EMC will hawk Dell's Nutanix-powered XC kit

VCE president Chad Sakac has confirmed EMC will pick up Dell's Nutanix-powered XC hyper-converged system, even though EMC's own VxRail hyper-converged system sales are "on fire." VCE is EMC's Converged Platform Division, and – lest we forget – EMC is going to be gobbled up by Dell, which flogs Nutanix-powered XC gear. If that …

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me try to translate canadian for everyone

"It's pretty straightforward: Dell is 20 to 30 per cent of the Nutanix business today, or about 420 customers. It's not the right customer move to sever that relationship. Therefore, we'll offer a choice"

(Translation) EMC offers lots of choices. Some they lead with some they don't... We'll take your money if you twist our arm and demand to buy a XC...

"VxRail is on fire. Together with VxRack, we are now [selling] north of $50m per quarter with a $200m run-rate as of Q2. We're closing in on 2,000 appliances and 700 customers. That's after 120 selling days."

(Translation) We view VxRAIL as a growth market for Dell-EMC, not XC. We have more customers for VxRAIL and at these growth numbers should lead Nutanix in the HCI appliance space by end of year or early 2017.

"Clearly we think the best answer for customers standardized on vSphere is VxRail – period. Our [go-to-market] will reflect that. We closed Q2 taking the number two spot from Simplivity."

(Translation) We will lead with VxRAIL, because Dell didn't buy this much of VMware to sell Hyper-V.... If your weird and want KVM or something else we'll offer other stuff if you beg (Maybe ScaleIO over Nutanix?) But don't expect both to be in the same slide deck when your Dell/EMC AE shows up unless you ask for it as their compensation is going to tilt toward the non-OEM product. Dell has a partnership with Nexenta? Havn't heard of it? well......

[dpk]

Re: Let me try to translate canadian for everyone

Substitute "translation" with "interpretation". FWIW, its a subtle difference, but Dell bought EMC, who own a majority stake in VMware.

[Anonymous Coward]

Inaccurate competitor numbers, interesting Vxrail insights

Interesting and likely inaccurate insight re: Simplivity - no idea how Chad would have install base count of a private company (Simplivity) to compare the Vxrail install count to.

Simplivity's current pitch indicates over 1000 customers and 5000 deployments, which would be significantly more than Vxrail - who knows if it's true, but I doubt Chad has any unique insight there.

Much more interesting is the Vxrail appliance count to customer count ratio - that indicates extremely small deployments of ~3 appliances each as the average. I think that's also near the Vxrail minimum node count. Nutanix has some pretty big customer deployments - 10s of nodes is not uncommon, some have hundreds. The implication is Vxrail is having success exclusively in ROBO use cases or SMB customers.

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder if Nutanix feel the same? I doubt it.

[Anonymous Coward]

VxRail numbers

An appliance is 4 servers FYI (they were going to offer 2 and 3 node later). So in 120 days that is 8000 nodes with an average of 12 hosts per customer is my math is right.

Chad is saying they hit those numbers in only 120 days, which implies a higher run rate than simplicity (Netapp has sold billions, but we judge them quarter to quarter for how much they sell, not how many ancient FAS 2020's rot in a rack).

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: VxRail numbers

Many of those might be existing customers of EMC which have been stuck with strategic sourcing deals from single vendors or legacy converged architectures. IT departments that aren't allowed to buy Nutanix or Simplivity basically or get sticker shock at the price per cpu core because they're not looking at the total SAN+Network+Server costs. There's a lot of frustration being addressed by the release of something from EMC that plays in the hyper-converged space and can replace much of the previous VCE componentry without leaving too much egg on the face of people making previous deals. It would be interesting to see how many new customers EMC are getting with the release of their improved HCI offering.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: VxRail numbers

As a member of the EMC channel at a distributor in the APJ region I can assure you that VXRail is opening doors that were closed to EMC before we had the product.

There are may companies that would like an HCI environment but will not risk a startup.

It is a good, flexible product that allows a good range of configuration options and is suited to approximately (My gut feel) 60-70% of the customer base in the 150-5000 seat market. That's not a bad hit rate.

[unredeemed]

Re: VxRail numbers

Short of a very large enterprise, that does an excellent job of controlling purchasing, I've never run into what you describe.

I now see as a common place of random crap sprinkled into DC's. A random business unit buys an AFA from a startup since it was a deal too good to pass. A different BU that bought a Nimble array. etc. The larger IT wouldn't touch that with a 3 meter pole. But the autonomous business units, or crafty purchasing skills circumventing the larger corporate purchasing rules, are able to sneak that in.

These startups are basically seeding a unit at a cut throat price, but usually for a small workload. With the hope it may gain traction in the larger whole, or to claim the new logo (Ever read a EULA lately and the use of your logo?)

But "sole sourcing," agreements are few and far between.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: VxRail numbers

Entry price on a VxRAIL (4 node appliance) is ~60K right?

Entry price on a vBlock has how many zeros?

EMC has 3000 CI customers, and billions of tin shipped, and VxRAIL just gave their sales team something that they can sell to every account or opportunity that wasn't big enough for VxBlock/VBlock.

Given the amount of channel involvement in VxRAIL being moved (I think Chad said over 80%) that didn't involve EMC directly I think this points to a lot of genuine demand/interest in a HCI solution that can scale up to PB's, has a low starting point, and doesn't come from a company who's stated mission in life is to destroy VMware and refuses to share performance numbers...

I've never met someone who contractually could only buy storage from EMC (And I consulted for storage in over 100 companies). That's just not normal, and sounds like sour grapes.

I agree with others that in large shops is a mismatch of "seed" units from startups trying to get mindshare and a logo.

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting announcement

Sonemc emc want to be the number 1 HCI vendor in the next 12 months and the dell nutanix agreement gives them access to nutanix pricing.

Sounds like a good deal for nutanix

[Anonymous Coward]

Did not see good to Nutanix

From the news, 20% revenue of Nutanix came from Dell-Nutanix deal.

Once Dell-EMC emerge is done, what't the reason for Dell to continue this deal?

EMC already has VxRail and VCE, VmWare already has VSAN. Both are overlapped with Nutanix/Dell offerings. Unless Dell/EMC wants to pick up Nutanix if they can't go public smoothly,

did not see why this deal will be sustainable.

[virtualgeek]

No need to translate Canadian :-)

All thanks for your comments, and Chris, thanks for your interest, and for pinging me on Twitter.

I think there's parts of this you got right (success we're seeing with VxRail), and there's parts of this you got wrong - it's an OEM, not a resell. Furthermore, this is a validation of customers, not anyone's tech.

There's also nothing here that suggests how we are going to go-to-market, and how for what customers and use cases we would use the elements of the portfolio. A few of the "anonymous cowards" have questions that are pretty easily answered.

This topic isn't something that I've been saying publicly for the last couple of weeks - so not news/exclusive - and interpretation is not needed.

In case people haven't heard me say it, and if any reader wants to hear it directly from me - I did a post here: http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2016/07/media-headlines-will-emc-resell-nutanix.html

Thanks!

[Anonymous Coward]

hilarious

Lets have 40 competing products and then open the trenchcoat and offer the customer whatever they pivot too.

Gone are the days of EMC/Dell selling whats best for the customer, it's now all about "lets sell what works best for EMC/Dell comp plans"

you cant sit there and say VxRail, VSan is best for the customer and when nutanix outsell them or vice versa say yep we can do that too.

Used Car selling