Nutanix has unveiled a significant expansion of its Cloud Platform, introducing new AI and storage capabilities designed to help enterprises navigate increasingly complex and supply-constrained IT environments.
Agentic AI Takes Centre Stage
The most prominent addition is the Nutanix Agentic AI solution, a full-stack platform announced at NVIDIA GTC and now in early access. Targeted at enterprises building and operating AI applications, the solution integrates compute, storage, networking, and Kubernetes services within the Nutanix Cloud Platform (NCP) to simplify deployment. It provides a secure, high-performance virtualisation foundation specifically for AI infrastructure, enabling businesses to run modern and AI workloads efficiently across hybrid and multicloud setups. The full solution is scheduled for general availability in the second half of 2026.
Complementing this is NKP Metal, an extension of the Nutanix Kubernetes Platform that supports Kubernetes deployments directly on bare-metal infrastructure. Also in early access and due for release later in 2026, it is engineered to deliver the performance required for edge environments and AI training workloads that depend on dense GPU clusters.
Expanding Infrastructure for AI and Modern Apps
Alongside these AI-focused developments, Nutanix is bolstering its core infrastructure services. Its Unified Storage (NUS) 5.3 release is now generally available and positioned as a key enabler for transforming object storage into a performance tier for AI “Factories”. This update expands Smart Tiering to seamlessly move data to Google Cloud and OVHcloud S3, while adding multitenant object scaling and quotas to support massive AI data lakes. Later in 2026, NUS will introduce Remote Direct Memory Access acceleration for S3-compatible object storage, aiming to dramatically increase throughput for large training datasets.
For data security, the updated Nutanix Data Lens 2.0 can now run fully on-premises, including in air-gapped environments. This brings ransomware analytics, data audit, and governance visibility to sovereign and dark-site deployments that cannot use SaaS-based tools.
The company also announced a generally available, certified integration between its Database Service and MongoDB Ops Manager, built on MongoDB’s third-party backup model, to simplify enterprise database operations with automated provisioning and management.
Broadening the Hardware and Cloud Ecosystem
Nutanix is executing what it terms the broadest expansion of infrastructure support in its history, offering customers more deployment flexibility amid hardware supply constraints. New integrations available now include a Foundation Central appliance to simplify deployment on servers from Cisco, Dell, Fujitsu, HPE, and Lenovo, enhanced synchronous disaster recovery for Dell PowerFlex, and extended support for Pure Storage’s //c FlashArray platform.
Later this year, planned expansions include support for AMD GPU-accelerated servers for AI workloads, deeper integration with Cisco’s AI and edge portfolios, general availability of Dell PowerStore support, and a full-stack collaboration with Lenovo covering servers, storage, and automation. Support for NetApp ONTAP storage systems is also planned.
The platform also now provides zero-copy migrations from VMware vSphere to Nutanix AHV, enabling near-instantaneous, in-place workload conversion without data duplication to accelerate migration timelines.
For sovereign and hybrid cloud deployments, Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) is being expanded. Support for AWS GovCloud is available now, with AWS European Sovereign Cloud coming later this year. In the second half of 2026, NC2 on Google Cloud will introduce Hyperdisk and C3 bare-metal instance support, allowing storage to scale independently of compute.
Unified Management at Scale
To manage these sprawling environments, Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) 2.0 is now generally available on a new architecture. It enables management of large numbers of clusters across multiple instances of Prism Central from a single console, centralising inventory, alerts, playbooks, and capacity planning.
A key change is the incorporation of Cost Governance on-premises as part of the platform re-architecture, eliminating the need for a separate SaaS application. This allows customers to track metering, showback, and budgeting while keeping all cost data within their own infrastructure, delivered alongside AIOps and Self-Service in a unified console.
Furthermore, Nutanix Service Provider Central (SP Central), currently in early access, brings new multitenancy capabilities to help service partners deliver a broader range of hosted infrastructure and AI services on NCP while maintaining secure isolation between tenants. It is expected to be generally available in the second half of 2026.
