PLEXXI HCN™ REFERENCE ARCHITECTURE for NUTANIX ENTERPRISE CLOUD Bringing Cloud Agility, Scalability and Simplicity to the Enterprise Data Center

PLEXXI HCN™ REFERENCE ARCHITECTURE FOR NUTANIX ENTERPRISE CLOUD Bringing Cloud Agility, Scalability and Simplicity to the Enterprise Data Center

WHITE PAPER

Executive Summary

Enterprises are introducing hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) to accelerate the pace of innovation, reduce TCO and streamline operations. By consolidating compute and storage resources onto common infrastructure, IT organizations and cloud builders can contain equipment sprawl and reduce administrative complexity. But legacy data center networking solutions and disjointed administrative practices can impair IT service agility and hinder large-scale HCI adoption.

Plexxi HCN™ for Nutanix Enterprise Cloud eliminates common HCI networking barriers, helping businesses accelerate time-to-value, increase IT service velocity and ensure high performance and reliability for cloud-based applications and services.

Unlike traditional IT solutions based on fixed-hardware configurations, Plexxi HCN for Nutanix Enterprise Cloud is fully software-defined, making networking for enterprise cloud infrastructure truly easy to design, deploy and scale. Plexxi HCN slashes infrastructure cost and complexity, bringing cloud agility, scalability and simplicity to the enterprise data center.

This white paper reviews hyperconverged infrastructure business drivers and networking challenges; describes the features, functions and benefits of Plexxi HCN for Nutanix Enterprise Cloud; and provides a reference architecture and sample configurations for cloud builders, system integrators and IT architects.

Introduction—The Rise of the Cloud

Businesses in every industry are turning to cloud-based infrastructure to increase business agility and accelerate digital transformation. Cloud compute and storage services help companies avoid capital equipment expenses, accelerate time-to-value and focus scarce resources on core business initiatives.

Smaller companies, startups and individual business units within larger enterprises are using public cloud services like AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform to minimize upfront investments and jumpstart new initiatives. And larger companies are using hybrid clouds—employing a mix of public and private infrastructure—to enable DevOps and deliver applications with diverse performance, security and compliance requirements.

© PLEXXI, INC. 2018 | WHITE PAPER: PLEXXI HCN™ REFERENCE ARCHITECTURE FOR NUTANIX ENTERPRISE CLOUD | 1 Cloud adoption has moved well beyond the early adoption stage. Gartner estimates global PaaS and IaaS spending exceeded $46 billion in 2017.1And a RightScale 2018 survey of nearly 1000 SMB and enterprise IT professionals reveals 63% of organizations have deployed multiple projects and applications in the cloud.2

Figure 1 - SMB and Enterprise Cloud Maturity Survey Results

8% 10% 19% 32% 31%

NO WATCHER BEGINNER INTERMEDIATE ADVANCED PLANS PLANNING FIRST PROJECTS APPS RUNNING HEAVY USE

Source: RightScale 2018 State of the Cloud Report The Boomerang Effect Bringing Applications Back to the Enterprise

As businesses scale their cloud deployments many are learning that public cloud services don’t live up to the hype. Complex pricing models with excessive add-on fees and high usage charges can hamper economics. And latency issues can hinder application performance, impairing quality of experience and customer satisfaction. Many businesses are moving applications back to the enterprise, introducing private clouds to regain control over infrastructure and rein in costs. In a 2017 KeyBanc Capital Markets survey nearly 53% of respondents said they have moved workloads back from the public cloud due to cost (47%), performance (32%), compliance (15%) or other reasons. Forty-one percent moved back Tier 1 applications and thirty-three percent moved back Tier 2 applications.3

Agile Development Demands Agile Infrastructure

The cloud lays the foundation for today’s agile software development and deployment practices. Development organizations are using continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) and DevOps to improve collaboration and productivity, and accelerate the pace of innovation. By delivering incremental features and fixes quickly and efficiently, development teams can be more flexible and responsive to customer needs and business demands.

Self-serve IT and on-demand services are essential for enabling agile development and delivery. Developers, test engineers and operators must be able to stand up virtual infrastructure quickly and easily to streamline application lifecycle management and efficiently move releases from private builds, to development, to test, to production.

Hyperconverged Infrastructure—the Technology of Choice for the Private Cloud

Forward-looking businesses are turning to hyperconverged infrastructure to power private clouds. Traditional siloed enterprise data center designs aren’t well suited for delivering on-demand infrastructure and elastic services. Most incumbent data centers are composed of discrete compute, storage and storage networking platforms with distinct management interfaces.

