Nutanix - Experts & Thought Leaders

Nutanix, a hybrid cloud pioneer and AI platform company, announces its acquisition of Ryax Technologies (Ryax), an AI-driven compute orchestration and management platform company based in France. The acquisition will accelerate Nutanix’s strategy to empower enterprises to build, run, and govern agentic AI anywhere by integrating the Ryax platform’s advanced GPU utilization and smart scheduling capabilities directly into Nutanix Kubernetes Platform (NKP) and Nutanix Enterprise AI (NAI). The rapid expansion of agentic AI is driving up the demand for efficient inference workloads across the enterprise. However, GPU shortages and fragmented infrastructure have led many organizations to split their compute footprint across private data centers, hyperscalers, and neoclouds to find available capacity. To make these deployments economically viable, enterprises need a unified hybrid cloud operating model that abstracts this complexity, simplifies operations, and maximises hardware efficiency. Maximising hardware efficiency Additionally, enterprises today often struggle to move AI projects from experimentation into production because of the significant infrastructure integration and manual configuration required. The Ryax platform is designed to resolve these challenges by automating the underlying infrastructure, data, hardware, and code to help customers deploy AI projects faster, more cost-effectively, and more reliably. With the Ryax platform, Nutanix is targeting two critical architectural capabilities for customers: Intelligent Resource Optimization and AI-Aware Smart Scheduling. Intelligent Resource Optimization: The Ryax platform enables customers to make the most effective use of available computing resources, such as GPUs and CPUs, to improve performance and reduce waste. Advance AI initiatives AI-Aware Smart Scheduling: Customers will be able to automatically place AI workloads on cost-effective hardware to help maximize performance and budget. Together, these capabilities are designed to help customers advance AI initiatives by improving infrastructure efficiency, managing costs, and making better use of available hardware. “The Ryax platform was built to give enterprises seamless execution across hybrid infrastructure, like private data centres, hyperscalers and neoclouds, handling the backend complexity so teams can deploy, scale and manage AI workflows from day one,” said Andry Razafinjatovo, CEO, Ryax Technologies. “By combining our technology and talented team with Nutanix and its hybrid cloud platform, we will further empower organizations to accelerate their agentic AI initiatives seamlessly, wherever their infrastructure lives.” Simplifying enterprise AI "Agentic AI requires a flexible architecture, simple operations and the ability to use infrastructure far more efficiently," said Rajiv Ramaswami, CEO of Nutanix. "Our acquisition of Ryax helps to directly answer the challenges enterprises face today with agentic AI infrastructure management. The acquisition marks an exciting milestone in our commitment to simplifying enterprise AI at scale. We are thrilled to welcome the talented Ryax team to Nutanix as we continue to deliver on our promise to help customers safely run AI, applications and data anywhere." Nutanix plans to integrate the Ryax platform into future releases of NKP and NAI. The Ryax team will join Nutanix in France and will continue to drive this transformative technology forward. The financial impact of the acquisition is not material to Nutanix.

Nutanix, a hybrid cloud pioneer and AI innovator, announces support for the general availability of Microsoft Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) Hybrid with Nutanix AHV, giving organizations greater choice over where their virtual desktops and data run. This will enable organizations to run Azure Virtual Desktop session hosts on-premises while continuing to use Microsoft’s cloud-based control plane for identity, access and session brokering. Nutanix has been involved in the Azure Virtual Desktop Hybrid initiative from the outset as a launch ecosystem partner, helping bring Azure Virtual Desktop Hybrid support to the Nutanix AHV hypervisor. Retaining greater control This hybrid deployment model is designed for organizations that want to modernise desktop delivery while retaining greater control over their infrastructure and data. It is particularly relevant across regulated industries where data residency, digital sovereignty, security, latency, performance and infrastructure economics can influence where workloads need to run. With Azure Virtual Desktop Hybrid on Nutanix, the Azure Virtual Desktop control plane remains in Azure while session hosts run on Nutanix AHV in the customer’s data center. Azure Arc connects those session hosts into the Azure environment, helping preserve the Azure-based identity, policy and management experience. Users can authenticate through Microsoft Entra ID, while organizations retain control over areas such as VM capacity, lifecycle management, networking, storage, disaster recovery and automation on AHV. Reducing operational effort Organizations can also choose how they want to operate the environment. Teams with established scripting and automation skills can use Nutanix APIs and tools to manage Azure Virtual Desktop Hybrid directly, while organizations looking to reduce operational effort can use Nerdio Manager to automate and centralize tasks such as VM provisioning, lifecycle management, power management, image and patch updates, policy management and autoscaling. Key capabilities include: Running Azure Virtual Desktop session hosts on premises on Nutanix AHV while retaining Microsoft’s Azure-based Azure Virtual Desktop control plane. Supporting data residency and digital sovereignty objectives by keeping desktops and data within customer-controlled environments. Using Azure Arc and Microsoft Entra ID to maintain a consistent identity, policy and management experience across the hybrid environment. Supporting Windows Server multi-session and Windows 11 Enterprise single-session, with Windows 11 multi-session remaining exclusive to Azure and Azure Local. Giving IT teams a choice between API-driven management and automated orchestration with Nerdio Manager. Helping organizations balance cloud innovation with existing infrastructure investments, operational control, performance requirements and cost considerations. Preserving existing investments "Customer choice and flexibility are at the core of Azure Virtual Desktop Hybrid. Nutanix's support helps organizations extend the benefits of Azure Virtual Desktop to environments that align with their operational and business requirements, enabling a smoother path to modernisation while preserving existing investments,” said Bhavya Chopra, Partner Director, Product Management, Microsoft. “The value for customers is straightforward. They no longer have to choose between using Azure Virtual Desktop and maintaining control over where their desktops run. If compliance, data sovereignty, latency or cost means those workloads need to stay on premises, they can run them on Nutanix AHV while still using Microsoft’s Azure Virtual Desktop services. It gives IT teams a more practical way to modernise without forcing every workload into the same model,” said Tarkan Maner, President at Nutanix.

