Angelo Luciani from Nutanix sat down with Rolland Miller to chat about the upcoming Nutanix .NEXT conference in Las Vegas during June 20-22. Here are the highlights. 

What IT challenges are your customers facing?

In the last decade, backup and recovery has suffered from a lack of innovation, resulting in widespread customer pain. Our customers often cite that while solutions have evolved over time, the improvements resemble bolt-ons to a dated architecture. Backup windows are shrinking as data continues to grow exponentially, leading to failed backups. Tape continues its torturous reign over backup admins. Finally, the amount of money to maintain a legacy backup and disaster recovery infrastructure results in a ridiculously high total cost of ownership (TCO).

Backup sucks. That’s why we’re making backup sexy again by introducing simplicity and management ease in a plug-and-play 2U appliance.

What are some of the technologies you plan on showcasing at .NEXT?

We will be showcasing how next-gen backup and recovery works. Our Converged Data Management appliances (which we affectionately call Briks) collapse backup software, catalog management, replication, and deduplicated storage into a single appliance that scales linearly. Our Briks eliminate backup jobs and deliver dead simple policy-based management for automated backup, site-to-site replication, data archival off-Brik, compliance/capacity reporting, and Google-like search. A key highlight will be our newest Brik, the r528. This is the industry’s first security enhanced Converged Data Management appliance. The new model delivers complete data protection, encryption-at-rest and in-flight, and rich data services at a global scale. It’s perfect for companies operating in highly regulated industries such as government, finance, and health care.

What are the topics you are most excited to see and hear at the conference?

I am excited to learn more about the new API’s for Acropolis. Acropolis represents the democratization of the hypervisor. One of my favorite features of the Nutanix platform is its commitment to REST API’s – we subscribe to the same philosophy at Rubrik. These API’s are the tools that our customers use to automate the data center and the impossible possible.

Another area I am looking forward to learning more about is cloud integrations for Nutanix. Cloud integrations represent ultimate portability and elasticity for the data center. While this technology hasn’t been perfected yet, each year we get a little bit closer.

What I’m looking forward to the most is meeting partners, colleagues, and experts within our field. These events are gatherings of the best and brightest in our industry, and I always welcome the opportunity to reconnect with old colleagues as well as meet new innovators. The customers are the real benefit though. This is where you can hear real people explain how technology benefits them and what challenges they still face. We engineer solutions to solve problems, and this is where you get to hear what those challenges are.

Can you give our audience a sneak peek of what you are going to be talking about at .NEXT?

We will be showcasing the r528 (our latest security-enhanced Brik), highlighting information governance, and meeting compliance measurements with Rubrik and the public cloud. This includes a technical deep dive on HIPPA, SOX, PII, and FIPS 140-2 L2 as well as granular file search in the cloud.We’ll also speak to how our new approach converges backup and recovery, resulting in a data

We’ll also speak to how our new approach converges backup and recovery, resulting in a data center that is simpler and more powerful. Finally, as the modern data center becomes more software-defined, it is important to implement modern API driven solutions into your environment that automate consumer-oriented services. We’ll share how we integrate with vRealize Automation, and how you can easily add backup to your private cloud orchestration toolsets. If you would like to hear more, please join us for my session at .NEXT!