Technology Partners
Nutanix
Introducing Nutanix
Nutanix is a global leader in hybrid multicloud software
One Platform. Any App. Any Cloud. Radically Simpler Infrastructure.
What Is Nutanix?
Nutanix is a global leader in hybrid multicloud software, trusted by more than 29,000 organisations worldwide to run their applications, manage their data and simplify their infrastructure operations. Founded as the pioneer of hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), Nutanix has evolved into a full cloud platform company, giving organisations the ability to run any workload, on any infrastructure, in any location, through a single unified management experience.
The core promise of Nutanix is simplicity. Traditional data centre infrastructure is complex, expensive to operate and slow to change, built on separate layers of compute, storage and networking that each require specialist expertise, separate management tools and careful coordination. Nutanix collapses this complexity into a software-defined platform that delivers all of these capabilities together, managed through a single interface, with the automation and intelligence to keep it running efficiently at scale.
For Irish organisations looking to modernise their infrastructure, escape vendor lock-in, reduce operational overhead, or build a resilient hybrid cloud environment without the complexity and cost of traditional enterprise infrastructure, Nutanix provides a proven, pragmatic path forward.
Talk to Pure Networks About Nutanix
Whether you are looking to modernise ageing infrastructure, migrate away from VMware, build a resilient hybrid cloud environment, or simplify the operational complexity of your current data centre, Nutanix provides a proven and pragmatic path forward.
Pure Networks brings the engineering expertise to design the right solution for your environment, deploy it correctly, and support it over the long term.
The Nutanix Cloud Platform – Run Any Application, Manage Any Data, Anywhere. Learn More ›
Hyperconverged Infrastructure and Nutanix AOS – The Storage and Compute Foundation That Changed Enterprise Infrastructure Learn More ›
AHV Hypervisor – Enterprise Virtualisation – Included, Not Extra Learn More ›
Prism – Unified Management – One Interface to See, Manage and Optimise Your Entire Infrastructure Learn More ›
Flow Network Security – Software-Defined Microsegmentation – Zero Trust Without the Complexity Learn More ›
Data Protection and Disaster Recovery – Built-In Business Continuity – Without the Complexity of Separate DR Tools Learn More ›
Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) – Extend Your On-Premises Nutanix Environment Into AWS or Azure – Seamlessly Learn More ›
The Nutanix Cloud Platform
What Is It?
The Nutanix Cloud Platform (NCP) is the overarching software platform that brings together all of Nutanix’s infrastructure, virtualisation, networking, security, data protection and management capabilities into a single, cohesive product. It is the foundation on which organisations run virtual machines, containerised applications, modern cloud-native workloads and increasingly AI-driven applications, whether on-premises, at the edge, in public cloud or across a combination of all three.
NCP is delivered as software that runs on Nutanix-qualified hardware nodes or, through Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2), natively on AWS and Microsoft Azure. This consistent software layer means the same management experience, the same security policies and the same operational processes apply regardless of where workloads are actually running, removing the friction that typically comes with managing hybrid and multi-cloud environments through separate tools.
Key Platform Capabilities
- Unified management of virtual machines, containers, and cloud workloads across on-premises, edge, and public cloud environments through a single control plane
- Software-defined compute, storage, and networking converged into a single platform, eliminating the complexity and cost of maintaining separate infrastructure layers
- Built-in data protection, disaster recovery, and business continuity capabilities managed natively within the platform, without requiring separate backup and DR tools
- Integrated security through microsegmentation, software-defined firewalling, role-based access control, and encryption, with security policies that follow workloads as they move
- Support for traditional VM-based workloads, modern Kubernetes-based containerised applications, and AI workloads including GPU-accelerated inference and training environments
- Trusted by 29,000+ customers globally across financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, public sector, retail and every other major industry vertical
Why It Matters for Your Organisation
Most organisations are running infrastructure that is more complex, more expensive and harder to change than it needs to be. Separate storage, compute and networking layers, each with their own management tools and specialist requirements, slow down IT operations and consume budget that could be directed at business outcomes. The Nutanix Cloud Platform simplifies this fundamentally, not by removing capability, but by delivering it through a unified, software-defined model that is faster to deploy, easier to manage, and dramatically less expensive to operate over time.
