Nutanix, the hyper-converged infrastructure company, has announced the availability of Xi IoT – an integrated platform for IoT and edge computing.
Xi IoT is a cloud-agnostic edge computing platform that can talk to mainstream public clouds including AWS, Azure, and GCP. It can also be easily integrated with private cloud and enterprise data center infrastructure.
The IoT and edge computing platform from Nutanix is built on the foundation of hyper-convergence. Customers can deploy the platform as a VM, standard NX hardware, or specialized edge hardware offered by partners such as Advantech and Super Micro.
Nutanix Xi IoT consists of a SaaS control plane and Xi Edge platform running on an edge device. The SaaS control plane provides an end-to-end platform that is centrally managed from the cloud through a user-friendly interface for application development and operations to deploy thousands of edge locations easily. Using Xi IoT, Nutanix customers can either deploy Xi Edge bare metal or a virtual machine (VM) on shared or dedicated nodes.
It is interesting to note that the Xi Edge platform leverages Kubernetes, which enables customers to consolidate traditional IoT applications and new-generation, data science-based applications in containers.
According to Nutanix, The Xi Edge platform provides secure access to IoT data sources with data pipelines all the way from the edge to the cloud, including AWS, Azure, GCP, and managed/on-premises private clouds. It also provides seamless data mobility between edge and cloud, which lets users send metadata and build ML models in the cloud.
One of the critical components of Xi Edge platform is an ML layer that supports deploying fully-trained machine learning models from the public cloud. Customers can use locally deployed ML models for performing predictive analytics on inbound data streams. Advanced ML models can be used for predictive maintenance of connected devices and equipment.
Xi IoT and Xi Edge are a part of Xi Cloud Services, a suite of offerings meant for multi-cloud management.
Xi Cloud Services is comprised of five distinct offerings:
Xi Leap – Cloud-based disaster recovery (DR) services to protect your critical business applications and data. Leap services are enabled directly in Nutanix Prism for a completely integrated public + private cloud experience.
Xi Frame – unique desktop-as-a-service platform built from scratch specifically for cloud deployment, now integrating role-based access control.
Xi Beam – a multi-cloud cost optimization and governance tool that allows customers to reduce cost and enhance cloud security across platforms, public and private.
Xi Epoch – an observability and monitoring solution for multi-cloud applications that provides a Google Maps-like view of applications to determine performance bottlenecks and availability issues in any cloud environment.
Xi IoT – an intelligent edge computing platform that performs real-time processing of sensor and device data pipelines, and moves intelligently filtered data back to a customer’s cloud platform of choice for long-term decision-making, allowing them to eliminate the complexity of deploying and managing edge locations while deriving more value from data at the edge.
With Xi Cloud Services, Nutanix wants to go beyond the primary HCI offerings to deliver multi-cloud and IoT capabilities to enterprise customers.
