Gives us better, more granular control over user access to servers and what users can doFor me, the most valuable feature is that, when you log in, you have customized dashboards. You can add widgets to those dashboards and you can change the density of certain data points in the dashboards. When I log in, I quickly see where the cluster lies, as far as memory and CPU resources go. I can see how much storage we have left or if we need to consider purchasing an additional node to expand the cluster. That's what I first look at. They populate the dashboards by default. Adding a widget is extremely easy. It's just a couple of clicks. And customizing the data density is a matter of choosing small, medium, or large. It's like: "What t-shirt size do you want to see?" It's a simplistic interface. Nutanix certainly takes its users, and the user experience, very much to heart. There are also some great built-in dashboards that allow us to get some customer reporting performance statistics and to get a feel for what the future is. There's some reporting that does a "flash forward" to six months down the road with predictive usage for the cluster. In addition, I have Life Cycle Management for updates. I'm primarily responsible for keeping the Nutanix infrastructure up to date with the latest code and the Life Cycle management takes care of that in a very small number of clicks. In other environments, I've run VMware with the Cisco offering for UCS, making sure that firmware and software all match up and that they don't fight. That was a pain. Nutanix's Life Cycle Management puts it all in one place and does all that legwork for me. When it comes time to run an upgrade, I click the button. It runs through the pre-install checklist, does a sanity check on itself to make sure that everything is inventoried properly, and then it applies the updates. I can walk away and have supper, or go to bed and wake up the next morning, and it's done. We also have some disaster recovery and business continuity plans, using Nutanix and its data protection offerings. We have some protection domains that are set up to replicate virtual machines between sites. And that's something that was, once again, very intuitive and easy to set up. Scheduling those jobs and getting the status of those data protection jobs was very simplistic. If something fails, you get an alert email and it tells you exactly where the failure occurred.
