Intelligent CIO Middle East Issue 38 | Page 66

INTELLIGENT BRANDS // Data Centres Nutanix Xi IoT brings intelligence to the edge as IoT puts pressure on data centres ///////////////////////////// With the ever-increasing amount of data, data centres are struggling to cope with demand. With a move to edge computing Nutanix has launched a new service as part of the company’s Xi Cloud Services. N utanix, 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 plus nodes across public and private cloud data centres. But the current IoT model in which the massive amounts of data on edge devices is sent back to a centralised cloud for processing has severely limited the ability of customers to make real-time, actionable decisions from intelligence gained at the edge. inference, and data services to perform real-time processing at the edge. Xi IoT Data Pipelines can securely move intelligently analysed 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, organisations 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. 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 containerised 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 organisations reduce training, development and testing costs while eliminating the possibility an organisation 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 data centre for processing, so decisions can be made based on data autonomously and in real-time. “It is critical for enterprise organisations 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. Nutanix Xi IoT will focus on the manufacturing, retail, oil and gas, healthcare and Smart Cities markets at launch. n 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 66 INTELLIGENTCIO www.intelligentcio.com