Nutanix consciously uncouples with move into software-only sales Nutanix has decided the time is right to sell more software, inking deals that will see its hyperconverged software-defined-everything stack sold with servers by HPE and Cisco. The company already has deals with Lenovo and Dell, but both involve selling ready-to-roll appliances. These new deals will see Nutanix sell just …
What do you mean?
Do you mean HPE buying simplivity or Netapp coming up with its own HCI play or Microsoft partnering with DellEMC on Azure Stack? Here and there, HCI is everywhere -- especially at places (like HPE, Netapp, EMC, etc) that myopically ignored, derided, or even disrupted productive conversations on datacenter technologies.
Your and some of the subsequent comments aren't productive to the education of the market, falling in the second and third buckets.
I can't blame Nutanix for thinking outside of the box to increase their reach. I am in technical sales at a VAR and my customers love it. They make their decisions based on utility and value, pain of migration and cost. Nutanix has come up on top, a lot more often than not.
Aah ... VARs! Second rate bottom feeders that sell whatever has the highest margin or shortest sale cycle while pretending to be "trusted advisors".
Your idiotic assumption that AzureStack is an HCI offering (and tied to DellEMC) is all we needed to know about your knowledge of the market.
Nutanix first started with their own hardware appliances and Acropolis (proprietary version of KVM, to everyone else, so customers are swapping one closed Hypervisor for another). But when they took this into VMware shops, they found much resistance, so they dropped to being just an SDS provider, serving storage pools to the incumbents.
When this meant they could not fund their entire HCI stack (afterall, there's a plethora of SDS providers out there; Open Source, Pretentious Open Source and Closed Source), they opened up their entire software stack to be installed on anyone and everyone who sells an x86 server.
They're now realising that these hardware partners either don't care who the software stack is from or they lack knowledge, to extol the virtues (if any) of HCI.
So now, they have re-invented themselves with their software stack running on 'anything, so long as we've stuck the disc in their 5 minutes prior to the customer, to make sure it runs' compatibility and calling it an "Enterprise Cloud" instead.
From HCI to SDS, back to HCI (with someone else's hardware) and now Enterprise Cloud, all in the space of a few years. HCI is nothing more than a bandage for the data centre.
And the Nutanix trolls are down voting you.
Extremely well put. I would add that they are getting hammered in the market, they have a mediocre product with crazy marketing but their business model is toast. They'll be out of business in a year or two. Problem is, the douchebags running the company will just spread out to other start ups and sell BS.
Something everyone is missing here is they can't get HPE to fix a Firmware issue. The Adaptec based controllers they have are full of bugs and when HPE tell you that you don't have a support operating system you'll be wondering what "Certified for HPE" really meant. It's a unilateral certification. Useless.
For more than 15 years now I have been making the observation that for any new technology, the immature (stupid) phase is the ‘appliance’ phase. When was the last time any of us asked for a ‘NAS appliance’? (not counting the sub-$1,000 market on Amazon)
The mature phase of NAS happened when the software stack was disaggregated from the hardware, and likewise, historically disaggregation ALWAYS wins in the end. Like the old saying goes, customers want to ‘date’ their hardware vendors but want to ‘marry’ their software vendors. Once the ‘gee-whiz’ factor wore out and customers realized that NAS is a relatively simple software stack that runs on any server, nobody liked the hardware lock-in that is represented in the case of the NAS appliance.
We’re seeing this play out again in the crashing-and-burning of Nutanix, the poster-child for the 'appliantization' of HCI.
Now, as customers are figuring out Hyper-converged technology, realizing that its JUST SOFTWARE that runs on ANY hardware, here comes desperate Nutanix as a software-only stack…
Good news for customers is that the market preference for the disaggregated HCI model is clearly starting to emerge. It would seem that companies who have been selling the disaggregated model of HCI are in the catbird seat.
Told you so ;-)
Lots of accurate stuff in there.
One thing that gets overlooked though is that all HCI vendors are really just SDS vendors that slapped a VSI management GUI onto their product. Once SDS became a commodity and built-in feature (VSAN, Windows Storage Spaces, HyperFlex) that's either free or can be added for a nominal fee, what's the big differentiator?
Nutanix really tried to be somehow a new server platform vendor while all they had was a kind of ok distributed storage system and Prism. They had a lot of early wins by sneaking into server departments who were disgruntled about their SAN and storage peers but now everyone has an easy button to provide LUNs and datastores.
With that gone and without hardware integration (if you run on everything, you cannot optimize for anything either) and their margin being squeezed on the hardware side, the only way to profitability (hahahahahahah aaaah hahahahahahah) is up the stack into software defined networking (of course, true to Nutanix being buzzword whores they chose the term "micro-segmentation") and cloud management.
SDN is a tough area, Vmware spent more than a billion $ to buy Nicira and still couldn't get it right with production releases crashes customer environments (twice) and terrible adoption. The other segmente, cloud management, is incredibly crowded and I am wondering why the fnck anyone would buy something from Nutanix in this space. Sure, if you are Nutanix, then you want your customer to buy EVERYTHING from you. Even if it's not from you, like the shitty hardware. But hey, it works on any hardware. Jimmy over there wrote a script that tests ten vendors and thousand server models if they are compatible. I am sure it will catch every little bug and possibility, your enterprise app is totally safe LOL
These guys are the posterchild for the VC and tech industry as well as our society at large. It's all show, take a second rate product, market the shit out of it, and sell it to a bunch of gullible folks; cash out and off you go to the next scam.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
