, all VMs in one subnet of an on-premises network (e.g., 192.168.10.0/24) usually failover to DRaaS. If the customer chooses to preserve the IP, VMs in DRaaS come up with the same IPs as on-premises (e.g., 192.168.10.0/24 network).

In this type of disaster recovery situation, customers can choose which critical VMs are replicated to DRaaS. But in those cases, on-premises VMs cannot communicate with VMs in DRaaS. 

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-host: Harvey Green
Co-host: Jirah Cox

The recent Files release 4.0 further enhances Smart DR with scalability improvements and self-service restore (SSR) integration

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-host: Harvey Green
Co-host: Jirah Cox

• Improving Synchronous Random Write Performance
• CPU Scheduling with NFS
• Flow Control with Nutanix Volumes
• Pushing the Performance Envelope

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-host: Havey Green
Co-host: Jirah Cox

As a result, Nutanix has invested in building a platform that provides the best way to create a unified hybrid cloud architecture. At Microsoft Ignite, Nutanix to shared best practices for running hybrid workloads and simplifying your hybrid cloud deployments.

Blog Post: https://www.nutanix.com/blog/elevating-hybrid-cloud-for-ai-databases-at-microsoft-ignite

Host: Philip Sellers
Co-Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-Host: Jirah Cox
Co-Host: Ben Rogers

Blog Post: https://www.nutanix.com/blog/elastic-san-and-nutanix-move-for-azure-vmware-solution-with-nc2

Host: Phil Sellers, XenTegra

Co-Host: Jirah Cox, Nutanix

Co-Host: Chris Calhoun, XenTegra

Does this sound familiar? You plug one hole another opens, you update software, you train end users on how to detect suspicious files or emails but the threats keep coming. The rise of Ransomware in recent years has put companies on red alert. CIO’s are well aware of the impacts this can cause and nearly all would say that security is a top priority for their business.

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-host: Jirah Cox
Co-host: Ben Rogers

Blog Post: https://www.nutanix.com/blog/dell-powerstore-coming-to-nutanix

Host: Phil Sellers, XenTegra

Co-Host: Jirah Cox, Nutanix

Co-Host: Chris Calhoun, XenTegra

Co-Host: Andy Greene, XenTegra

The key for CIO’s and other C-level executives is to plan for and enable this critical eventuality in their enterprise. The compelling business case for adopting the shift to hybrid multicloud is highlighted in the sixth annual Enterprise Cloud Index (ECI) report.

The findings of the ECI report reveal a notable increase in the planned deployment of hybrid multicloud infrastructure, which spans private IT infrastructure (on-premises and hosted), public clouds and edge locations.

Host: Phil Sellers
Co-Host: Harvey Green
Co-Host: Jirah Cox 

So, when we have a larger cluster, we always recommend using RF3 (Redundancy Factor 3) as the risk is higher that you have multiple nodes/disks go offline at the same time.

During trainings and onsite customer work I often get the question, "what will happen if multiple nodes go offline in Redundancy Factor 2?" In this blog post I will explain different scenarios and their behaviors.

Blog by: Jeroen Tielen
Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-host: Harvey Green
Co-host: Philip Sellers
Co-host: Jirah Cox
Co-host: Ben Rogers

Blog post: https://www.nutanix.com/blog/moving-from-multiple-clouds-to-multicloud

Host: Phil Sellers, Practice Director for Modern Datacenter @ XenTegra
Co-host: Jirah Cox, Principal Solutions Architect @ Nutanix
Co-host: Chris Calhoun, Solutions Architect @ XenTegra

Blog link: https://www.nutanix.com/blog/transform-your-cloud-experience-with-nutanix-aos-7-0-and-ahv-10

Host: Phil Sellers, XenTegra

Co-Host: Chris Calhoun, XenTegra

Co-Host: Jirah Cox, Nutanix

Co-Host: Ben Rogers, Nutanix

More often than not, even the most experienced IT professionals will still run into TCO, design, sizing, user experience, and administration challenges when it comes to DaaS. Folks seem to forget that matching the right use case to the right solution, managing expectations, proper budget planning, and solid design practices still apply in the world of public cloud and DaaS.

The purpose of this five-part blog series is to help you identify and (more importantly) avoid the mistakes that others have made when it comes to implementing a DaaS solution!