1Gartner Forecasts Worldwide Public Cloud Services Revenue to Reach $260 Billion in 2017, October 12, 2017 2RightScale 2018 State of the Cloud Report™, January 2018 33Q17 VAR Survey and Earnings Preview, KeyBanc Capital Markets, October 16, 2017

© PLEXXI, INC. 2018 | WHITE PAPER: PLEXXI HCN™ REFERENCE ARCHITECTURE FOR NUTANIX ENTERPRISE CLOUD | 2 These disjointed architectures are inherently costly and complex to deploy (individual system components must be sourced, integrated and tested), operate (each technology platform consumes power, cooling and rack space), and manage (each platform supports unique, often low-level, administrative interfaces and APIs).

Hyperconverged infrastructure solutions help IT organizations and cloud builders improve economics, simplify operations and accelerate service velocity by consolidating hypervisor, compute, storage, and storage networking functions onto common hardware with unified administrative and programming interfaces. HCI platforms help enterprises achieve cloud agility and simplicity, while regaining control of their infrastructure.

Legacy Network Solutions and Disjointed Administrative Practices can Impair Large-Scale HCI Adoption

Unfortunately, many businesses fail to fully consider data center networking implications and requirements when planning private cloud and HCI initiatives. Many organizations operate the network as a discrete technology silo, managed by a separate team using distinct administrative tools and practices. Networking infrastructure is typically deployed and provisioned independently of compute and storage infrastructure, consuming time and human resources.

Legacy data center networking solutions and fractured administrative practices can hinder IT service agility and impair large-scale HCI adoption. It can take days or even weeks to stand up networking infrastructure to support new applications and projects. Worse still, legacy data center networks designed to support traditional client-server applications can’t handle the dynamic workloads and diverse traffic flows that dominate the contemporary data center.

In short, the network has become a barrier to innovation. To take full advantage of all the benefits of hyperconvergence, private cloud builders must take a fresh look at the data center network. The modern data center demands a modern data center network.

“Enterprises have embraced hyperconverged infrastructure as a means of building software-defined datacenters. Unfortunately, networking is often overlooked as an integral element in HCI offerings.

This oversight frequently results in suboptimal HCI implementations that not only fall short of meeting tactical enterprise objectives but also create problems that can prevent enterprises from successfully pursuing their hybrid cloud and digital transformation strategies.”

— BRAD CASEMORE Research Vice President, Datacenter Networks, IDC The Importance of Integrated Networking to HCI, IDC Opinion June 2017

Legacy data center networks can’t meet the increased agility, scalability and price-performance demands of the private cloud. Most incumbent data center networks are based on leaf-spine topologies composed of distinct top-of-rack (ToR) switches and aggregation switches as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2—Traditional Leaf/Spine Topology

Spine Layer

Leaf ToR

These two-tier network designs are inherently inefficient and inflexible. Limitations include:

»» Network-design Bottlenecks: Most conventional leaf-spine networks are optimized to support traditional north-south traffic flows within the rack. They aren’t well suited for the east-west, cross-rack traffic flows that dominate today’s data centers. Spine-layer contention can lead to latency and timeouts, hindering workload mobility and impairing the performance of scale-out applications. IT planners are forced to limit the placement and interaction of compute and storage resources and workloads based on arbitrary rack boundaries imposed by the network architecture.

»» Load-balancing Bottlenecks: Most enterprises use rudimentary load distribution protocols like ECMP (Equal Cost Multi-Path) to balance traffic across uplinks. ECMP is not application-aware; it arbitrarily distributes traffic based on network costs, without considering an application’s requirements, tendencies or performance characteristics. As a result, upstream traffic is often distributed unevenly, which leads to hotspots, bottlenecks and poor service quality.

»» Protocol Boundary Constraints: Most enterprises use layer 2 protocols in the leaf tier and layer 3 protocols in the spine tier. Creating an L2/L3 boundary at the leaf node avoids network loops (L2 traffic is constrained to a leaf node) and simplifies load balancing (L2 traffic can be distributed across L3 links). But the approach can lead to addressing discrepancies when distributing or moving workloads across the data center (i.e. you can’t create a distributed cluster with a common IP address, or preserve an application’s IP address when moving it across racks). IT teams are often forced to build “overlay” networks (create host-to-host tunnels through the IP fabric) to make applications or virtual machines appear to belong to the same L2 network.

