Nutanix today at its .NEXT 2024 conference revealed it will make available a turnkey appliance that Dell will sell and support.
Nutanix CEO Rajiv Ramaswami told conference attendees – at a time when many organizations are reassessing their commitment to VMware following its recent acquisition by Broadcom, the two companies are moving to provide IT organizations with an alternative supported by Dell. The overall goal is to make it possible to run applications anywhere at a time when there is a major storm of uncertainty and risk, he added.
Dell, of course, at one time owned VMware, but today makes available turnkey platforms based on integrated software stacks from multiple platform providers, including VMware, Red Hat and Microsoft.
As part of that effort, Nutanix today also announced it is working with Cisco to certify Cisco UCS blade servers to run the Nutanix AHV hypervisor. Nutanix will also expand the ability to run AHV on a broad set of existing and new server configurations via its Nutanix Elevate Program initiative for technology partners.
Nutanix is also adding an ability to automatically deploy virtual machines across a set of clusters to better maximize utilization of IT infrastructure. In addition, Nutanix has added a Secure Snapshot capability to enable organizations to recover from ransomware attacks, in addition to extending a disaster recovery capability to enable IT teams to handle two simultaneous outages.
A Nutanix Central control plane that makes it possible to centrally manage Nutanix platform across a hybrid cloud computing environment across tens of thousands of clusters is now also generally available.
Finally, Nutanix is adding an ability to monitor power consumption to make it easier for IT teams to achieve sustainability goals.
In general, Nutanix is taking a multifaceted approach to hyperconvergence. IT teams have the options to either buy turnkey appliances or scale out computing and storage nodes independently of each other as an alternative to traditional rack-based systems.
At the same time, Nutanix via a Project Beacon initiative is also committed to refactoring its offerings to run natively on cloud computing platforms using container technologies. Nutanix today also launched Nutanix Kubernetes Platform (NKP) to manage multiple Kubernetes clusters using the platform it gained when it acquired assets from the now defunct D2iQ.
It’s unclear how and at what pace IT teams are embracing Kubernetes to deploy applications based on microservices-based architecture. In contrast, the bulk of applications running on legacy platforms are monolithic. Most organizations will be running a mix of microservices-based and monolithic applications for many years to come. The challenge going forward is determining how to run multiple classes of applications on different platforms or trying to use platforms such as KubeVirt to encapsulate legacy monolithic applications in a set of containers that can be deployed on Kubernetes clusters.
Regardless of approach, Nutanix is betting more organizations than ever are placing a higher value on flexibility at a time when mergers and acquisitions are reshaping the IT landscape in ways that IT teams may not always appreciate, as the licensing terms under which software was previously made available change.