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-Host: Harvey Green
Co-Host: Jirah Cox

So, what is Flow Network Security?  By now, you may have heard the name, read about it or had a conversation about it with a Nutanix employee.  First off, and in most basic terms, Flow Network Security is built-in security for workloads that run on Nutanix AHV, our native hypervisor.  Think of it more as a feature or solution rather than a separate “product”.

While AHV has been available for many years, one thing became obvious as customers were looking to have more security options in their Nutanix environment; we didn’t have a Nutanix-developed solution to provide network security.

Enter microsegmentation.  Network virtualization got its beginning as a Stanford University research project that ultimately became a startup and commercial solution from Nicira, circa 2007.  VMware acquired Nicira in 2012 and the solution became, as you may know, NSX, which offered software-defined networking and microsegmentation functionality.  Since this time, other software companies have brought their own solutions to market.  

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-host: Harvey Green
Co-host: Philip Sellers
Co-host: Jirah Cox

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-Host: Jirah Cox
Guest: Wendy M. Pfeiffer

Working from home, or is it living at work?  Nearly everyone has been affected, either directly or indirectly, by the shift to remote work.

Although remote work had been increasingly common, the pandemic caused a spike that has fundamentally altered attitudes by both employees and employers. FlexJobs.com reports that “a Gartner survey of company leaders found that 80% plan to allow employees to work remotely at least part of the time after the pandemic, and 47% will allow employees to work from home full-time. In a PwC survey of 669 CEOs, 78% agree that remote collaboration is here to stay for the long-term. In a recent FlexJobs survey, 65% of respondents report wanting to be full-time remote employees post-pandemic, and 31% want a hybrid remote work environment—that’s 96% who desire some form of remote work.” 

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-Host: Harvey Green
Co-Host: Jirah Cox
Guest: Adrian Escobedo
Guest: Stephen Miller

Project Beacon

Nutanix announced Project Beacon, a multi-year effort to deliver a portfolio of data-centric Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) level services available natively anywhere – including on Nutanix or the native public cloud. With a vision of decoupling the application and its data from the underlying infrastructure, Project Beacon aims to enable developers to build applications once and run them anywhere.

As the initial phase of Project Beacon, Nutanix will expand the capabilities and benefits of Nutanix Database Service (NDB) to the public cloud as a managed service, providing the same database automation and management experience already available on Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI). The company plans to subsequently extend this effort to other popular data-centric platform services

Host: Harvey Green
Co-host: Jirah Cox
Co-host: Donvan Linton
Co-host: Marina Troyano

This is where Nutanix comes in, helping you protect your SLED organization’s public information from cyber threats. Over time, Nutanix has honed in on the core concepts of security while improving data resiliency strategies. We have elevated our presence in the security space by releasing new solutions with a proactive security focus.

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-host: Harvey Green
Co-host: Jirah Cox

We know that upgrades can be a bit intimidating, but fear not! Nutanix is continually working to make the process smoother and more efficient. We’re thrilled to announce a new version of Nutanix Life Cycle Management (LCM), 2.6!

Blog: https://next.nutanix.com/community-blog-154/nutanix-lifecycle-management-2-6-is-here-check-out-the-top-5-coolest-features-of-lcm-41843
Thanks to Mike Baronde - the blog author! 

Host: Phil Sellers
Co-Host: Jirah Cox

Blog Post: https://www.nutanix.com/blog/nutanix-and-canonical-partner-to-simplify-kubernetes-deployments-with-nkp-and-ubuntu-pro

Host: Phil Sellers, XenTegra
Co-Host: Jirah Cox, Nutanix

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-Host: Jirah Cox
Guest: Harvey Green

With recent advances in automation, machine learning, data analytics, and cloud computing, we are all expected to achieve more with less. Even the most technologically savvy departments in our organizations have had challenges adapting. Almost every organization is trying to find the right balance and approach to incorporate automation in its processes. In order to get a sense of how the IT industry is thinking about automation, we surveyed 500+ IT professionals as part of the Automation Coffee chat in Nov 2020. From this survey, we gained insights into:

• Where are practitioners today?
• What challenges lie ahead?
• Where is the industry headed?

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-Host: Harvey Green
Co-Host: Jirah Cox

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-Host: Jirah Cox

This blog series introduces you to Microsoft Windows® Operating System (OS) optimizations, starting with version 1903. I will attempt to keep these optimizations as environment agnostic as possible. Hopefully, these optimizations will be just as good to administrators of physical machines as to a virtual environment utilizing Nutanix Frame, Citrix, or VMware Horizon VDI solutions.

