A couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure of being able to attend the Nutanix .NEXT on tour in London, which was held at a place called the Brewery. This event was held over 2 days with the first day being a partner day. I attended both days with one of my colleagues.

 

Day 1

The first day I attended was the Partner day. Upon arrival the place was decked out  with the normal Nutanix flair…

 

 

Once inside, registered and with our tag’s we headed into the Partner Exchange room and had some lunch whilst walking around exploring the various vendors and partners in the room.

 

 

Nutanix have an app that you use to scan each vendor and you receive points which go to a leaderboard, with prizes at the end of the day. Most vendors had various merch that they were handing out whilst some had challenges to complete to win prizes. For example one vendor had a grabbing machine which could be used to win prizes (I even managed to win a £20 voucher). One vendor (Cohesity) had a really cool display to win some custom Adidas trainers. This was made of a fan with blades that spin around with LED’s providing the image.

 

 

After a walk round and visiting a few booths, it was time for the partner introduction and welcome, where James Sturrock and Chris Pickerill discussed how partners can assist customers by modernising their infrastructure, using Nutanix to build apps once and run them from anywhere and to look to the not too distant future of enabling agentic AI. There were also a few discussions around Scottish sports teams. 😉

 

 

After this there was a session from Mark Longo regarding NC2 (Nutanix Cloud Clusters) and use cases for both cloud only and hybrid cloud as well as DR. 

 

There was also an MSP/Service provider track session and closing keynotes followed by a drinks reception and prize giving ( was pleased to have won a £150 Amazon voucher) for participating in the vendor\challenges around the venue. It was a really fun afternoon and really good to see so many partners showing up and was a great place to meet up with peers and network.

 

Day 2

Day 2 was much busier with further halls setup for extra vendors and partners, as well as a section for displaying some of Nutanix’s features.

After a brief bit of breakfast and coffee we attended the keynote which started with some dancers swinging light sticks with LEDs built in around, that created a pattern or spelt out the word Nutanix. Then Mandy Dhaliwal welcomed everyone and handed the stage to Andrew Brinded and Parag Karnik who explained how Nutanix enables organisations to simplify infrastructure, unify hybrid operations and prepare for AI at scale.There were some great use cases and scenarios from guest speakers who explained how Nutanix had helped them.

 

 

There was a short coffee break and I then attended the technical keynote speech by Luke Congdon that delved into the latest innovations in Kubernetes and AI with Nutanix.

Then there was then a lunch break which gave everyone time to explore the other vendors and partners in the exhibition halls. I bumped into many a familiar face from various different businesses and was a good chance to catch up and network.

 

 

I then attended a talk on Migrating to Nutanix with Kevin McGarvey and Robbie Black. In this session Kevin explained and ran through the process of migrating from other well known hypervisors to Nutanix. He ran through the different strategies, tools, and best practices. He also explain about how to avoid the most common pitfalls and how to handle structure d and unstructured data. Robbie assisted in telling how NHS Tayside migrated to Nutanix and how easy and seamless the transition was.

 

 

After this session I attended Mastering Multi Cluster Management with Nutanix Lifecycle Manager (LCM) with Steve Wenban and Pearse McMullen. This session comprehensively covered how to manage software and firmware upgrades across multi clusters with Nutanix and how it can streamline the updates. It also covered some future updates that will help with this process even more.

 

 

After another short coffee break I attended a session on Omnissa and Nutanix: Redefining Proactive EUC Operations with David Brett and Kees Baggerman. This session gave a first hand look at using Omnissa Horizon with Nutanix works. There was information on best practices  and how to improve uptime.

 

 

After all this hard work it wouldn’t be a Nutanix Next without a party. The afterparty was held at the Barbican with drinks, music and and outside area with cocktails.

 

 

All in all it was a really good couple of days with lots of learning and networking. I enjoyed all the sessions which as always really provided me with a wealth of information to take away. If you ever get a chance to attend a Nutanix Next event do so, you won’t be disappointed!