Nutanix breaks the bounds of HCI once more with Pure Storage linkup

Hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) pioneer and market chief Nutanix has added the power to join with exterior storage from Pure Storage from its HCI stack. The transfer is Nutanix’s second overture in direction of exterior storage – the primary was to Dell PowerFlex final yr – and marks an extra rupture with a strict hyper-converged infrastructure mannequin

The announcement – made at this week’s .Subsequent occasion in Washington DC – helps Nutanix place itself to reap the benefits of buyer have to de-risk publicity to VMware commitments after its buy by Broadcom and the elevated prices and lowered deployment selections which are reported to have resulted.

The transfer so as to add exterior Pure Storage FlashArray – its most performant array product line based mostly round Connectivity – capability to Nutanix HCI permits current VMware prospects to think about shifting to a unique hypervisor for virtualised workloads. Nutanix gives its personal Acropolis hypervisor however can run every other that the client needs to deploy. That comes as a result of Nutanix’s working system – AOS – permits it.

Nutanix was a pioneer of so-called hyper-converged infrastructure, which noticed compute and storage bundled collectively in nodes that might join in grid-like style to kind clusters, typically with server and storage elements scalable independently. This was a very enticing proposition to prospects that lacked deep skillsets as they had been comparatively simply deployable and scalable.

And so the concept that Nutanix ought to permit the usage of exterior storage from third events considerably goes towards the unique precept it pioneered. It does, nonetheless, make a compelling proposition.

On the one hand, it permits prospects that wish to swerve away from VMware to take action comparatively simply right into a hypervisor-agnostic atmosphere. It additionally offers scalability by way of capability and efficiency that Nutanix could have beforehand lacked in its Pure hyper-converged infrastructure structure. That’s probably made extra pressing by the present upsurge in AI workloads, which might run to very giant scale by way of knowledge volumes.

Right here, Nutanix advertising vice-president Lee Caswell defined the distinction, evaluating cluster sizes doable with exterior storage – which run to the lots of – with Nutanix because it has often been deployed.

“HCI customers scale their clusters at a lot smaller sizes,” he stated. “They’re usually six to eight, eight to 12 or 16 nodes. And so you may see that we’re bringing efficiency and scale of a storage system into Nutanix usability, the Nutanix usability mannequin.”

Clients will be capable of handle Pure capability via the Nutanix Prism interface, from the place they will run replication, snapshots and DR capabilities.

Caswell was additionally eager to spotlight the independence of storage within the Nutanix structure in contrast with VMware.

“AOS was architected independently, modularly, impartial of the hypervisor,” he stated. “That’s in stark distinction to V San, for instance, which is built-in within the kernel of vSphere. You may’t run vSAN with out vSphere. It’s a part of vSAN. In reality, when vSphere ships, the vSAN bits are in it. From the beginning, we’ve been in a position to supply a alternative of hypervisor.”

Does this all mark a retreat from hyper-converged for Nutanix? In no way, stated Caswell: “It’s not a alternative for HCI. We’re not strolling again from any of the HCI worth proposition that we’ve got, and there’s nonetheless a lot of prospects. HCI is barely 20% penetrated available in the market right now. On the similar time, we’re recognising that storage and HCI will coexist, and that Nutanix goes to offer a standard approach to go and handle throughout storage and HCI techniques.”

However why now? Caswell was eager to spotlight that the rise of IP storage and the relative decline of Fibre Channel has made it much less of a technical problem to combine exterior storage arrays to the Nutanix world.

“Traditionally, most exterior storage has been Fibre Channel,” he stated. “And the technical raise to go do {hardware} compatibility with Fibre Channel, the switches, and with Fibre Channel exterior arrays, has been a very onerous drawback, however now it’s a solved drawback. What we’re specializing in is IP-based storage. That reduces a complete slew of technical integration threat.”

He additionally highlighted the push to vary that the Broadcom takeover of VMware had offered: “Most storage techniques connect to vSphere, and there was no compelling transfer in a really slow-to-move, conservative market, to maneuver away from vSphere. Till Broadcom. The Broadcom modifications are actually pushing prospects to de-risk future publicity they need to Broadcom enterprise practices.”