The Pure Networks Advantage
Pure Networks designs, deploys and supports Nutanix Cloud Platform environments for Irish organisations, from initial architecture and sizing through to full deployment, configuration and ongoing management. We bring both the infrastructure expertise and the security knowledge to ensure your Nutanix environment is built correctly from the ground up.
Hyperconverged Infrastructure and Nutanix AOS
What Is It?
Nutanix invented hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) and its Acropolis Operating System (AOS) remains the most mature and capable HCI software platform available. AOS is the distributed operating system that runs across all nodes in a Nutanix cluster, managing storage, data protection, replication and cluster operations through a software-defined architecture that abstracts the underlying hardware into a single, pooled resource.
In a traditional three-tier infrastructure model, compute servers, storage area networks and networking equipment are all separate systems that must be integrated, managed and upgraded independently. Nutanix HCI converges all of these into standardised nodes that can be added to expand capacity or performance with no disruption to running workloads. The platform scales linearly: adding nodes adds proportional compute, storage and performance, with no complex reconfiguration required.
Key Capabilities
- Scale-out distributed storage that eliminates the need for dedicated storage area networks (SANs) and the specialist expertise required to manage them
- Intelligent data placement and tiering that automatically moves frequently accessed data to faster storage tiers for optimal performance
- Erasure coding and data deduplication to maximise storage efficiency and reduce the raw capacity required for a given workload footprint
- Native encryption at rest and in transit, with support for external key management systems for organisations with strict data sovereignty requirements
- Non-disruptive upgrades, allowing AOS software and hardware nodes to be updated without downtime or impact to running workloads
- Linear scalability from a minimum of three nodes to hundreds of nodes per cluster, with the ability to manage multiple clusters through a single Prism Central instance
- Support for a wide range of hardware configurations including all-flash, hybrid and high-density options, across multiple hardware vendor platforms
Why It Matters for Your Organisation
If your organisation is running ageing three-tier infrastructure, approaching a hardware refresh cycle, or struggling with the operational complexity of managing separate compute and storage systems, Nutanix HCI represents a significant and proven simplification. Organisations consistently report reductions in infrastructure operational effort of 50-70% after moving to Nutanix, along with meaningful improvements in storage efficiency and a substantial reduction in the floor space, power and cooling costs associated with legacy SAN infrastructure.
AHV Hypervisor
What Is It?
AHV is Nutanix’s enterprise-grade hypervisor, built directly into the Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure platform. Unlike VMware ESXi, which requires a separate licence, management infrastructure and specialist training, AHV is included with every Nutanix deployment at no additional cost and managed through the same Prism interface used for everything else on the platform.
AHV is built on an enterprise-hardened KVM foundation and delivers full VM lifecycle management, live migration, high availability, snapshot and cloning capabilities, and deep integration with Nutanix’s storage, networking and security features. For the many organisations currently running VMware who are evaluating their options following Broadcom’s acquisition and the significant licence cost increases that followed, AHV represents a mature, proven and cost-effective alternative.
Key Capabilities
- Full VM lifecycle management including creation, cloning, snapshotting, live migration and power management, all managed through Prism Central
- High availability with automatic VM restart on a healthy host if a node fails, with configurable restart priorities to ensure critical workloads recover first
- Seamless live migration of running VMs between nodes within a cluster and between clusters, including across on-premises and AWS or Azure environments via NC2
- Built-in Kubernetes support, allowing AHV to run both traditional VMs and containerised workloads on the same infrastructure with consistent management
- Integration with Nutanix Flow for software-defined networking and microsegmentation, applying security policies at the VM level without requiring changes to the physical network
- Support for GPU passthrough, enabling AHV to host demanding AI inference, machine learning and GPU-accelerated workloads alongside traditional applications
- No separate hypervisor licence required, included with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure at no additional cost
Why It Matters for Your Organisation
The VMware licensing changes introduced by Broadcom have prompted a significant reassessment of virtualisation strategy across the market. For organisations facing substantially higher VMware renewal costs, AHV provides a technically capable, operationally familiar and commercially straightforward alternative. Migrating from VMware to AHV on Nutanix is a well-documented, well-supported process that thousands of organisations have completed successfully. Pure Networks has the expertise to plan and execute that migration with minimal disruption to your operations.
Prism - Unified Management
What Is It?
Prism is the management and operations platform that sits at the heart of every Nutanix deployment. It provides a single, unified interface for monitoring, configuring, and automating every aspect of the Nutanix environment, from individual VM performance and storage utilisation to cluster health, security posture, and workload placement across on-premises and cloud environments.