»» Geographic Constraints: Traditional leaf-spine networks aren’t well suited for organizations with geographically distributed data centers. Excessive latency or addressing constraints can restrict scale-out applications and workload mobility. IT teams are forced to use overlays and tunneling to support geo-distributed clusters or enable application failover for business continuity.

»» Make network design an integrated part of your HCI cluster design and implementation to ensure performance and reliability requirements are met.

»» Require that your HCI vendor’s system management integrates with your switch’s network operating system or network fabric controller to provide an application/workload-specific view of system performance.

»» Connect your HCI nodes directly to your data center leaf switches.

»» Map network design to the unique internal characteristics of your chosen HCI and supported applications.

Source: Leverage Networking to Ensure Your Hyperconverged Integrated Systems Can Support Demanding Workloads, Gartner, August 19, 2016

Plexxi HCN Eliminates Conventional Data Center Networking Constraints

Plexxi HCN was designed from the ground up to eliminate the architectural constraints and price- performance limitations of traditional leaf-spine data center networks. It enables an agile, integrated hyperconverged network that efficiently supports diverse applications and workloads. The programmable Plexxi network fabric adapts in real-time to ensure high service quality, reliability and performance for next-generation applications as well as conventional workloads.

Figure 3—The Plexxi Network Fabric Adapts in Real-Time to Satisfy Fluctuating Application Demands

Source: RightScale 2018 State of the Cloud Report

Plexxi HCN supports an efficient network topology, where ToR switches are directly interconnected using a virtual spine layer. The Plexxi approach eliminates physical aggregation switches, removes artificial workload restrictions based on rack boundaries, and accelerates application performance and workload mobility.

© PLEXXI, INC. 2018 | WHITE PAPER: PLEXXI HCN™ REFERENCE ARCHITECTURE FOR NUTANIX ENTERPRISE CLOUD | 5 Plexxi HCN deconstructs the network into distinct data, control and integration planes for ultimate scalability, flexibility and extensibility. As shown in Figure 4, Plexxi’s software-based, application- driven data center networking solution includes:

»» Plexxi Switches (The Data Plane): High performance Plexxi-branded or third-party ToR Ethernet switches deployed as a single tier to enable high bandwidth, low-latency any-to-any connectivity within and across data centers.

»» Plexxi Control (The Network Control Plane): A software-based, distributed control plane that reconfigures the network fabric in real-time to satisfy fluctuating workload demands. Plexxi Control models workloads and automatically reprograms the network topology to optimize application performance and service quality.

»» Plexxi Connect (The Integration Plane): An open framework for tightly integrating Plexxi Control software with external service orchestration solutions, DevOps tools, and management applications (such as Nutanix Prism). Plexxi Connect eliminates manually intensive, error-prone configuration and scripting processes.

Figure 4—Plexxi HCN Stack for Nutanix Enterprise Cloud and Applications

TRADITIONAL WORKLOADS DEVOPS WORKLOADS

APP A APP B APP Z

VM VM VM

Bare Metal VM VM VM VMs Containers

VM VM VM

App Tools Nutanix Prism Kubernetes

Integration & Event-Based Automation

Topology Visualization & Control

Hyperconverged Network Fabric

© PLEXXI, INC. 2018 | WHITE PAPER: PLEXXI HCN™ REFERENCE ARCHITECTURE FOR NUTANIX ENTERPRISE CLOUD | 6 Plexxi HCN for Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Brings Cloud Agility, Scalability and Simplicity to the Enterprise Data Center

The Plexxi HCN for Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Reference Architecture was specifically conceived to eliminate common HCI networking barriers. The software-defined reference architecture combines the industry-leading Nutanix Enterprise Cloud hyperconverged infrastructure platform with the pioneering Plexxi HCN hyperconverged network stack, providing a complete enterprise cloud foundation. Designed to bring cloud simplicity, agility and scalability to the enterprise, Plexxi HCN for Nutanix Enterprise Cloud is extremely easy to deploy, extremely easy to operate, and extremely cost-effective to scale.

Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Converges Server, Storage and Virtualization

Nutanix is a global leader in hyperconverged infrastructure solutions. Built on the industry’s leading HCI technology, Nutanix Enterprise Cloud integrates compute, storage and virtualization in a full-stack solution that runs nearly any application. The 100% software-driven solution delivers a consistent, high-performance and seamless experience for both cloud operators and consumers of cloud-delivered services and applications. Nutanix Enterprise Cloud is managed via Nutanix Prism, a consumer-grade application that enables one-click operations and provides comprehensive REST APIs to streamline automation.

