Nutanix has announced at its .NEXT Conference 2018 Nutanix Flow, a software-defined networking (SDN) solution built for the multi-cloud era.

Flow provides application-centric security to protect against internal and external threats not detected by traditional perimeter-oriented security products. Nutanix Flow capabilities are fully integrated into Nutanix’s Acropolis software for easy deployment and will be enhanced with real-time application visibility and discovery technology from the company’s recent acquisition of Netsil. Nutanix Flow non-intrusively automates the creation and management of application security .

Enterprise IT teams are turning to cloud-based infrastructure to deliver today’s modern business applications, many of which are built from discrete but interconnected services. Protecting these applications requires the microsegmentation capabilities of Nutanix Flow, which enforces app-centric policies that govern communications between individual application services. Nutanix will also leverage Netsil’s advanced stream processing, application discovery and mapping technology to simplify security policy definition for applications running in both public and private clouds. IT teams and business owners gain the confidence that their business applications are protected from both internal and external security threats.

“The next frontier of networking is about providing customers with visibility into their networks so they can track and analyze data, improve cloud application performance and optimize their resources,” said Harjot Gill, Sr. Director, Product & Engineering, Nutanix. “We have worked hard to integrate Netsil’s advanced functionality into Nutanix Flow and we’re proud our customers will soon be able to take advantage of the visibility and discovery technology we pioneered.”

Nutanix Flow is built into the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS, and today provides:

• Network Visualization — giving application owners an at-a-glance view of network performance and availability per application
• Application-Centric Microsegmentation — providing granular control and governance for all application traffic to protect sensitive workloads and data
• Service Insertion and Chaining — integrating additional network functions from multiple Nutanix Ready ecosystem partners into a single networking policy
• Network Automation — streamlining and automating common network configuration changes, like VLAN configuration or load balancer policy modifications, based on application lifecycle events for VMs running on Nutanix AHV

To accelerate infrastructure innovation and agility, Gartner recommends that infrastructure and operations leaders “make network automation, visualization and optimization capabilities an integral part of their selection process by prioritizing vendors that provide an application-specific view of cluster performance.”

“Nutanix Flow completes Nutanix’s mission to make IT infrastructure invisible,” said Sunil Potti, Chief Product & Development Officer, Nutanix. “As we looked to simplify networking, we took a modern approach to enable visibility and control for both enterprise apps and next-generation cloud-native services. Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS now converges the compute, storage, virtualization and networking resources to power nearly any application, at any scale.”

Availability

Nutanix Flow is available now. Additional network visibility and app discovery capabilities based on recently-acquired Netsil technology are in development.

For more information about Nutanix Flow, check out this video, or visit the Nutanix website or read more at the Nutanix blog.