Commvault extends Nutanix partnership with support for Acropolis hypervisor

Commvault becomes the first data protection vendor to offer support for Nutanix’s own hypervisor, improving the capabilities of their customers and partners in the Nutanix environment.

Ralph Nimergood

Ralph Nimergood, VP, Worldwide Channels and Alliances at Commvault

Data protection vendor Commvault and hyperconverged infrastructure provider Nutanix have announced an extension of their existing partnership. It provides for Commvault integration and support of the Nutanix Acropolis Hypervisor. This includes Commvault IntelliSnap snapshot management capabilities to simplify protection and recovery for data and virtual machines running on Nutanix.

“Commvault’s partnership strategy is based on reinvigorating all our routes to market, including global alliances, and Nutanix is an important part of this,” said Ralph Nimergood, VP, Worldwide Channels and Alliances at Commvault.

Nimergood described Commvault’s partnership philosophy as an ‘either and’ strategy, designed to reach out to all vendors in the data centre space, from traditional storage players like NetApp and EMC to hyperconverged disruptors like Nutanix.

“We want to be the data protection company of choice,” he said. “The beauty of Commvault’s market strategy is our unique position, where we can protect legacy environments while allowing them to migrate to the new world, whether that world be hyperconverged or the public cloud. Because we are data location-independent, we are well prepared to deal with those who want to move between traditional, and disruptors, to next-generation models.”

Nimergood said that Commvault’s strategy is to provide the heterogeneous environments that will provide the best customer protection around their data. Adding support for the Nutanix Acropolis hypervisor, complementing capabilities already available for VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V, makes Commvault the first data protection software platform to provide hardware snapshot integration and agentless protection for all three hypervisors on Nutanix. It is designed to eliminate the need for complex multiple point-solutions with a fully integrated solution across physical, virtual and cloud-based data.

This integration, which leverages Commvault IntelliSnap and Nutanix Acropolis Distributed Storage Fabric snapshot functionality, will let customers leverage the most appropriate hypervisor, to reduce risk and effort and optimize costs.

“It’s a priority for Commvault to attach ourselves to disruptive and market-leading companies in the market in areas that touch ours,” Nimergood said. “We determined that support for Acropolis would be another capability that would be of value to our customer base.”

Greg White headshot 2011

Greg White, Director of Global Alliances Marketing at Commvault

“We have been working with Nutanix for over a year,” said Greg White, Director of Global Alliances Marketing at Commvault. “Our integration with them in our October software release for the next generation platform was the first big announcement with them.”

Basic support for Nutanix Acropolis is available now to select customers, with more advanced IntelliSnap technology integration coming later in the quarter.

“We are actively going to market and meeting in the channel with Commvault and Nutanix partners,” White said. “This really opens up what our partners can do and the problems they can solve.”

Nimergood stressed that more of these kinds of partnerships with key complementary vendors can be expected.

“Commvault is a partner-centric company, and we are investing heavily in technical integration and marketing and business development to ensure we are rounding out a very strong ecosystem that covers both traditional and next generation partners,” he said. “You will continue to see more movement and momentum in that area.”