Plexxi HCN Delivers Adaptable, Resilient, High-Performance Networking

Plexxi is a pioneer in converged network infrastructure for public and private cloud deployments. The Plexxi HCN hyperconverged network stack provides a highly flexible, resilient and scalable network fabric for the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud platform. With Plexxi HCN, cloud operators can deploy and move applications in any rack, across any row and across any data center—seamlessly. The Plexxi network fabric adapts in real-time to ensure high service quality, reliability and performance for any workload.

Key Features and Benefits

Plexxi HCN for Nutanix Enterprise Cloud slashes IT cost and complexity, helping organizations accelerate the pace of innovation and improve business outcomes.

Key features and benefits include:

»» Rapid Time-to-value: IT generalists can commission a complete Nutanix Enterprise Cloud platform and the integrated Plexxi HCN data center networking fabric quickly and easily, reducing private cloud turn-up times from hours to minutes.

»» On-demand Service Activation: Operators, developers and test engineers can instantly provision IT services (including network connectivity) to streamline application lifecycle management.

»» Unique Network Design: Plexxi’s innovative data center network topology obviates the need for physical aggregation switches and eliminates artificial workload restrictions based on rack boundaries.

»» Programmable and Adaptable Network Fabric: Plexxi HCN delivers a dynamic network fabric that automatically adjusts bandwidth to satisfy specific application needs and changes in the infrastructure.

© PLEXXI, INC. 2018 | WHITE PAPER: PLEXXI HCN™ REFERENCE ARCHITECTURE FOR NUTANIX ENTERPRISE CLOUD | 7 »» Elastic Resource Pools: Operators can add Nutanix nodes as needed, to any rack, at any time. Plexxi HCN provisions network resources automatically to satisfy real-time application requirements and workload demands.

»» True Pay-as-you-grow Economics: A scale-out design minimizes upfront investments and tightly aligns ongoing equipment and operations expenses with business demands.

»» Friction-free Operations: Operators can transparently expand and upgrade infrastructure, rollout new projects and move applications from development, to test, to production without disrupting services.

»» Radically Simplified Administration:Unified administration via the familiar Nutanix Prism interface eliminates swivel-chair management and manually intensive, error-prone configuration and troubleshooting tasks for ultimate simplicity and convenience.

System Components

»» Nutanix Acropolis: A completely software-driven infrastructure stack converging storage, virtualization and security to deliver any type of application.

»» Nutanix Prism: An intuitive, end-to-end infrastructure management solution that provides one- click administrative simplicity. Nutanix Prism includes two main components: ҅҅ Prism Central—a multi-cluster manager with a single, centralized management interface. ҅҅ Prism Element—a localized cluster manager responsible for an individual cluster.

»» Nutanix Flow: Microsegmentation for enhanced application security.

»» Plexxi Top-of-rack Ethernet Switches: Industry-standard Dell, white box/bright box, or Plexxi-branded Ethernet switches running the Plexxi switch network operating system.

»» Plexxi HCN Software Stack: A full-function HCI networking solution including the Plexxi network operating system, Plexxi Control management software and Plexxi Connect integration software.

Theory of Design and Operation

Plexxi HCN for Nutanix Enterprise Cloud was specifically conceived to bring cloud simplicity, agility and scalability to the corporate data center. Unlike traditional IT solutions based on fixed-hardware configurations, Plexxi HCN for Nutanix Enterprise Cloud is fully software-defined, making enterprise cloud infrastructure truly easy to design, deploy, operate and scale.

Easy to Design (Day 0)

A software-defined network architecture and innovative network topology radically simplify systems planning and network engineering. Plexxi HCN eliminates artificial application placement restrictions based on rack boundaries. Instead, Plexxi HCN for Nutanix Enterprise Cloud delivers universal compute, storage and networking resource pools that spans racks and data centers. Cloud builders can quickly stand up infrastructure, and arbitrarily add compute, storage and network components to any rack, at any time. Plexxi HCN automatically provisions the network fabric to satisfy real-time application requirements and workload demands. This innovative “pool and provision” approach dramatically simplifies system design efforts.

Plexxi HCN for Nutanix Enterprise Cloud delivers operational simplicity from the start. Tight Plexxi networking integration simplifies infrastructure turn-up, accelerating time-to-value from days to minutes. At first power up, Plexxi automatically installs and configures the networking software needed to interconnect the Nutanix clustered compute and storage environment. Next, it automatically discovers the Nutanix environment, including: Nutanix nodes, Nutanix AHV and VMware guest VMs, and Nutanix controller VM. Finally, it installs Plexxi’s network operations software onto the Nutanix cluster to create a ready-to-go, fully integrated enterprise-cloud foundation—all managed via Nutanix Prism. The complete system is up-and-running in just minutes.

