Nutanix has announced the general availability of Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) on Microsoft Azure, extending its hybrid cloud environment to Microsoft Azure dedicated bare metal nodes.

NC2 on Azure offers a seamless hyperconverged infrastructure and unified management spanning private and public cloud environments to accelerate hybrid cloud adoption, the company states.

NC2 on Azure is designed to enable customers to deploy and manage their workloads in their own Azure account and VNet enabling them to keep the operating model simple and consistent between Azure and on-premises.

With licence portability of Nutanix term-based software and the ability to leverage all Microsoft Azure benefits, NC2 on Azure provides customers the investment protection and choice to run their workloads in a hybrid cloud environment.

NC2 on Azure is now generally available to customers on Azure dedicated bare metal nodes in North America Azure regions, with additional global Azure regions to follow in 2023.

Rajiv Ramaswami, President and CEO of Nutanix, says, "Organisations are embracing hybrid multicloud to easily scale from on-prem to the public cloud, optimise costs for performant and secure workloads, and tap into a flexible subscription model. NC2 on Azure gives our customers a frictionless on-ramp to Azure with consistent management of apps and data across their hybrid multicloud environment."

Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice President, Cloud + AI Group, Microsoft, says, "While public cloud has solidified as a crucial investment for businesses, many customers need to run and manage workloads across public and private cloud environments. NC2 on Azure provides consistent management for businesses' infrastructure across on-premises and cloud, reduces network latency, and increases cost efficiency."

As of now, customers can run workloads on NC2 on Azure and manage Azure instances from Nutanix's management interface. This enables customers to run hybrid workloads across private clouds and Microsoft Azure without needing to re-architect their applications.

Customers can also take advantage of Azure Hybrid Benefit as well as Extended Security Updates to improve cost, security, and efficiency, the company states.

Nutanix customers will be able to port their existing term licences to NC2 on Azure or get on-demand consumption of Nutanix software through the Azure Marketplace, enabling frictionless movement between private clouds and Microsoft Azure.

According to Nutanix, customers can leverage NC2 on Azure to:

• Optimise disaster recovery, eliminating the need to maintain a secondary site by utilising Microsoft Azure's on-demand capacity for failover.
• Access on-demand capacity bursting to Microsoft Azure, scaling capacity while leveraging existing applications and tooling.
• Migrate and modernise data centres by moving existing applications and data as-is without refactoring or retooling.

Paul Nashawaty, Senior Analyst at The Enterprise Strategy Group, comments on the announcement, "Customers are struggling with the reality of managing workloads across private and public clouds, and this challenge is not going away. This Nutanix and Azure solution addresses key challenges many enterprises are facing by providing unified management across clouds with applications, data and licence portability."