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And again you are not understanding the angle of the question.

Of course on the front end Nutanix' Controller VM supports various the data protocols used by several hypervisors. And from that perspective you can migrate data as "easily" as with every other storage array that is used by Hypervisor X to Hypervisor Y or to another "hyperconverged" solution. You are doing this with the interfaces on top of the hypervisor. Not much gain there. It's as easy or complex as with a storage array that speaks a supported protocol.

The question is: how is data stored in the backend above it's internal SCSI controller? Meaning: is the BACK-END data format that sits on top of the HDD/SSDs in the node making up NDFS known? Is it directly accessible?

Unless I am misinformed it's not because it's propietary. And that's where Nutanix controls access to your data. You need HDFS instead of NFS and SMB 3.0? Out of luck. That's where the lock in occurs.

A real software-defined storage solution sit's on top of a well-known format here, in the Linux space this is usually either LVM or XFS. There you can still access the data even when the SDS layer is offline or unavailable.

So apparently you are always coming back to the use case of using hypervisors to access data which is a major but not the only use case for SDS.

Instead of accusing me of "making up shit" you should probably try to understand what other uses cases exist than just yours. As it turns out the SDS market, where Nutanix claims to be a leader in, only attributes a small portion of it's growth and revenue to online workloads like VMs.

The major money is being made in environments where the data is NOT accessed through a hypervisor.

And that's where YOUR story is completely falling apart and you end up with another silo for a single use case.

My 2 cent.