I told you about it in my previous article, Nutanix invited all the members of its “Nutanix Technology Champion” program to come and participate in the very first NTC Tech Connect ever organized, at its headquarters in San José, California. The opportunity for me to come back to this privileged event during which we had the chance to be in direct contact with the internal teams of the editor.

Un long voyage

The journey to NTC Tech Connect was long from France. First a TGV to Lyon Saint Exupéry with a night in a hotel. Up at 3:30 am on Sunday to take the plane to Amsterdam where I picked up Jeroen Tielen with whom I did the 11 hours of flight to San Francisco. Once there, we had an evening planned at the bar “MINIBOSS” which mixes cocktails, pizzas and arcade games!

Day 1: Nutanix Cloud Solutions

The first day began with a presentation by Angelo Luciani, Community Manager at Nutanix, who warmed up the room and enthusiastically launched the event to prepare the ground for the various speakers we were going to meet during the day.

Although it was not planned in the program, Cameron Stockwell took the floor to discuss LCM (Lifecycle Manager), an essential tool in infrastructure management, and Foundation, which allows us to deploy our clusters with ever greater speed. These two building blocks are constantly evolving and improvements are already planned.

Then, Rajiv Ramaswami, CEO of Nutanix, did us the great honor of joining us to offer us a strategic overview of the evolution of Nutanix’s business, emphasizing the company’s long-term vision and its ability to remain a leader in the cloud and hyperconverged infrastructure market. He also engaged in a series of questions and answers with the NTCs present in the room.

The technical sessions were then able to begin! The focus was first on Nutanix Cloud Manager with the presentation of Vijaay Doraiswamy, Ramachandran Varadharajan and Pranav Gupta. They shared with us the latest innovations around this key platform that facilitates the management of multi-cloud environments with Intelligent Ops, Self-Service, Cost Governance and Security Central.

The discussion then focused on the Nutanix Kubernetes Platform (NKP), where Deepak Goel highlighted the importance of integrating Kubernetes into the Nutanix ecosystem, particularly with regard to automation, container orchestration and container security.

Oscar and Ramya Prabhakar introduced us to the latest developments in AOS (Acropolis Operating System) and NDK (Nutanix Data Keeper), two technologies that enhance the Nutanix infrastructure to provide optimal resiliency and performance enhancement.

The morning being over, a friendly lunch break allowed us to all meet around a table to share a meal with Mexican flavors. The opportunity for us to share our experience and strengthen our ties.

After the lunch break, Jennifer Rowland spoke to focus on AOS and AHV and in particular on the entire development roadmap of these 2 essential bricks of the Nutanix ecosystem.

We restarted the afternoon technical sessions with Ahmad Elayat who gave a presentation on Nutanix Database (NDB), explaining how this solution simplifies large-scale database management for all Nutanix customers.

Hillary Hill then gave us a quick overview of Nutanix’s social media activities, with a particular focus on the company’s digital strategy. She also discussed the avenues explored internally to collaborate more closely with our community.

The day continued with a presentation by Srinath G S Adharsh Praveen R, who highlighted Nutanix Central, a unified platform for managing customer infrastructure across multiple clouds. Currently a cloud-only component, an on-premise version is under consideration…

Finally, the event concluded with a reception in the company gardens where we were all able to enjoy a friendly moment to continue to exchange together and get to know each other better.

Day 2: Security, storage and object management

The second day of this Nutanix Tech Connect, which unfortunately only lasted one morning, focused on the other key Nutanix solutions.

Aniket Daptari and Swaminathan Sankar opened the morning with a technical presentation of Nutanix Flow, a network and security management platform for hybrid cloud environments, including VPCs and how they work.

Ramesh VelurEunni then took the floor to tell us about Nutanix Files, a scalable and high-performance file storage solution that facilitates the management of unstructured data. A focus was made on the performance of the solution which has been optimized:

The last session of the event, hosted by Gowtham Alluri and Mayur Sadavarte, focused on Nutanix Objects, a highly scalable object storage solution that is essential for large enterprises requiring robust management of growing data volumes.

Conclusion

This first edition of NTC Tech Connect was a great success and offered us a unique opportunity to be as close as possible to the publisher’s internal teams. This meeting allowed us to have a detailed overview of Nutanix’s latest innovations, reinforcing the company’s commitment to offering cutting-edge cloud solutions.

These two days of technical discussions and exchanges allowed us to build stronger links between NTC and to develop our professional network. We owe all this to Angelo Luciani and his team, who have been working hard in recent weeks to allow us to fully experience this exceptional event.