5 Benefits of Building Your Hybrid Multicloud with Nutanix NC2 and AWS

December 12, 2024

Article
8 min

5 Benefits of Building Your Hybrid Multicloud with Nutanix NC2 and AWS

This blog talks about five scenarios where your IT environment can significantly benefit from a hybrid cloud with our solutions from our partners at Nutanix and AWS. We shed light on each solution, how to implement it and why it is valuable.

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What's Inside
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The CDW 2024 Canadian Hybrid Cloud Report found that 60 percent of organizations plan to leverage multiple clouds over the next two years. The surveyed organizations indicate the following reasons as the key drivers of this transition:

  • Leverage cloud-specific capabilities from different providers (44 percent)
  • Optimize application performance (38 percent)
  • Reduce overall cloud spend (37 percent)

In their journey to adopt hybrid cloud solutions, IT teams must also prepare for the operational complexities. IT directors must arm cloud administrators with the right platform tools and simplified management to help them maximize hybrid cloud profitability.

This blog talks about five scenarios where your IT environment can significantly benefit from a hybrid cloud with our solutions from our partners at Nutanix and AWS. We shed light on each solution, how to implement it and why it is valuable.

Download the 2024 CDW Canadian Hybrid Cloud Report→

How hybrid solutions like Nutanix NC2 hosted on AWS benefit IT teams

The key to high-performing hybrid infrastructure is establishing a strong interconnection and smooth interoperability between two different environments. It could be two or more public clouds (multicloud) or a combination of public and private clouds. However, as each cloud environment is configured uniquely, making them work together can be challenging.

Our partner solutions offered by Nutanix feature the Nutanix Cloud Cluster, a streamlined way to handle the complex interplay of hybrid multicloud. With NC2, organizations can seamlessly move applications and workloads between on-premises data centres and public cloud platforms without re-architecting or making significant changes.

NC2 helps you extend your private infrastructure to AWS

Using NC2, IT administrators can build a cohesive hybrid cloud that can leverage scalable AWS cloud services as needed. NC2 can be deployed on the AWS platform with unified cloud control provided by Nutanix Prism, AOS Storage and Flow – the packaged cloud management software.

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5 benefits of building your hybrid multicloud with Nutanix NC2 and AWS

Here are five ways NC2 and AWS can help organizations unlock key benefits such as improved disaster recovery and reduced cloud costs

1. Enhance disaster recovery (DR) with seamless failover

For organizations with mission-critical workloads running privately, building the capacity required for disaster recovery on-premises could be costly and complicated. They need a more scalable alternative that is OPEX-friendly.

NC2 integrates with AWS to solve this scenario cost-effectively and scalably. Organizations can replicate on-premises workloads to AWS regions without maintaining a secondary physical data centre.

In a disaster event, workloads can instantly fail over to the AWS cloud, ensuring business continuity. The highly elastic nature of the AWS cloud allows them to host their business applications until on-premises systems come back to normal without bloating the costs.

Once the issue is resolved, workloads can fail back to on-premises systems, minimizing downtime and data loss. This eliminates the need for expensive, underutilized DR hardware while ensuring quick recovery and reliable protection.

2. Effortless temporary workload bursting

Workload bursting refers to temporarily scaling out an organization's IT workloads to a public cloud during periods of high demand. This ensures that customers continue to receive a consistent experience even if the workload capacity fluctuates.

During seasonal demand spikes or with large-scale analytics programs, there is a high chance that on-premises systems with fixed resources may run out of capacity.

For such scenarios, Nutanix NC2 allows organizations to burst workloads to AWS with a quick and straightforward interconnection that swiftly moves workloads between environments.

Organizations can spin up additional capacity in AWS without overprovisioning on-premises infrastructure. This way, they can gain the ability to handle short-term capacity needs while avoiding long-term investments in on-premises hardware.

3. Cost-effective data centre expansion or consolidation

The public cloud can act as an extended data centre running parallel to private systems for simpler tasks such as object storage or virtual machines. This frees up the local data centre space and helps remove extraneous hardware from the floor.

However, organizations must maintain governance and security in the process. The Canadian Hybrid Cloud Report states that 34 percent of organizations need help to ensure that specific workloads run on the best cloud option.

With NC2, IT teams can manage intercloud connectivity from a single pane of glass and access AWS Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) with a standard NC2 abstraction layer. This allows them to introduce better security and improved governance while expanding their on-premises data centre to the cloud.

Instead of buying additional hardware, they can stretch their local environment virtually to AWS, with NC2 managing the entire interconnection. This way, the growing demand for computing, storage and networking resources can be frugally offloaded to AWS, which is less expensive than setting up an on-premises data centre and more OPEX-driven.

4. Refresh enterprise virtualization licences without bloating costs

Organizations usually use virtualization software on top of their on-premises hardware to manage the entire infrastructure as a single pool of resources. However, as these software licensing agreements grow costly with time, it becomes more difficult to justify their value.

Organizations facing expiring enterprise licensing agreements for their on-premises virtualization platforms can benefit significantly from transitioning to Nutanix NC2 integrated with AWS. This solution provides a seamless path to modernize and optimize IT infrastructure without significant disruptions.

With Nutanix NC2, businesses can migrate existing workloads to AWS while maintaining operational consistency. NC2 supports the same hypervisor and management tools that IT teams are already familiar with, reducing training needs and enabling rapid adoption.

Additionally, workloads can be shifted to the cloud with minimal refactoring, preserving investments in existing infrastructure and applications.

5. Optimize TCO for a hybrid cloud infrastructure

AWS offers several on-demand cloud services that can reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) compared to private infrastructure. For instance, storing 100 TB of data will generally cost less with AWS Simple Storage Service (S3) compared to buying physical storage of the same size.

NC2 allows organizations to align workloads with the most cost-effective AWS IaaS offerings, leveraging AWS' pay-as-you-go model alongside Nutanix's efficient on-premises infrastructure.

Workloads with unpredictable demand can run in AWS for elasticity, while stable workloads remain on-premises to maximize cost efficiency. With NC2's automated optimization, businesses can avoid over-provisioning and reduce idle resource costs.

This helps organizations significantly reduce operational expenditure (OPEX) while maintaining performance and flexibility across hybrid environments.

Build a better hybrid cloud with CDW, AWS and Nutanix

As you plan to strengthen your hybrid cloud, optimize licensing costs or build a new hybrid solution, CDW’s partnerships with Nutanix and AWS can help you achieve your goals. We smoothen out the entire process for your organization, from consulting on your needs to deploying NC2 clusters in AWS.

CDW is a long-standing AWS partner recognized for having a thriving pool of cloud engineers, AWS experts and accreditations to assist with all things cloud. From initial migrations to full modernization, CDW can be a key part of your support team to ensure success.

To realize the benefits of NC2 and AWS for your hybrid cloud, speak with our AWS experts who can help you roadmap the migration process. Allow your IT teams to focus on business value as we manage the solution development and tooling on our end.