Nutanix 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 nodes across public and private cloud data centers. But the current IoT model in which the massive amounts of data on edge devices is sent back to a centralized cloud for processing has severely limited the ability of customers to make real-time, actionable decisions from intelligence gained at the edge. 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 inference, and data services to perform real-time processing at the edge. Xi IoT Data Pipelines can securely move intelligently analyzed 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, organizations 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 containerized 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 organizations reduce training, development and testing costs while eliminating the possibility an organization 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 datacenter for processing, so decisions can be made based on data autonomously and in real-time.

“It is critical for enterprise organizations 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. “For companies looking for a competitive advantage, solutions like Nutanix Xi IoT can help them stay ahead of the market and identify new opportunities to grow their businesses.”

Nutanix Xi IoT will focus on the manufacturing, retail, oil and gas, healthcare, and smart cities markets at launch.

For more information:

• Learn more about Nutanix Xi Cloud Services on their website
• Read about how the Xi IoT platform helps companies identify actionable insight from the edge here

Availability

Nutanix Xi IoT is available now as part of Nutanix Xi Cloud Services.