Kathy Gibson reports from Nutanix .Next in Washington DC – The rapid pace at which technology advances and changes has never been as apparent as the last year.
Amid change and disruption, organisations have to focus on modernising their infrastructure, building applications once and running them anywhere, and enabling the move to agentic AI.
Rajiv Ramaswami, president and CEO of Nutanix, says the company is delivering solutions to help customers achieve these goals.
“We want to be the platform of choice for the long-term,” he tells delegates to Nutanix .Next happening this week in Washington DC. “And to do this, we are investing in innovations and a growing ecosystem.”
Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) is an established technology, and one that Nutanix has offered for some time. “But customers have told us they want more flexibility,” Ramaswami says. “Last year, we told customers we would integrate with external storage and we have delivered with Dell PowerFlex, offering the same simplicity and ease of use as an HCI platform.”
Moody’s, best known as the global ratings agency, but also a credit analyst, was an early adopter of the PowerFlex storage integration.
Tony Bacon, global head of infrastructure at Moody’s, says that last year the company invested in PowerFlex as part of a big migration project.
“We were looking for opportunities after the migration, and joined the early access programme with Nutanix.”
The implementation has enabled hybrid cloud management for the PowerFlex environment, giving Moody’s the ability move workloads around so they can run in the right place, for the right reasons.
“Today we’re announcing that we will be integrating Nutanix with Pure Storage’s FlashArray next, giving customers more choice,” Ramaswami says.
Charles Giancarlo, chairman and CEO of Pure Storage, says the announcement means customers don’t have to choose any more.
“Disruption and uncertainty are forcing everyone to rethink their infrastructure. But customers are clear that they want simplicity, power, agility and control.
“We have joined forces with Nutanix to deliver a full stack solution that is resilient, high performing and ready to scale at the speed of your business.
“This gives customers the freedom to choose the server platform they trust best,” Giancarlo says.
The integrated Nutanix and Pure Storage solution comes at a pivotal time for customers as the virtualisation market evolution is top of mind. IT leaders are focused on helping their organisations maintain pace with the rapidly changing technology landscape while simultaneously implementing greater operational effectiveness.
Gartner predicts that “by 2028, cost concerns will drive 70% of enterprise-scale VMware customers to migrate 50% of their virtual workloads.”
With this collaboration, the Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure solution, powered by the Nutanix AHV hypervisor, along with Nutanix Flow virtual networking and security, will integrate with Pure Storage FlashArray over NVMe/TCP to deliver a customer experience uniquely designed for high-demand data workloads – including AI.
“We believe our largest customers will have storage and HCI – and we’re giving them that choice,” says Lee Caswell, senior vice-president: product and solutions marketing at Nutanix.
“We are not walking back from HCI,” he stresses. “There are great opportunities with HCI. But we recognise that external storage and HCI co-exist, and Nutanix provides a common way to manage this.”
Key benefits of the new solution include:
- Scalable, Modern Infrastructure – This partnership will provide customers with access to high-performance, flexible, and efficient full-stack infrastructure to power their most business-critical workloads through the simplicity and agility of Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure for virtual compute, and the consistency, scalability, and performance density of Pure Storage all-flash systems.
- Built-in Cyber Resilience – Customers will be able to strengthen their end-to-end cyber-resilience posture by leveraging native Nutanix capabilities, such as Flow micro-segmentation and disaster recovery orchestration, alongside Pure Storage FlashArray capabilities, such as data-at-rest encryption and SafeMode.
- Freedom of Choice – Customers want agility and control of their missioncritical environments. The combination of Nutanix and Pure Storage will offer a resilient and easy-to-use alternative to existing market options.
“This new solution will help Nutanix and Pure Storage reach more customers together and help them better manage and modernise their mission-critical applications,” says Tarkan Maner, chief commercial officer at Nutanix. “Our integrated solution will be ideally suited for companies with storage-rich environments looking for choices in modernisation.”
“With more than 13 500 global customers, I’m hearing more than ever that organizations of all shapes and sizes have a growing need for efficient, flexible, and high-performance solutions that can also scale to support their most critical, data-intensive applications,” says Maciej Kranz, GM: enterprise at Pure Storage. “Nutanix and Pure Storage are both known for pushing the boundaries of traditional infrastructure, driving innovation, and enabling unmatched agility. With this easy-to-manage solution, our joint customers will have the power of a virtual infrastructure that’s truly built for change.”
The solution will be supported on major server hardware partners that currently support Pure Storage FlashArray including Cisco, Dell, HPE, Lenovo, and Supermicro, for both existing and new deployments.
Cisco and Pure Storage have an existing partnership, with more than 60 FlashStack-validated designs, and they are now extending this to include Nutanix in the portfolio.
“The future of infrastructure is defined by flexibility,” says Jeremy Foster, senior vice-president and GM at Cisco Compute. “That’s exactly what this next evolution of FlashStack delivers. With nearly a decade of joint innovation with Pure Storage, and an expanded partnership and co-development roadmap with Nutanix, we’re offering a proven platform backed by Cisco validated designs, a world-class joint support model, and deep integration with Cisco Intersight – providing unified visibility across both Pure Storage and Nutanix clusters for a more complete view of the operating environment. This level of integration, insight, and support is what will set FlashStack with Nutanix apart in the market.”
The Cisco solution is currently under development and is expected to be in early access by the summer of 2025 and generally available at the end of this calendar year through both Nutanix and Pure Storage channel partners.
Ramaswami points out that Nutanix aims to be the platform of choice for apps, and a growing ecosystem of ISV applications is making that a reality – today more than 1 000 independent apps already running on the platform.
“One of those workloads we have always been close to is end user computing.”
To this end, Nutanix has enjoyed a long partnership with Citrix, and continues to enhance that. At Nutanix .Next today, Nutanix announced that AHV is now also integrated with Citrix.
The company rounded out its modernised infrastructure offerings with the announcements that Omnissa now supports AHV. “This is a big step, and means that AHV now supports Horizon View,” says Caswell. “It also demonstrates how Omnissa is working with Nutanix to derisk its customers.”
Omnissa is the company that brought VMware’s Horizons solutions from Broadcom.