This series aims to share the seemingly infinite number of ways you can optimize a Windows environment, with something for beginners as well as administrators familiar with optimizations but looking to deliver an even better experience within their environment.

Of course, the optimizations provided in this blog series are intended only as a guide. Be sure to test the optimizations described in this series internally before pushing the changes to your production environment.

The previous entry of this series covered Active Setup. We discussed what Active Setup is, how it works, and how to optimize it.

This blog addresses the Microsoft Store: its purpose, how it works, and what can be done with it. This particular area of the OS is continually changing and, as such, will require constant management to optimize in the way you desire. This blog potentially saves even more headaches than any other blog in this series.

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-Host: Havery Green
Co-Host: Jirah Cox
Co-Host: Jon Spallone

Blog post: https://www.nutanix.com/blog/nutanix-central-on-premises by Adharsh Praveen, Ruhi Sehgal, and Mayank Gupta

IT companies create certifications for many reasons as well. It can help customers get the most value out of the product. It can help reduce support costs, which frees up company resources to focus on innovations and new products. And it can help ensure that their partner ecosystem is fully up to speed on all the latest and greatest developments in their product.

But none of those reasons matters if no one is aware of your certification, or it has no value to the overall industry and job market. That's why salary surveys like the ones produced by Global Knowledge, Robert Half, and others are so important. They poll the industry globally and find out what areas are growing, what areas may be declining, and help IT professionals make educated decisions about how to guide their career for the future.

Host: Harvey Green
Co-Host: Jirah Cox

The team breaks down the differences between traditional scripting, code generation, and agentic AI workflows, while also discussing security guardrails, RBAC controls, hybrid multi-cloud implications with NC2 and GC2, and how AI-driven operations may fundamentally reshape enterprise IT management.

If you're interested in Nutanix, automation, AI infrastructure, hybrid cloud, or the future of intelligent operations, this episode delivers practical insights into where the industry is heading next.

Nutanix’s SDN journey chartered a new path in 2018 with SDN, launching Nutanix® Flow Security with Microsegmentation then quickly followed with a robust ID Based Firewall and Security Planning solution. These were the first pillars of our SDN vision.

Fast-following Flow Security, Nutanix implemented the second key pillar of SDN: Network Virtualization, or as Nutanix calls it, Flow Networking™. 

First introduced to provide secure multi-tenant network virtualization in Nutanix's managed Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service (or DRaaS) offering, Flow Networking quickly evolved for on-premise Nutanix customers, becoming available for Early Access following its announcement soon after .NEXT 2020.

Host: Harvey Green
Co-Host: Jirah Cox
Co-Host: Andy Whiteside

How could we make this even easier in a ‘work from home’ world? 

With the launch of Nutanix Foundation Central 1.0 with Prism Central 5.17, this specialist requirement is now removed. 

*Update

Out today Foundation Central Release 1.1

Foundation Central is the Nutanix service used to create clusters from factory-imaged nodes remotely from Prism Central.

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-Host: Harvey Green
Co-Host: Jirah Cox

I’ll highlight some of those reasons in this post. And because I’m familiar with the author and his background, I’ll assume that he was writing about the healthcare provider market, and not payors, pharma, or some other sub-market. So, my comments will also be focused on HCI and healthcare providers.

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-host: Harvey Green
Co-host: Jirah Cox
Guest: Dave Weber

Exponential growth of unstructured data is putting a tremendous strain on the legacy three-tier architecture of VDI environments. Whether it is a single user VDI or a multi-user remote desktop service, deteriorating VDI performance, complexity in managing storage, protecting user data against cyberthreats and ransomware are key challenges. This is especially true with a growing remote workforce and user data.

Blog post: https://www.nutanix.com/blog/unified-data-services-platform-simplifies-vdi

Host: Phil Sellers
Co-Host: Harvey Green
Co-Host: Jirah Cox
Co-Host: Ben Rogers

In fact, some estimates say that a ransomware attack occurs every 11 seconds. These attacks can cripple an organization, causing unexpected downtime and wreaking havoc on an enterprise’s operations, production, customer service, and even future reputation. 

It can cost a lot of time, effort, and money to recover from a ransomware attack. Simply having a backup of your data is no longer sufficient, because attackers can now infiltrate backups as well. 

