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Server-storage halfblood newbie Nutanix: We're taking on big dog VCE

Begs customers to make a move

It’s not the size of the dog in the fight that matters, it’s the size of the fight in the dog - which brings us to converged server/storage system vendor rivals Nutanix and VCE.

VCE is a bulging giant backed by Cisco, EMC and VMware, with annual revenues running at more than $1bn and more than 1,750 systems sold to more than 800 customers in nearly 60 countries.

Nutanix is a startup stripling with lifetime sales of just $100m over the past three years or so. What has this stripling got that should make VCE sit up and take notice?

It claims:

  • Nutanix Virtual Compute Platform (VCP) gear can deliver nearly any virtualised workload, including virtual desktops, Microsoft enterprise applications, databases and more, and deliver them with 9x faster performance and 10x faster time to deployment.
  • It claims VCE only runs on VMware Nutanix’ boxes support VMware, Hyper-V and KVM.

Customers are being offered a Vblock-to-Nutanix Migration Service which includes:

  • Free detailed assessment of all virtual workloads in the Vblock environment, including;
    • Complete inventory of CPU, RAM and storage (random and sequential I/O) utilisation per workload,
    • All workloads outliers are identified and addressed individually,
    • Formal capture of custom network and security requirements (e.g. dependencies on virtual distributed switches), Cisco 1000V vSwitch, or other network function virtualisation,
  • Documented migration plan,
  • Multi-phase, documented, step-by-step cutover process.

Nutanix says its Global Services Organisation has services “available to implement Nutanix clusters, and perform the actual application and workload migration, plus full training on the Nutanix-based infrastructure.”

The Nutanix announcement includes a quote from Parmeet Chaddha, the firm's global services VP: “The enterprise datacenter is at an inflection point as it tries to keep up with rapid advancements in technology. Some vendors have turned to duct taping legacy technologies in a 42U rack and selling it as next-generation converged infrastructure.”

What does VCE think about Nutanix? We might paraphrase its response as: “Who?”. NICs are all very well but Nutanix gear doesn’t include the networking that a Vblock contains, for example. And when it comes to VCE's Fibre Channel, it could easily point out that Nutanix does not have any. ®

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