Heads up! Just a few moments ago Nutanix announced their global agreement with Dell computing! They have signed an original equipment manufacturing (OEM) agreement with Dell to offer a new family of converged infrastructure appliances based on Nutanix Web-Scale technology. Soon Dell will launch a new series of XC, Web-Scale based appliances, which will consist out of various Dell Poweredge servers with the Nutanix software installed on top. A very powerful and innovative combination which allows datacenters of any size to adopt Web-Scale technology as their own.
From the ground up
Their product(s) have been (re) designed from the ground up and will be available in multiple variants offering various price and performance options. This new line of appliances will deliver a high performance and converged infrastructure ideally suited to support a whole range of well known and popular use cases, these include but are not limited to; Virtual Desktop Infrastructures, or VDI in short, Big data solutions, virtualized applications and more. As you probably know already, the Nutanix web-Scale software is compatible with all major hypervisor platforms available today, like; VMware, Hyper-V and KVM and it’s not limited to just one hypervisor within the same environment, which enables you to mix and match as you feel fit, a unique feature on its own!
Web-Scale for everyone!
For some smaller companies today, solution like Nutanix might just be a bit to expensive, but with this new OEM agreement already singed and sealed and a fresh line of Dell / Nutanix hybrid machines coming soon all this will go away. Web-Scale technology will become more affordable and available than it already was, even for the smaller budgets among us.
Something to look forward to
As I already highlighted in my last article, Web-Scale technology is here to stay and eventually take over, perhaps not overnight, but it might happen sooner than you think, so you’d better come prepared when it does. Unfortunately we still have to wait till the fourth quarter of 2014 before the new Dell XC series will hit the shelves, but I guess that gives us something to look forward to. They will be made available through Dell sales teams and channel partners world wide as stated in their official press release.
Shoot for the moon
Another big move by Nutanix who is quickly becoming one the leaders, if not already, in the converged infrastructure landscape. And what to think about Dell, a big step forward for them as well. Not that long ago HP launched their Moonshot, software defined, server line of products, and although they were the first to do so I don’t think they’ll be able to match the Dell / Nutanix portfolio coming soon. Although HP offers several software packages supporting their Moonshot infrastructure, it’s still much more about the hardware involved.
So I wonder if statements like ‘software defined’ or Web-Scale for that matter, really apply to HP’s Moonshot technology. I’m thinking no, should you say ‘converged’ than yes. They also claim, that not using a hypervisor ‘in between’ reduces complexity and enhances security, hmmm, but what about flexibility, automatic failovers, data tiering, data dedup, replicated writes and so on? I guess they both could serve the same purpose when it comes to handling Big data and VDI workloads for example, they just go about it another way. With the HP solution also offering several advantages for sure, it’s just not Web-Scale material, not yet anyway, that’s all.
Web-Scale Wednesday
To highlight the influence of web-scale technologies in enterprise datacenters, Nutanix is hosting Web-Scale Wednesday on June 25, 2014 from 9:00am PT – 12:00pm PT (with on-demand access throughout the week). This interactive and educational industry event brings together web-scale experts from virtualization, infrastructure, and cloud companies to discuss how recent developments are changing the course of enterprise IT. Click on the banner below to register.
Remember where you read it first ;-) More technical details will follow as soon as they become available and I can get my hands on them!