Nutanix, a hybrid cloud pioneer and AI innovator, announces the general availability of Nutanix Enterprise AI (NAI) 2.8, and the upcoming general availability of Nutanix Kubernetes Platform (NKP) 2.19, along with new incentives, programs, and resources designed to help partners accelerate growth on emerging AI opportunities. Many enterprises face a major roadblock when deploying AI: AI is accelerating the shift to containers, while critical applications and data remain spread across both virtualised and containerised environments. This divide can force enterprises to add infrastructure silos, move data or rearchitect existing workloads to support AI alongside the applications and data they already run. Dual-native architecture Nutanix addresses this with a governed, dual-native architecture that runs traditional applications and modern AI side by side, allowing the infrastructure to flexibly support the workload, integrated with silicon partners to provide choice and flexibility to customers. By bringing AI to where enterprise data already lives, Nutanix helps customers reduce silos and accelerate ROI without costly rearchitecting or added networking and data layer complexity. Expanding on NCP capabilities, NAI and NKP are designed to enable organizations to securely run, manage, and govern AI, containerised applications and virtualised workloads through a consistent control plane. These complement the core platform capabilities for near-bare metal performance for AI on virtualised infrastructure introduced with NCI 7.6. Together, they give enterprises a flexible alternative to infrastructure stacks that limit architectural choice, drive up costs, and require disruptive platform changes. Adaptable multitenant cloud foundation For partners, the new Powered by Nutanix: Verified Services program aims to enable them to capitalize on major industry shifts and next-generation AI deployments by empowering them to build validated, high-margin services practices that span the full customer lifecycle. To operationalise these flexible new offerings, Service Provider (SP) Central provides an adaptable multitenant cloud foundation, giving service providers the control they need to grow infrastructure, platform, cloud-native, and AI services on their own terms. “Enterprise AI should not require customers to rebuild the systems that already run their business,” said Thomas Cornely, Executive Vice President, Product Management, Nutanix. “With our dual-native architecture, customers can bring AI to their existing applications and data while running each workload on the infrastructure best suited to it, with consistent operations and governance across VMs, containers and AI. This gives organizations a practical path to production without creating new silos or limiting future choice.” Unified and secure platform NAI delivers a unified and secure platform to deploy, manage, and scale AI workloads across hybrid environments. It enables enterprises to enforce governance over their agents and models, gain total visibility over token usage, and streamline AI development with a simple interface with built-in observability metrics and easy to use model-as-a-service while ensuring security, scalability, and integration with existing infrastructure. Key NAI updates include: Agent Gateway: This now includes a generally available MCP Gateway which serves as a secure, unified front door for AI agents to access tools and data without custom engineering. To complement this, Nutanix has also released MCP Server for NCP to help customers build agentic AI applications with secure access to the infrastructure managed by Nutanix.  Private Inference: New advanced inference and fine tuning capabilities enable scalable, multiGPU inference for LLMs via tensor parallelism, delivering high-throughput serving and low-latency response times for enterprise LLM workloads. In addition, this enables batch inference and speculative decoding. Key features include: 1) Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning which supports Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) fine-tuning for smaller models (<8B parameters), helping organizations to cost-effectively customize open LLMs on private domain data using single-GPU compute while seamlessly deploying adapters straight to serving pipelines; 2) Scalable multiGPU serving which enables high-throughput multiGPU inference via tensor parallelism, delivering fast, distributed serving across enterprise hybrid cloud environments; and 3) Speculative decoding which accelerates LLM inference token generation by up to 2.5x using lightweight draft models, cutting output latency without sacrificing model accuracy. Enhanced Security against Rogue AI: With the rise of agentic AI and the risk of models breaking out of sandboxes, security is paramount. NAI provides robust protection against rogue models through our platform and APIs, featuring fine-grained Identity and Access Management (IAM), custom roles and seamless model sharing. This enforces least-privilege security, helping ensure agents operate securely and restricting access to only authorized roles, as well as support for air-gapped NVIDIA NIM deployment. Running agentic applications With NKP, organizations can simplify container operations across containers running on bare metal and VMs without piecing together complex, custom stacks. The upcoming release will provide an AI-optimized platform for building and running agentic applications at scale, including the following features coming soon: NKP Metal: Built to bring HCI-grade simplicity to bare-metal Kubernetes, with automated OS, firmware, and container deployment, and persistent, enterprise-grade