In addition to practicing “defense in depth,” IT professionals are now beginning to see the critical need for immutable backups as a last line of defense from ransomware and other attacks—and a smart way to maintain a successful strategy for business continuity and disaster recovery.

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-host: Harvey Green
Co-host: Jirah Cox

Join Philip Sellers and the XenTegra team as they break down the biggest announcements, from enterprise AI and agentic workflows to new partnerships, hybrid multi-cloud advancements, and expanded freedom of choice across the platform.

This is not a highlight reel. It is your roadmap.

In this episode, you will get:

•  The real impact of Nutanix’s AI strategy and what “AI factories” mean for your environment 
•  Key partnership updates with NVIDIA, AMD, NetApp, and more 
•  What’s changing with storage, cloud, and workload flexibility 
•  How Nutanix is doubling down on simplicity, security, and scalability 
•  Clear next steps to turn .NEXT insights into action 

If you are evaluating your next move, exploring alternatives, or looking to get more out of your current environment, this episode gives you the clarity to move forward with confidence.

Start Season 2 with what matters most. 

Year over year we continue to execute not because we have done it before but because we are never satisfied. We are very proud of the accomplishments we have made as we strive to continuously learn, innovate and improve. This requires us to listen to what our customers as well as employees are saying.

That’s why I’m excited to announce that for nine consecutive years we have received the NorthFace ScoreBoard (NFSB) Service Award for 2021, with the special Summit classification that recognizes exceptional organizations who have earned the award for seven or more years in a row.  Every year, the NFSB Service Award recognizes companies who provide superior customer service as voted by their customers. The award uses the image of Mount Everest to symbolize exceeding customer expectations.

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-host: Harvey Green
Co-host: Jirah Cox

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-Host: Jirah Cox
Guest: Steven Kaplan

Meanwhile, shadow IT is swiping credit cards simply to get work done which exacerbates the challenge. Lack of flexibility and choice lead business units to solve their problems the best way they can. Unfortunately, some decisions are not easy to change once applications are up and running.

Hyperconverged infrastructure on-premises fixed a lot of issues around responding to the speed of the business and now has made its way into the public cloud over the last five years. Today, a single cloud platform can address security, management and data sovereignty by deploying into the right hyperscaler, service provider or edge site where more and more processing occurs.

Blog: https://www.nutanix.com/blog/storage-mobility-to-meet-the-challenges-of-hybrid-multicloud post by Dwayne Lessner

Host: Phil Sellers
Co-Host: Jirah Cox
Co-Host: Ben Rogers

On average, downtime costs organizations $540,000 per hour. Every minute of downtime is a direct hit on revenue, reliability, and reputation. This is one of the most dreaded situations an IT department can face, which is why it’s crucial to have a strong data protection plan in place. 

Nutanix’s Cloud Platform’s data protection capabilities are robust and trusted by organizations who may have a need to build a solution for their highly sensitive and mission-critical data. The Nutanix® snapshot technology is natively built into the Nutanix Cloud Platform and offers a backup and disaster recovery plan that can be customized for your data protection needs in concert with a powerful ecosystem of Nutanix-certified backup vendor partners. 

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-host: Harvey Green
Co-host: Jirah Cox

Nutanix provides an industry-leading HCI platform that is ideal for running cloud-native workloads running on Kubernetes at scale. The Nutanix architecture offers better resilience for both Kubernetes platform components and application data. With the addition of each HCI node, apart from scaling the Kubernetes compute nodes, there is an additional storage controller as well which results in improved storage performance for your stateful applications. 

The Nutanix Unified Storage is made available to cloud-native applications with the Nutanix CSI driver. Applications use standard Kubernetes objects such as PersistentVolumeClaims, PersistentVolumes, and StorageClasses to access its capabilities. The CSI driver also enables users to take Persistent Volume snapshots using API objects VolumeSnaphot, VolumeSnapshotContent, and VolumeSnapshotClass. Snapshots represent a point-in-time copy of a volume and can be used to provision a new volume or to restore existing volumes to the previous snapshotted data. OpenShift Container Platform deploys the snapshot controller and the related API objects as part of the Nutanix CSI Operator as described in Blog 3. 

