New Xi IoT service enables best practice for edge computing

Nutanix has flagged the general availability of Xi IoT, a new edge computing service offered as part of the telco’s Xi Cloud suite.

“Combining core Nutanix services 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,” Nutanix said.

It added that in 2017, three billion enterprise Internet of Things edge devices generated up to 30 times more data (256 ZB) than the 30+ million nodes across public and private cloud data centres.

“But the current IoT model, in which the massive amounts of data on edge devices is sent back to a centralised cloud for processing, has severely limited the ability of customers to make real-time, actionable decisions from intelligence gained at the edge,” said Nutanix. “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.”

Xi IoT enables customers to manage their edge locations through a sophisticated infrastructure and application lifecycle management tool, regardless of platform, it added. “Developers can leverage a rich set of popular open APIs to deploy next-generation data science applications as containerised 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 organisations reduce training, development and testing costs while eliminating the possibility an organisation 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 data centre for processing, so decisions can be made based on data autonomously and in real-time,” Nutanix said.

Availability

Nutanix Xi IoT is available as part of Nutanix Xi Cloud Services and will focus on the manufacturing, retail, oil and gas, healthcare, and smart cities markets at launch. Nutanix Xi Cloud Services are available now. Nutanix Leap is available to customers today in East and West availability zones in the United States. Additional availability zones are expected to be available in the UK in calendar Q1 2019.