Prism comes in two forms. Prism Element is the per-cluster management interface for direct cluster-level operations. Prism Central is the multi-cluster management plane that provides a consolidated view and management capability across all Nutanix clusters in the environment, including those running on NC2 in AWS or Azure. Prism Central is where most organisations do the majority of their day-to-day management work.
Key Capabilities
- Single pane of glass management across all Nutanix clusters, regardless of location, providing a consistent operational experience from on-premises data centres to public cloud
- AI-driven capacity planning and performance analytics that identify bottlenecks, forecast capacity requirements and recommend optimisations before problems affect workloads
- One-click infrastructure upgrades, allowing AOS, AHV and firmware updates to be applied across the cluster with a single operation and no manual coordination
- Automated policy management, allowing storage, protection and networking policies to be defined once and applied consistently across all managed resources
- Comprehensive audit logging and compliance reporting, providing the evidence trail needed for regulatory frameworks including GDPR, NIS2, ISO 27001 and PCI-DSS
- Self-service infrastructure provisioning through Nutanix Calm, allowing development teams to deploy and manage their own environments within policies defined by IT
- Natural language search and AI-assisted operations through Nutanix GPT, making it easier to query the environment and get actionable recommendations
Why It Matters for Your Organisation
Infrastructure complexity is one of the biggest drains on IT team capacity. When managing compute, storage, networking and virtualisation through four different tools, with four different interfaces and four different operational models, the cognitive and operational overhead is significant. Prism removes this by consolidating all of these management activities into a single, intuitive interface that requires far less specialist knowledge to operate effectively. For IT teams that are stretched thin and need to do more with less, the operational simplicity that Prism delivers is not a minor convenience. It is a material improvement in how the team operates every day.
Flow Network Security
What Is It?
Nutanix Flow Network Security is a software-defined networking and security solution built natively into the Nutanix Cloud Platform. It provides microsegmentation and distributed firewalling capabilities that allow organisations to implement Zero Trust security policies at the workload level, controlling exactly which virtual machines, applications and services can communicate with each other, without requiring any changes to the physical network infrastructure.
Traditional perimeter security assumes that anything inside the network can be trusted. Microsegmentation rejects this assumption, enforcing granular policies that limit lateral movement even if an attacker has already gained access to the environment. Flow Network Security makes this practical by managing policies through software rather than hardware, and by tying security rules to application categories and identity rather than static IP addresses, so policies follow workloads as they move rather than breaking when they do.
Key Capabilities
- Application-centric microsegmentation using dynamic categories tied to workload identity rather than IP addresses, ensuring policies remain accurate as VMs are moved, scaled or migrated
- Distributed stateful firewall enforcement applied at every host, preventing lateral movement between workloads even within the same network segment
- Identity-aware access control using Active Directory group membership to determine which users and services can access specific workloads and data
- Ransomware containment by default, with microsegmentation boundaries that prevent an infection on one VM from spreading to others even within the same VLAN
- Flow Virtual Networking for software-defined VPCs with their own routing, enabling multi-tenancy and workload isolation without physical network changes
- Consistent policy enforcement across on-premises and cloud environments, including NC2 deployments on AWS and Azure, with security policies replicating during failover and live migration
- Traffic visualisation and application dependency mapping, giving security teams clear visibility of communication flows before and after policies are applied
- Managed entirely through Prism Central alongside all other infrastructure management, with no separate security management console required
Why It Matters for Your Organisation
Lateral movement is how most significant breaches escalate from a single compromised machine into a widespread incident. Ransomware in particular exploits the flat network architectures that most organisations still operate, spreading rapidly across systems once an initial foothold is established. Flow Network Security closes this exposure by creating software-defined boundaries that contain any compromise to the workload where it originated. For organisations with compliance obligations that require network segmentation, or those working towards a Zero Trust security model, Flow Network Security provides a practical path to implementation that does not require a hardware overhaul or a separate security product.
Data Protection and Disaster Recovery
What Is It?
Nutanix integrates data protection, backup and disaster recovery directly into the Cloud Platform, managed through the same Prism interface used for everything else. Rather than deploying separate backup software, replication appliances and DR orchestration tools, Nutanix provides these capabilities natively, significantly reducing the complexity and cost of maintaining resilient infrastructure.