storage natively, eliminating the complexity of patchwork platforms. NKP Full Stack: While NKP Metal is intended to bring simplicity to bare-metal deployments, NKP on AHV remains the cornerstone for organizations requiring robust, agile virtualised environments. Combined with Nutanix Flow, NKP on AHV is designed to deliver stronger network-level sandboxing for AI agents, helping provide essential isolation to mitigate the risk of rogue attacks and lateral movement. AI Applications Catalog: Offers a one-click deployment path for curated, validated AI/ML software (Kubeflow, Milvus, Slurm) to help bypass manual integration challenges. Hardware and Compliance: Planned expansion of ecosystem support with validated GPU integrations, alongside dynamic resource allocation for modern AI workloads. CNCF Certified Kubernetes AI Conformant Platform: NKP has attained formal CNCF certification to validate that NKP provides the standardized APIs and capabilities required to reliably operate enterprise AI workloads. Maximising GPU utilization Demanding AI workloads require infrastructure that keeps data moving, maximises GPU utilization, and reduces deployment risk. Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) recently achieved NVIDIA-Certified Storage validation at the enterprise level, providing a trusted, interoperable foundation that helps eliminate data bottlenecks. NUS establishes a low-latency, high-throughput data path directly to GPUs, maximising GPU utilization and ensuring linear scalability for large-scale production AI workloads. According to Gartner®, “By 2029, 55 percent of enterprises will migrate 100 percent of workloads from VMware to alternative infrastructure delivery solutions”. To help partners capitalize on this market shift, next-generation AI deployments and other emerging opportunities, Nutanix recently launched the Powered by Nutanix: Verified Services program. This program provides the framework to support the broader partner ecosystem in transitioning from traditional, one-time deals to high-margin, recurring revenue streams by building validated services practices. Backed by streamlined onboarding, comprehensive service delivery kits, and exclusive badging across hybrid cloud infrastructure, Kubernetes, and VM migration, the program equips partners to own the full customer lifecycle, drive faster time-to-value, and maximize long-term retention. Broad portfolio of infrastructure Nutanix is also announcing the general availability of SP Central, a unified multitenant control plane that gives displaced VMware service provider partners greater choice in how they build and monetise services. Service Provider Central gives providers one consistent foundation to build and monetise a broad portfolio of infrastructure, application, cloud-native, and AI services, with the flexibility on deployment location and licensing they need. This is designed to help providers improve utilization and protect margins while giving customers more choice in how and where they run applications and AI workloads. “The Nutanix Cloud Platform gives us a dual-native architecture that is governed and brings AI to our applications and data across virtual machines and containers.  This helps speed AI innovation across the production environments our organization depends on,” said Jasim Abdul Rahman, Group Chief Information Officer, Power International Holding. Prioritising platform consistency Industry Analyst Commentary - “By introducing a “dual native” model that unifies services such as networking, security, and data protection across both VMs and containers, Nutanix is leaning into a competitive landscape where consistent policy enforcement and lifecycle management are becoming key differentiators. Enterprises are increasingly prioritising platform consistency as application portfolios span legacy, refactored, and cloud-native designs,” said Matt Flug, IDC. Ecosystem Partners Commentary - “As enterprises deploy agentic AI to automate complex workflows, they need infrastructure that delivers the performance, security and control required for production environments. Cisco is bringing that foundation. Together with Nutanix’s governed, dual-native cloud operating model, we’re giving organizations greater choice in how they deploy and operate AI while maintaining the control they need across their environment,” said Jeremy Foster, Cisco GM & SVP, Cisco Compute. Highly regulated industries "At Continent 8 Technologies, we've worked closely alongside Nutanix to help shape the next generation of cloud services for regulated industries. Our continued collaboration with Nutanix, including the development of Service Provider Central, is built around helping our customers adopt modern cloud and AI capabilities without adding unnecessary complexity. Together, we're enabling organizations in highly regulated industries to innovate faster and focus on their core business, while maintaining the security, compliance, and operational control they require,” said Edward O’Connor, Chief Technology Officer at Continent 8 Technologies. “The rise of agentic AI is redefining how AI services are delivered, making security and sovereignty foundational requirements. Through our collaboration with Nutanix, we are enabling enterprises and service providers to build high-performance, multitenant AI platforms with hardware-enforced isolation and security. This ensures that sensitive data and models remain protected in use, delivering the secure scale and efficiency required for next-generation AI factories,” said Bill Pearson, VP, Data Center Software, Intel. NAI 2.8 and SP Central are generally available now. NKP 2.19 will be available soon.