Nutanix also announced Nutanix Go, a program that allows acquisition of their appliances on a cloud-like purchase model, but for now, it’s only available in the U.S.
Greg Smith, Nutanix’s Senior Director of Product Marketing
Nutanix has made a series of announcements designed to broaden the ways that customers can consume their Enterprise Cloud Platform software. First, they said that their software will be available for license on both Hewlett Packard Enterprises ProLiant rackmount servers and Cisco UCS B-series blade servers. These new validations follow up last August’s announcement of Nutanix support for the Cisco UCS C-series platform. Secondly, they announced a new program, Nutanix Go, which provides for the sale of Nutanix appliances to customers on an OPEX model so they can pay for them out of their operating budgets.
“This is a significant announcement both for us and the market as a whole, and a continuation of our long-standing strategy to make Nutanix available on the most popular platforms,” said Greg Smith, Nutanix’s Senior Director of Product Marketing. “We are a 100 per cent software solution, and many customers have asked us to support additional platforms, so they can run our software stack on their preferred platform, To meet this customer demand, last year we introduced support for Cisco UCS C Series rackmount servers, and with this announcement we are making a major leap forward by announcing support for HPE Proliant servers. Nutanix customers can now choose from four of the most popular servers in the world for their Nutanix enterprise cloud.”
Like last year’s Cisco announcement, the new HPE and Cisco support is very different from Nutanix’s relationship with Lenovo and Dell EMC. The latter two are OEM relationships, with both Nutanix and the hardware partner working together to optimize the software on the hardware. Last year’s Cisco validation was entirely from the Nutanix side, with Nutanix engineers validating the effectiveness of their software on Cisco UCS C servers, and with Nutanix’s global support and services teams offering full support to customers throughout the entire IT lifecycle, including initial installation, infrastructure scaling and troubleshooting. The two new announcements are essentially the same as this one from last year.
“These new announcements are something that Nutanix on its own is bringing to the market to meet the request of joint customers,” Smith stated.
Smith said that the market response to the Cisco UCS validation encouraged Nutanix to extend it to other platforms.
“The response has met and in some ways exceeded our expectations,” he said. “We have been very pleased and encouraged by the demand for Nutanix software on Cisco UCS. It has validated the business model and the larger market need for customers to pick their software stack and then choose their hardware platform.”
The absence of a reciprocal agreement means that, in theory, HPE and Cisco could decline to provide support to Nutanix software on their servers, although Smith said Nutanix is hopeful this will not be the case.
“Nutanix software runs on general purpose hypervisors, so running on a supported hypervisor should not pose any compatibility or support issues for hardware vendors,” he said. “We would hope they would not discriminate against a software package just because we offer a competing solution, and that in the end, they will do what is best for their customer, and support it like they would any other software solution for their server.”
Nutanix also announced a new program, Nutanix Go, which provides a cloud-like consumption model to acquire Nutanix appliances.
“Go pricing gives customers the ability to consume Nutanix appliances using their operating budgets, rather than make a long term decision to own infrastructure,” Smith said. “Nutanix Go pricing gives customers the flexibility to rent Nutanix appliances for terms as short as six months. They can also scale up – or scale down – without financial penalty, bringing a cloud-like consumption model to Nutanix deployments. It shows Nutanix’s commitment to expand the dimensions of consumption by economic consumption model, as well as by form factor.”
Nutanix Go pricing is targeted at large enterprise customers, to provides them with more budget flexibility, as well as service providers.
For Canadians, there’s a catch, however. It’s initially only available in the U.S., although Smith said that the intention is to scale the program beyond that at same point.
