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SimpliVity customers spurned by HPE welcomed into loving arms of Nutanix

Seductive twofer licence deal if you switch

Nutanix wants SimpliVity customers upset by HPE's purchase to move across to them instead.

Chief marketing officer Howard Ting said HPE, having bought SimpliVity, was discontinuing SimpliVity sales on non-HPE hardware, leaving SimpliVity customers possibly needing to switch hardware.

"It looks like a dead end for Cisco and Lenovo customers" using SimpliVity SW on those vendors x86 server hardware products, Ting said. Nutanix is offering all SimpliVity Cisco UCS customers a 2-for-1 licence deal if they switch from SimpliVity to Nutanix, meaning that for every SimpliVity SW node switched to Nutanix, they will get two Nutanix node licences.

"We're working on a migration plan" for Dell and Lenovo HW-using SimpliVity customers, he added.

And there's more: "For larger accounts we might provide an even greater financial incentive and will probably do so on a case-by-case basis."

He claimed Nutanix was finding customers were increasingly interested in its full-stack approach, as that was the only alternative to the VMware stack used by other hyperconverged infrastructure appliance (HCIA) vendors. Nutanix will extended its software-defined networking capabilities to embrace network segmentation and also strengthen its security offerings. It is not interested in building networking hardware.

The firm wants to move further "up the stack" and offers app orchestration and hybrid cloud management. Ting's view is that this is a greenfield area. The old incumbents with similar software for monolithic applications are disenfranchised in a world moving to virtual machines and thinking about containers and micro-services.

VMware has assets here, he said, with AWS for example, but a lot of it has still to be developed. Microsoft has its Azure Stack but he sees neither Cisco nor HPE doing much in the area. "There's not a lot of incumbency. It's mostly greenfield... We'll see a lot of action in hybrid this year."

NetApp will bring out its SolidFire-based product but it will be version 1 and so limited.

Asked if Nutanix would provide a cloud service, Ting said the company's project Calm was focussed on hybrid system management and orchestration. Some European ISPs run Nutanix software in their clouds but it doesn't have an AWS, Azure or Google presence. "There are a lot of conversations but nothing to announce."

On the hardware front, Ting said Nutanix is looking at NVMe SSD usage and exploring 3D Xpoint possibilities, but "the performance isn't there yet".

Nutanix is also working on integration with Rubrik's software and extending machine learning-based automation of its systems to enable workload SLAs. For example a what-if capability could be added. "We're living in a prediction economy. We want the infrastructure to run better and predict better."

And Nutanix wants upset SimpliVity customers to join the Nutanix party and enjoy all this stuff coming down the pike, including the possibility of a VMware escape route. Because VMware and its stack is Nutanix's main competitive focus, not the other HCIA box-shifters. Full stack status, here we come. ®

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