Easy to Operate (Day 1)

Once initialized, Plexxi HCN for Nutanix enables frictionless lifecycle management of the entire infrastructure, leveraging its knowledge of the Nutanix environment to automate many routine operational tasks. The dynamic network fabric automatically adapts in response to real-time Nutanix compute and storage events (e.g. create, move or delete a VM operations) ensuring high performance and service quality for diverse applications and workloads, while making optimal use of network capacity.

Administrators can efficiently manage the entire system, including the networking infrastructure, from the Nutanix Prism management console. From a single console, operators can view physical and virtual components, and add, move and extend physical and virtual resources. Prism centralizes and unifies management allowing administrators to correlate, isolate and resolve issues quickly and easily

Figure 5—Nutanix Prism Unifies and Simplifies Operations

Plexxi HCN for Nutanix Enterprise Cloud leverages a scale-out design that minimizes upfront investments and contains ongoing expenses. Cloud builders can start small and expand incrementally, without disrupting services or ripping-and-replacing assets down the road. Plexxi’s pool-and-provision approach makes it easy to expand a cluster, add new clusters, or extend clusters across racks and data centers. Operators can scale compute, storage and network capacity independently, according to application and infrastructure needs.

Assembly, Setup and Expansion Guidelines

Plexxi HCN for Nutanix Enterprise Cloud is extremely easy to assemble, set up and extend. IT teams and cloud builders can start small and then expand within a rack or across racks with plug-and-play simplicity to support new projects or accommodate increased business demands or capacity requirements.

To prepare Plexxi HCN for Nutanix Enterprise Cloud for initial deployment you simply rack, stack and cable the equipment, and install the necessary Plexxi and Nutanix software components. Once up and running, you can add Nutanix nodes, add equipment racks and expand clusters in a frictionless manner, with minimal operator intervention. The system automatically discovers new Plexxi switches and Nutanix nodes, automatically installs and configures necessary software components and automatically reprovisions the network fabric.

The following guidelines explain how to deploy and seamlessly expand the system, from a small-scale, partial-rack configuration to a massive-scale, multi-rack configuration. Plexxi partners offer pre- configured systems and professional turn-up services to simplify installation.

Small-Scale Reference Configuration

The small-scale reference configuration is ideal for an early-stage cloud builder or for any IT team that is simply trying to improve service agility and economics. The minimal Plexxi HCN for Nutanix Enterprise Cloud configuration includes two Plexxi ToR switches and four Nutanix Enterprise Cloud nodes as shown in Figure 6, which shows the flexibility of the Plexxi fabric to easily support small, medium, and large infrastructure configurations.

Figure 6—Plexxi HCN—Flexible Network Fabric Scalability

SMALL MEDIUM LARGE

Single Rack (or Less) 1-3 Racks 3+ Racks

1. Construct a basic Plexxi HCN fabric by simply cabling two Plexxi switches together as shown in Figure 7.

Figure 7—Two-Switch Fabric

2. Cable each Nutanix node to each Plexxi switch to enable resilient connectivity, as shown in Figure 8.

Figure 8—Four Nutanix Nodes Dual-Homed to Two Plexxi Switches

A. Install the Plexxi switch network operating system (if using third-party switches) and initialize the switches

B. Install Nutanix Acropolis (using Nutanix Foundation) and initialize the Nutanix nodes

C. Install Nutanix Prism

D. Install Plexxi Control and Plexxi Connect software on two VMs on the Nutanix cluster

The system is now operational and can be expanded in a plug-and-play manner, without operator intervention.

»» Nutanix Foundation automatically detects new nodes and installs the Nutanix Acropolis software stack on them.

»» Nutanix Prism automatically discovers the new nodes.

»» A Prism administrator can add the new nodes to an existing cluster or use them to create a new cluster.

»» Plexxi HCN automatically reprovisions the network fabric to optimize connectivity.

Medium-Scale Reference Configuration (Expanding Across Racks)

You can easily extend the Plexxi HCN for Nutanix Enterprise Cloud across racks to expand capacity or support larger operations. Initially, up to three equipment racks can be directly connected, switch-to-switch, as shown in Figure 9.

