The Beam service that Nutanix announced at their spring customer event was designed for the public cloud. The integration into the Nutanix private cloud, available by the end of the calendar year will allow customers to determine whether the private cloud or a specific public cloud makes the most sense for a given workload.
Nutanix follows up their certification on SAP HANA non-production environments in June with the expected – but still very important – announcement that they have now been certified for SAP HANA production environments as well.
While this in itself is huge news for Nutanix and their channel partners, the goal is to have HANA certified for production environments in the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS with their 5.9 release.
The provision of new object storage, compute and marketplace services to developers is part of a continuing Nutanix strategy to elevate itself from providing HCI infrastructure to providing the whole stack.
The cloud services have the same OS as Nutanix’s on-prem software, which provides major benefits for customers – and significant new opportunities for partners.
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.
The interesting thing here is that Nutanix has expanded the Cisco support on its own, without Cisco being involved in the validation process. That supports the two companies’ earlier stated position that no partnership where Nutanix would be sold on UCS was in the works. This move may, however, indicate that Nutanix is trying to create momentum towards it.
Nutanix is making a major initiative targeting service provider customers, which sees it introduce a program that lets them pay for their infrastructure by subscription, as they are paid themselves.
Acropolis combines Nutanix’s flagship Distributed Storage Fabric with their own hypervisor and a new app mobility fabric which will decouple apps from their hypervisor, let users use the Nutanix hypervisor, and massively cut their virtualization costs. Prism complements it with simple management. Acropolis and Prism make up the new Xtreme Computing Platform.
Nutanix, which despite its massive success is still a startup, gets key validation from Dell partnering with them, and also greatly expands their channel and routes to market.
With new funding and new markets to tap, Nutanix sees the debut of VMware’s Evo family of products as evidence for further convergence of infrastructure.