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-host: Harvey Green
Co-host: Jirah Cox

Blog: https://www.nutanix.com/blog/why-you-should-run-nkp-on-nutanix-cloud-clusters

Host: Phil Sellers, Practice Director for Modern Datacenter, XenTegra
Co-Host: Andy Greene, Solutions Architect, XenTegra
Co-Host: Chris Calhoun, Solutions Architect, XenTegra
Co-Host: Ben Rogers, Enterprise Sales Engineer, Nutanix

An increasing number of IT organizations are standardizing on Nutanix® HCI to power the applications and services that run their businesses. We have been working closely with our customers to guide product development efforts and have simultaneously invested in our vision to lead the next era in IT by bringing powerful yet simple hybrid cloud infrastructure to organizations everywhere. Let’s take a closer look at the most impactful new functionality delivered with this release.

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-host: Harvey Green
Co-host: Jirah Cox

NCM Self-Service (formerly Calm) provides an easy and seamless way to consume simple Infrastructure as a Service VMs and multi-tier applications via the marketplace[JG1] . This is possible via easy to use blueprints to automate complex application deployment processes. As NCM Self-Service continues to grow its footprint across enterprise deployments, customers have remarked on the need for even better governance and controls on resources provisioned and managed. Governance is key to building a cloud-like experience for IT organizations, and the ability to easily define and monitor policies are important for enterprise customers.

Host: Harvey Green
Co-host: Jirah Cox

Organizations are increasingly investing in the public cloud to solve business and IT challenges for improved operational flexibility, agility and cost-efficiency. According to 1,700 IT decision makers polled for the 2022 Enterprise Cloud Index report, 83% agree that hybrid multicloud is the ideal operating model.

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-Host: Harvey Green
Co-Host: Philip Sellers
Co-Host: Jirah Cox
Co-Host: Ben Rogers

VMware was a leader for most of the 21st century. However, during the past decade, Nutanix has been developing AHV to meet customer demand and has made steady and noteworthy progress.

Blog: https://www.nutanix.com/blog/migration-to-ahv-brownfield-considerations

Host: Phil Sellers, XenTegra
Co-Host: Chris Calhoun, XenTegra
Co-Host: Andy Greene, XenTegra

This happened when I examined my notes from a recent discussion with Adrian Darmawan, executive vice president and CTO of First Foundation Bank, which provides personal and business banking, private wealth management and trust services.

He gives credit to the Nutanix HCI for helping to navigate banking regulations, manage $7.7 billion in assets, and support customers and employees at 23 locations – while reducing the time spent on infrastructure management by up to 40%

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-Host: Harvey Green
Co-Host: Jirah Cox

This blog series introduces you to Microsoft Windows® Operating System (OS) optimizations, starting with version 1903. I will attempt to keep these optimizations as environment agnostic as possible.  Hopefully, these optimizations will be just as good to administrators of physical machines as to a virtual environment utilizing Nutanix® Frame, Citrix®, or VMware® Horizon solutions.

This series aims to share the seemingly infinite number of ways you can optimize a Windows environment, with something for beginners as well as administrators familiar with optimizations but looking to deliver an even better experience within your environment.

Of course the optimizations provided in this blog series are intended only as a guide.  Be sure to test the optimizations described in this series internally before pushing the changes to your production environment.

This installment addresses Active Setup: its purpose, how it works, and what can be done with it.  This particular area of the OS is criminally underused as a method of optimization.  As such, it should provide useful information to a wide range of readers.

Host:  Andy Whiteside
Co-Host: Harvey Green
Co-Host: Jon Spallone

Organizations are increasingly investing in the public cloud to solve business and IT challenges for improved operational flexibility, agility and cost-efficiency. According to 1,700 IT decision makers polled for the 2022 Enterprise Cloud Index report, 83% agree that hybrid multicloud is the ideal operating model.

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-Host: Harvey Green
Co-Host: Philip Sellers
Co-Host: Jirah Cox
Co-Host: Ben Rogers

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-Host: Jirah Cox
Guest: Sahil M Bansal

More often than not, even the most experienced IT professionals will still run into TCO, design, sizing, user experience, and administration challenges when it comes to DaaS. Folks seem to forget that matching the right use case to the right solution, managing expectations, proper budget planning, and solid design practices still apply in the world of public cloud and DaaS.

The purpose of this five-part blog series is to help you identify and (more importantly) avoid the mistakes that others have made when it comes to implementing a DaaS solution!

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-Host: Harvey Green
Co-Host: Jirah Cox
Guest: Ruben Spruijt

You must also make several detailed design decisions, then evaluate the complete solution for supportability, maintainability and scalability to ensure that it meets your operational needs, can adapt to changing requirements, and offers a compelling TCO and ROI.

