Nutanix has announced the general availability of Nutanix Enterprise AI (NAI) 2.8 and the upcoming availability of Nutanix Kubernetes Platform (NKP) 2.19. The company also introduced new partner programs for building AI services.
Nutanix has announced the general availability of Nutanix Enterprise AI (NAI) 2.8. The company also announced the upcoming availability of Nutanix Kubernetes Platform (NKP) 2.19, along with new partner programs intended to help solution providers and service providers pursue growth opportunities in AI.
According to the company, many enterprises face a structural challenge when adopting AI: AI workloads are accelerating the shift toward containerized environments, while existing applications and data remain spread across virtualized and containerized infrastructure. This, Nutanix says, can force organizations to add infrastructure silos, move data, or rearchitect existing workloads to accommodate AI.
Nutanix says it addresses this with a dual-native architecture that runs traditional applications and modern AI workloads on shared infrastructure, integrated with silicon partners. NAI and NKP extend the existing capabilities of the Nutanix Cloud Platform with a consistent control plane for AI, containerized applications, and virtualized workloads, complementing the near-bare-metal performance for AI on virtualized infrastructure introduced with NCI 7.6.
“Enterprise AI should not require customers to rebuild the systems that already run their business,” Thomas Cornely, Executive Vice President of Product Management at Nutanix, is quoted as saying in the announcement. He said the dual-native architecture lets customers connect AI to existing applications and data while running each workload on the infrastructure best suited to it.
According to Nutanix, NAI provides a unified, secure platform for deploying, managing, and scaling AI workloads across hybrid environments, including governance for agents and models and visibility into token usage. Key updates include an Agent Gateway featuring a generally available MCP Gateway, designed to give AI agents secure, standardized access to tools and data; Nutanix has also released an MCP Server for NCP. In Private Inference, new capabilities add multi-GPU inference via tensor parallelism and parameter-efficient fine-tuning using LoRA for smaller models under eight billion parameters. Speculative decoding is designed to accelerate token generation by up to 2.5 times. To address the risk of models operating outside intended boundaries, Nutanix points to fine-grained identity and access management, custom roles, and support for air-gapped NVIDIA NIM deployments.
NKP is designed to simplify container operations across bare-metal and VM environments without assembling custom infrastructure stacks. For the upcoming release, Nutanix outlines NKP Metal for bare-metal deployments, tighter integration of NKP on AHV with Nutanix Flow for network-level sandboxing of AI agents, and an AI Applications Catalog offering pre-validated software such as Kubeflow, Milvus, and Slurm. NKP has also achieved CNCF certification as a Kubernetes AI Conformant Platform.
On the storage side, Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) has achieved NVIDIA-Certified Storage validation at the enterprise level, which the company says supports a low-latency, high-throughput data path to GPUs.
For partners, Nutanix has launched the Powered by Nutanix: Verified Services program, aimed at helping partners build validated, higher-margin service offerings across the customer lifecycle. The company cites a Gartner forecast projecting that by 2029, about 55 percent of enterprises will migrate all workloads off VMware to alternative infrastructure solutions. Nutanix also made Service Provider (SP) Central generally available, a multitenant control plane intended to give service providers a shared foundation for infrastructure, platform, cloud-native, and AI services.
Voices quoted in the announcement include Jasim Abdul Rahman, Group CIO at Power International Holding, and IDC analyst Matt Flug. Cisco, Continent 8 Technologies, and Intel also commented on their collaboration with Nutanix on AI infrastructure.
NAI 2.8 and SP Central are available now; NKP 2.19 is expected to follow soon, according to the company.
Dr. Jakob Jung is Editor-in-Chief of Security Storage and Channel Germany. He has been working in IT journalism for more than 20 years. His career includes Computer Reseller News, Heise Resale, Informationweek, Techtarget (storage and data center) and ChannelBiz. He also freelances for numerous IT publications, including Computerwoche, Channelpartner, IT-Business, Storage-Insider and ZDnet. His main topics are channel, storage, security, data center, ERP and CRM.
Contact via Mail: jakob.jung@security-storage-und-channel-germany.de