Satyam Vaghani, Nutanix | Nutanix .NEXT EU 2018
Channel: SiliconANGLE theCUBE
Date: 2018-11-28

Satyam Vaghani (@SatyamVaghani) ‏VP & GM, of IoT  AI at Nutanix sits down with Stu Miniman (@stu) & Joep Piscaer (@jpiscaer) at Nutanix .NEXT EU 2018 in London, UK.

#NEXTConf #theCUBE #Nutanix

https://siliconangle.com/2018/11/30/qa-nutanix-xi-iot-brings-one-click-simplicity-edge-nextconf/

Q&A: Nutanix Xi IoT brings one-click simplicity to the edge

Analysts who predicted edge computing would kill the cloud will be surprised to see cloud computing software company Nutanix Inc. announcing its new Xi IoT intelligent edge computing service. So what makes a company known for hyperconverged infrastructure appliances and software-defined storage embrace edge computing?

Satyam Vaghani (pictured), vice president and general manager of IoT and AI at Nutanix, spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host Joep Piscaer (@jpiscaer), technical pathfinder, cloud and infrastructure, at Jumbo Supermarkten and blogger at VirtualLifestyle.nl, during the .NEXT Conference in London. They discussed how Nutanix is rising to the challenges of the next-generation, bringing its signature elegance and simplicity to the complexity of the edge. (* Disclosure below.)

[Editor’s note: The following answers have been condensed for clarity.]

Miniman: Welcome Satyam. We had you on the program a little over a year ago to talk about Project Sherlock, when Nutanix was starting with IoT. Fast forward to today, it’s now called Xi IoT. Help bring us up to speed as to what your team has been working on and what’s the state of the product today?

Vaghani: A year and a half ago, analysts were projecting that a lot of enterprise data was going to be produced at the edge, [and] it was important to process at the edge for many different reasons [such as] autonomy, security, cost and compliance. So that was the genesis [of Xi IoT].

We thought we were very well-suited to [edge intelligence] because it was yet another problem where you needed to provide a very elegant system, a very well-contained system — just like hyperconverged infrastructure is for your primary data center — in an extremely remote and extremely hostile environment.

Along the way, our ambitions broadened to being a multicloud company. That fit in, because IoT is never an edge-only problem or a cloud-only problem. Every IoT app kind of spans the edge in the cloud. This was a perfect way to showcase the multicloud data plane, multicloud control plane capability [of Xi IoT].

Piscaer: If I look at this from that technical perspective, I still see a data center; I still see the cloud; I still see data going back and forth. What makes Xi IoT different?

Vaghani: One is the focus on edge computing. We said, let’s go from the edge outwards. Because in an enterprise context, data processing, the amount of data, the volume is pretty overwhelming. So one difference is the richness of services that we provide at the edge.

Another difference is the pipeline all the way to the cloud. We don’t consider this as an edge-only problem, so we not only do a pipeline to the cloud, but we allow the customers to have a choice of cloud. We don’t dictate the choice of cloud just because we are providing a solution to the edge.

Another key difference is the ease of use both for deployment and operations of the edge device itself. So think about deploying [Xi IoT] on a thousand stores. We made it zero-touch provisioning process. So the only requirement to deploy the Xi edge is that you plug in the internet cable. That is very core to the Nutanix philosophy: simplicity, one-click simplicity.

The last thing [that makes Xi IoT different] are APIs. It’s the programmer APIs that whole system exposes, it’s Apache class APIs, open-source class APIs. So that people who are already used to various programming frameworks can immediately jump on this.

Miniman: You bring up something we saw in our research, as one of the biggest hurdles: operational technology doesn’t play with information technology. How do you hope to bridge that gap? 

Vaghani: The only way to make OT appreciate a solution is to show them a path [where they] can adopt Xi IoT without causing disruption to their machine-critical setup, OT setup, that they already have. So we put a lot of thought around how we could source data from OT systems without throwing out, ripping, and replacing every OT data gathering point and device that they have.

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Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the .NEXT Conference. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the .NEXT Conference. Neither Nutanix Inc., the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)