Aviatrix Partners With Nutanix To Bridge HCI And Public Clouds
Cloud networking technology developer Aviatrix has formed a technology and sales partnership with hyper-converged infrastructure technology developer Nutanix, along with a joint offering to help enterprises automate the connection between on-premises and public cloud environments.
The new offering brings the Aviatrix Cloud Interconnect software and the new Nutanix Calm multi-cloud orchestration software together to let Nutanix customers extend their data center networks into Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure or other public clouds.
Nutanix Calm, unveiled last week, is a single software fabric that lets customers define and publish applications in the form of blueprints that can then be provisioned across different cloud environments.
Nutanix Calm, which is expected to be available late this year, takes advantage of the compute and storage capabilities of the Nutanix hyper-converged infrastructure software stack to converge applications using the VMware ESX, Microsoft Hyper-V, and Nutanix AHV hypervisors across public clouds and Nutanix's own upcoming cloud services.
Aviatrix develops technology to network on-premises IT infrastructures together with public clouds, said Steven Mih (pictured), CEO of Palo Alto, Calif.-based Aviatrix.
The company is not offering software-defined networking, Mih told CRN. "We build cloud software that enables cloud networking without changing data center networking at all," he said. "This lets enterprises build a cloud networking without needed to know the CLI (command line interface) for the cloud."
Aviatrix enables hybrid cloud and on-premises workloads without the need for tools like routers, Mih said. "Aviatrix uses point-and-click tools that don't impact the data center," he said. "We provide a single portal to let enterprises leverage both public and private networks."
Partnering with Nutanix on Nutanix Calm addresses one way to meet the needs for enterprises to bring their private cloud investments to public clouds, Mih said.
The two have a bundled offering sold via Aviatrix and Nutanix channel partners that gives customers a one-click deployment of hybrid cloud connected to their Nutanix appliances. The offering also orchestrates hybrid hyper-converged infrastructure environments via a single management portal with Nutanix Calm, Mih said.
The Aviatrix technology is also being extended to Cisco's Hyperflex hyper-converged infrastructures, although rather than working directly with Cisco it is offered as a "meet-in-the-channel offering, he said.
Aviatrix currently sells primarily direct to customers, but that is changing, Mih said. "We are transitioning to indirect channels as quickly as we can turn on channel partners," he said. "We expect to get help with this from companies like Nutanix."
One Aviatrix channel partner which does not currently work with Nutanix said Aviatrix's technology is the easiest way to migrate data between on-premises and Amazon Web Services environments.
John Peak, managing partner at Candid Partners, an Atlanta-based solution provider and channel partner to both Aviatrix and AWS, told CRN that Aviatrix has become his company's go-to way to migrate data between AWS and the data center.
Candid Partners originally used Aviatrix to move massive amounts of network-attached storage-based data from on-premises to AWS and back, Peak said. "There was no easy way to network the two and still have failover capabilities," he said. "We ended up using Aviatrix with NetApp. It turns out NetApp has the best native cloud storage out there."
Candid Partners also use Aviatrix to develop such broader applications as mesh networks, Peak said. "It makes things highly available," he said. "And it reduces costs. Migrating data can take a lot of effort to set up the different links. Aviatrix is much easier to set up."
Aviatrix also scales well, Peak said. "We can get multiple pipes running parallel," he said. "This leads to a lot of bandwidth. We've seen it can easily support 10 Gbits per second."