Nutanix Xi IoT Brings Cloud Computing Intelligence to the Edge

Nutanix, Inc., a leader in enterprise cloud computing, has announced the general availability of Xi IoT, a new edge computing service offered as part of the company’s Xi Cloud Services. Combining the simplified elegance of core Nutanix solutions with a streamlined approach, Xi IoT eliminates complexity, accelerates the speed of deployment and elevates developers to focus on the business logic powering IoT applications and services.

In 2017, 3 billion enterprise IoT edge devices generated up to 30 times more data (256 ZB) than the 30+ million nodes across public and private cloud data centers. But the current IoT model in which the massive amounts of data on edge devices is sent back to a centralized cloud for processing has severely limited the ability of customers to make real-time, actionable decisions from intelligence gained at the edge. For customers, deriving value from this massive amount of data is rife with latency issues, lack of scalability, lack of autonomy, and compliance and privacy issues.

Unlike traditional IoT models, the Xi IoT platform delivers local compute, machine inference, and data services to perform real-time processing at the edge. Xi IoT Data Pipelines can securely move intelligently analyzed data to a customer’s public (Azure, AWS or GCP) or private cloud platform of choice for long-term analysis. Edge and core cloud deployments all operate on the same data and management plane, so Xi IoT customers have seamless, simplified insight into their deployment. Because Xi IoT provides zero-touch setup and management of edge devices, organizations can eliminate the risk of IoT security breaches due to human error, increase overall efficiency and reduce the cost of operating edge devices across the globe.

“It is critical for enterprise organizations to have an edge strategy to unify, edge to cloud connectivity, to rapidly build IoT applications, and to provide real-time analytics closer to where the data is generated,” said, Ashish Nadkarni, Group Vice President, Infrastructure Systems, Platforms and Technologies, IDC. “For companies looking for a competitive advantage, solutions like Nutanix Xi IoT can help them stay ahead of the market and identify new opportunities to grow their businesses.”

Through Xi IoT, customers can manage all their edge locations through a sophisticated infrastructure and application lifecycle management tool, regardless of platform. Developers can leverage a rich set of popular open APIs to deploy next-generation data science applications as containerized applications or as functions, which are small snippets of code. This can be integrated into existing CI/CD pipelines, allowing them to make changes quickly from a single location. By leveraging this well-known framework, Xi IoT helps IT organizations reduce training, development and testing costs while eliminating the possibility an organization is locked in to one public cloud provider. And because data is processed in real-time at the edge, companies are no longer inhibited by the transmission of data back to a core datacenter for processing, so decisions can be made based on data autonomously and in real-time.

Xi IoT is part of Nutanix’s Xi Cloud Services which is comprised of five distinct services, including Leap, which address the growing challenges of the multicloud era. These services bring together not only the ability to standardize workflows and harmonize operations across environments, but also the ability to blur the lines between clouds, seamlessly utilizing applications and data across multiple clouds for a variety of data protection, application delivery and edge locations requirements.

Offered as part of Nutanix Enterprise, customers can take advantage of:

Xi Leap - Cloud-based disaster recovery (DR) services to protect your critical business applications and data. Leap services are enabled directly in Nutanix Prism for a completely integrated public + private cloud experience.

Xi Frame - unique desktop-as-a-service platform built from scratch specifically for cloud deployment, now integrating role-based access control.

Xi Beam - a multi-cloud cost optimization and governance tool that allows customers to reduce cost and enhance cloud security across platforms, public and private.

Xi Epoch- an observability and monitoring solution for multicloud applications that provides a Google Maps-like view of applications to determine performance bottlenecks and availability issues in any cloud environment.