At Nutanix, we understand that one size doesn’t fit all. To provide the right solution for your needs, we offer various technical solution artifacts: Tech Notes (TN), Best Practices Guides (BPGs), Reference Architectures (RAs), and Nutanix Validated Designs (NVDs).

Blog Link: https://www.nutanix.com/blog/nutanix-validated-designs-blueprints-for-success by Ketan Mota

Host: Phil Sellers
Co-Host: Harvey Green
Co-Host: Jirah Cox
Co-Host: Ben Rogers

While the idea of a Hybrid Cloud architecture has been around for a while, there have been several challenges that prevented rapid adoption of hybrid cloud platforms. Managing complex networking between on-premises datacenters and public clouds has been a long-standing obstacle, and re-architecting legacy applications for the cloud can be time-consuming and expensive. Another issue has been the inefficiency created by silos of using multiple different management tools for various clouds.

To address these challenges and power their customers IT needs to the next level, Nutanix is collaborating with Microsoft on hybrid cloud solutions that help blend the boundaries between cloud and on-premises for a true hybrid cloud experience.

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-Host: Harvey Green
Co-Host: Jirah Cox

If you want to move your on-prem applications to clouds such as AWS while maintaining the freedom to easily integrate multiple public clouds, Nutanix offers a solution that is quick to deploy, easy to manage, and keeps you in control of your infrastructure. 

Check out what we consider the five unique advantages of Nutanix Clusters.

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-Host: Harvey Green
Co-Host: Jirah Cox

The Forrester study also noted that many organizations lack standard workflow procedures that can streamline the provisioning process for more effective procedures in database provisioning. Surveyed customers commented that, when workflow best practices are applied holistically across several different database types, common provisioning mistakes could be avoided.

Nutanix has partnered with ServiceNow, Inc. to integrate Nutanix Era™ into the ServiceNow® platform. Using the ServiceNow Nutanix Era Plugin for Database Management, Era and ServiceNow customers can use standard workflow processes to ease database provisioning even further.

Nutanix Era can increase database provisioning by 97% through its one-click database management and control plane as noted in Forrester’s TEI report for Era. This process can be streamlined even further through the integration with ServiceNow’s digital workflow processes.

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-Host: Harvey Green
Co-Host: Jirah Cox
Co-Host: Jon Spallone

Kubernetes provides cloud-native capabilities, architecture, and operations which require new skill sets, posing a disruptive challenge to traditional organizations who desire the rapid software updates and performance scaling benefits. Like the Linux operating system, there are many Kubernetes distributions, and Red Hat OpenShift provides a market-leading platform to build, deploy and run applications with a consistent foundation across the hybrid cloud. Red Hat OpenShift includes over-the-air updates, container runtime, networking, ingress, monitoring, logging, container registry, and authentication and authorization solutions.

Nutanix provides simplicity, scalability, and hybrid cloud infrastructure, providing one-click upgrades of storage, compute, and network resources and services on your choice of hardware, public cloud, and service providers. Running Red Hat OpenShift on Nutanix provides a full stack, enterprise supported, standardized solution with greatly simplified platform management and many non-disruptive operations, accelerating the adoption of containers and cloud native applications.

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-Host: Harvey Green
Co-Host Jirah Cox

In addition to discovery and classification capabilities, NC Protect for Nutanix Files dynamically controls access to business-critical content and restricts how authorized users can share it and with whom, based on real-time comparison of user context and file content to enforce data governance and security policies. NC Protect provides unmatched information protection capabilities to prevent accidental sharing, data misuse and loss, while maintaining a simple and intuitive user experience that empowers customers to start securing information in hours, not days or weeks.

“Our client’s top priority, especially in the age of remote work, is to protect sensitive data stored and collaborated in Nutanix Files,” said Jayson O’Reilly, General Manager at Atvance Intellect. “Using NC Protect, customers can prevent unauthorized access to or sharing of sensitive documents in Nutanix Files. They can also leverage those same protections in other file shares and collaboration systems, such as Windows file shares, Office 365, and Microsoft SharePoint, all from the NC Protect platform to centrally manage data security.”

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-Host: Harvey Green
Co-Host: Jirah Cox
Guest: Randy Brown
Guest: Andy Lalaguna

The first supported solution at launch is the Nutanix Cloud Platform with Dell PowerFlex, a complete server-based infrastructure solution designed for large mission-critical environments where resiliency, security, scalability, and performance are essential.