Figure 9—Scale Across 3 Racks for Expanded Capacity

© PLEXXI, INC. 2018 | WHITE PAPER: PLEXXI HCN™ REFERENCE ARCHITECTURE FOR NUTANIX ENTERPRISE CLOUD | 12 Racks can be added to a system in a seamless manner. Plexxi HCN automatically discovers new Plexxi switches and automatically extends the fabric across racks. Nutanix nodes are automatically discovered and initialized as previously described. A Prism administrator can add the new nodes to an existing cluster or use them to create a new cluster.

Plexxi offers a passive optical device called a “PSI” (Pod Switch Interconnect) that simplifies construction of the physical data center network. Each switch is cabled directly to the PSI. Multiple top of rack switches can be directly and conveniently wired together using high-density optical interconnects that simplify wiring and reduce installation time, as shown in Figure 10.

Figure 10—Plexxi’s PSI Passive Optical Interconnect (Medium Deployments)

PLEXXI POD SWITCH INTERCONNECT

Massive-Scale Reference Configuration (Many Racks, Multiple Clusters)

Plexxi HCN for Nutanix Enterprise Cloud can be extended in multiple dimensions to achieve massive scalability, as shown in Figure 11. This innovative data center network design doubles the number of switches directly reachable from any given switch, minimizing hops across the network and the latency associated with it.

Figure 11—Plexxi’s Fully Connected Rack-to-Rack Topology

© PLEXXI, INC. 2018 | WHITE PAPER: PLEXXI HCN™ REFERENCE ARCHITECTURE FOR NUTANIX ENTERPRISE CLOUD | 13 To accommodate the massive wiring challenges in these environment, Plexxi’s PSI passive optical patch panels can be connected together to construct a multidimensional physical data center network. Deployments can grow to accommodate needs as they arise, without need for up-front planning. The Plexxi HCN fabric simply expands to accommodate more switches and racks in a building-block fashion, as more Plexxi PSI’s are interconnected. Here we see a 12-rack network configuration arranged into a 3 x 4, redundantly connected configuration.

Figure 12—Plexxi’s Two Dimensional Fabric Design for a 12-Rack

Multi-Cluster Security Considerations

Larger-scale configurations are typically used to support multiple clusters and tenants. Additional security and policy features and practices are required to segregate tenants and protect against threats.

Nutanix Flow supports microsegmentation for isolating workloads and restricting communications flows based on administratively defined policies. By tightly controlling flows between machines and applications you can insulate tenants and prevent threats from propagating across virtual resources.

With Plexxi HCN you can extend security policies into the physical network, using L2 VPNs to isolate tenants and segregate resource pools. Plexxi’s multi-dimensional network fabric provides multi-workload and isolation at the physical layer and lets you extend policy into legacy bare-metal deployments.

Conclusion and Next Steps

Businesses are turning to hyperconverged infrastructure to jumpstart private cloud initiatives and accelerate digital transformation. But legacy data center networking solutions and fractured administrative practices can hamper IT service agility and impede large-scale HCI rollouts.

Plexxi HCN for Nutanix Enterprise Cloud was specifically conceived to overcome common HCI networking challenges. It delivers the best of both worlds—the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud HCI platform and the Plexxi HCN hyperconverged network stack—in the form of a tightly integrated private cloud with one-click Prism management.

© PLEXXI, INC. 2018 | WHITE PAPER: PLEXXI HCN™ REFERENCE ARCHITECTURE FOR NUTANIX ENTERPRISE CLOUD | 14 Easy to design, deploy and extend, Plexxi HCN for Nutanix Enterprise Cloud slashes infrastructure cost and complexity, bringing cloud elasticity and simplicity to the enterprise data center. Ideal for today’s distributed applications and agile software development and deployment practices, Plexxi HCN for Nutanix Enterprise Cloud delivers a programmable and adaptable network fabric that automatically adjusts to satisfy real-time requirements. A scale-out design and software-based architecture enables true pay-as-you-grow economics, tightly coupling expenses with business demands.

Learn More

To learn more about how the Plexxi HCN for Nutanix Enterprise Cloud can help you bring cloud agility, scalability and simplicity to your data center visit go.plexxi.com/plexxi-hcn-nutanix.

The Plexxi HCN for Nutanix Enterprise Cloud is supplied and configured-to-order through Plexxi partners. To find a certified partner,please contact Plexxi.

The information contained herein is subject to change without notice. Plexxi and the Plexxi logo are trademarks of Plexxi Inc. Other company, product or service names may be trademarks or service marks of their respective owners.

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