Nutanix Leap is the disaster recovery orchestration capability within the platform, enabling organisations to define recovery plans, automate failover and failback processes, and test DR procedures without impacting production workloads. Combined with native snapshot management and policy-driven replication, it provides a comprehensive business continuity solution that works across on-premises sites and public cloud environments.
Key Capabilities
- Policy-driven snapshot management allowing organisations to define protection schedules based on the recovery point objectives (RPO) of each workload, from minutes to hours
- Synchronous and asynchronous replication between on-premises sites and to NC2 environments on AWS and Azure, providing flexibility in how recovery objectives are met for different workload tiers
- Tiered disaster recovery options that match protection levels to each workload, ensuring business-critical systems receive the strongest protection while less critical workloads are protected cost-effectively
- Business continuity in the event of up to three site or region failures, with multi-cloud snapshot support for maximum resilience
- Security policies remain consistent during failover and live migration, eliminating the operational gaps that typically occur when workloads move between environments in a crisis
- One-click test failover capability, allowing DR plans to be validated and tested regularly without impacting production systems
- Data protection for modern containerised Kubernetes workloads as well as traditional VMs, with tiered synchronous and asynchronous DR extending to container-based applications
- Native encryption and immutable snapshots to protect backup data from ransomware, ensuring recovery copies cannot be deleted or encrypted by an attacker who has compromised the primary environment
Why It Matters for Your Organisation
Disaster recovery is one of those capabilities that organisations know they need, frequently defer investment in, and deeply regret not having when an incident occurs. Nutanix removes the financial and operational barriers to implementing proper data protection by building it into the infrastructure platform you are already running, managed through the same interface your team uses every day. There is no separate DR software to licence, no complex integration to maintain, and no specialist DR expertise required to keep it working. For organisations with NIS2 obligations, the ability to demonstrate a tested, documented disaster recovery capability is increasingly a regulatory requirement. Nutanix makes meeting that requirement significantly more straightforward.
Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2)
What Is It?
Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) allows organisations to run the Nutanix Cloud Platform natively on bare metal infrastructure in AWS and Microsoft Azure, extending the same software environment, management experience and operational processes they use on-premises into public cloud. This is a fundamentally different model to simply running workloads in cloud VMs. NC2 brings the Nutanix platform itself into the cloud, meaning the same Prism Central instance, the same security policies, the same data protection configuration, and the same operational workflows apply across both environments.
For organisations that have invested in Nutanix on-premises and want to use cloud for burst capacity, disaster recovery, application development or geographic expansion, NC2 provides a hybrid cloud model that genuinely eliminates the operational complexity of managing separate on-premises and cloud environments.
Key Capabilities
- Run the full Nutanix Cloud Platform on bare metal nodes in AWS and Azure, with the same capabilities, performance and security that on-premises Nutanix provides
- Extend Prism Central management to cover both on-premises and cloud clusters through a single interface, with no separate cloud management tool required
- Seamless workload migration between on-premises and cloud using live migration and disaster recovery replication, without refactoring or re-platforming applications
- Consistent security policies across environments, with Flow Network Security microsegmentation and access controls applying equally to cloud-hosted workloads
- Subnet extension and consistent IP addressing across sites, simplifying disaster recovery failover to cloud by eliminating the need to re-IP workloads when they move
- Elastic capacity that can be provisioned on demand for burst workloads and decommissioned when no longer needed, paying only for cloud infrastructure when it is in use
- Support for disaster recovery to cloud, enabling organisations to use AWS or Azure as a DR target for on-premises workloads without the cost of maintaining a permanent secondary data centre
Why It Matters for Your Organisation
The practical challenge with hybrid cloud is that on-premises and cloud environments typically require different skills, different tools and different operational processes. NC2 solves this by making the cloud an extension of your existing Nutanix environment rather than a parallel one. For organisations that have Nutanix on-premises and are exploring cloud for DR, burst capacity or new application deployment, NC2 provides a path to hybrid cloud that leverages existing investments and skills rather than requiring a separate cloud competency to be built from scratch.
The Pure Networks Advantage
Pure Networks designs and deploys Nutanix environments for Irish organisations, from initial HCI deployments and VMware migrations through to hybrid cloud architectures using NC2. We bring infrastructure expertise, security capability, and a practical understanding of the operational realities Irish organisations face, and we support what we deploy over the long term.