Blog Post: https://www.nutanix.com/blog/nutanix-cloud-infrastructure-for-external-storage

Host: Phil Sellers, XenTegra
Co-Host: Chris Calhoun, XenTegra
Co-Host: Jirah Cox, Nutanix
Co-Host: Ben Rogers, Nutanix

Real-world examples from many ISVs and customers tell a different story with multiple drivers: low-latency, data privacy and cost (especially at scale) that make the Core DC (owned or hosted) a better choice. With leading market analysts agreeing on explosive data growth at storefront/ branch/ customer service center locations, for Edge AI/ML use cases, on-prem deployments are a ‘no-brainer’.

Blog: https://www.nutanix.dev/2023/10/12/deliver-enterprise-grade-edge-ai-ml-with-nutanix/

Host: Philip Sellers
Co-host: Harvey Green
Co-host: Jirah Cox
Co-host: Ben Rogers

While the idea of a Hybrid Cloud architecture has been around for a while, there have been several challenges that prevented rapid adoption of hybrid cloud platforms. Managing complex networking between on-premises datacenters and public clouds has been a long-standing obstacle, and re-architecting legacy applications for the cloud can be time-consuming and expensive. Another issue has been the inefficiency created by silos of using multiple different management tools for various clouds.

To address these challenges and power their customers IT needs to the next level, Nutanix is collaborating with Microsoft on hybrid cloud solutions that help blend the boundaries between cloud and on-premises for a true hybrid cloud experience.

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-Host: Harvey Green
Co-Host: Jirah Cox

In this episode of Nutanix Weekly, Philip Sellers is joined by Marcus Barton from Nutanix along with XenTegra Solutions Architects Andy Greene and Chris Calhoun to discuss how organizations are adapting to rising hardware costs, extended lead times, AI-driven infrastructure demand, and evolving operational challenges.

The team explores why flexibility, workload portability, and hybrid cloud strategy are becoming essential components of modern infrastructure planning. From Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) to extending hardware lifecycles and supporting multi-vendor environments, the conversation focuses on practical ways organizations can maintain momentum despite ongoing supply chain uncertainty.

Topics include:

•  AI infrastructure demand and supply chain pressure 
•  Hybrid cloud and workload portability 
•  Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) 
•  Multi-vendor infrastructure flexibility 
•  Extending hardware lifecycles 
•  Security and compliance considerations 
•  Infrastructure resilience and modernization 
•  Automation and lifecycle management 

As organizations continue balancing operational stability with digital transformation initiatives, infrastructure adaptability is quickly becoming a business necessity.

Read the related blog:
 How Nutanix Helps IT Teams Navigate Supply Chain Volatility

To survive in an increasingly competitive and shifting marketplace, organizations continue to look for ways to increase agility, scalability, and innovation with public and private cloud services. Today the cloud is a vital component of practically every business, regardless of industry and size. And when it comes to the cloud, the concept of “one-stop shop” doesn’t apply. 

Organizations are using multiple clouds to find the right balance between business and technical requirements and varying cloud services for their different workloads, so they can work as efficiently as possible. With the multiple cloud approach quickly becoming the de facto standard for modern enterprises, the term “multicloud” is often used to describe this approach, but that can be a bit of a misnomer. 

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-host: Philip Sellers
Co-host: Harvey Green
Co-host: Jirah Cox
Co-host: Ben Rogers

Our partnership with Cisco is built upon our shared leadership in application, data, infrastructure management and security. It represents our collective commitment to deliver a cohesive and consistent cloud operating model that transforms how businesses procure, deploy, secure, and manage IT services. This new platform is a fully integrated and validated solution that combines Cisco’s SaaS-managed compute and networking infrastructure (Cisco Unified Computing System with Cisco Intersight), networking (ACI), and management (UCS Manager)  with Nutanix Cloud Platform–which includes Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) and its built-in AHV Hypervisor, Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM), Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS), and Desktop Services solutions. 

Host: Andy Whiteside
Co-host: Philip Sellers
Co- host: Harvey Green
Co-host: Jirah Cox
Co-host: Ben Rogers

Expect clear insights.
 Real conversations.
 And practical next steps you can act on.

If you’re navigating on-prem, cloud, or both, this is your weekly edge.

Episode 1 Drops soon! Stay tuned!