Nutanix Weekly: Nutanix Central On-Premises: Bringing Cloud Simplicity to Your Data Center

Balance the speed of the cloud with the need to keep data secure and compliant with global sovereignty regulations: This is a core challenge for modern enterprises. Enterprises today need a single, consistent way to manage all their infrastructure across private datacenters, public clouds, and at the edge. 

Blog post: https://www.nutanix.com/blog/nutanix-central-on-premises by Adharsh Praveen, Ruhi Sehgal, and Mayank Gupta

Transcript

0:02 - Speaker 1
Hello again and welcome to Nutanix Weekly, one of the many podcasts here at XenTegra. We like to call it content with context, and that's because we take the best content on the web, bring it to you, and break it down, adding our context. I'm your host, Phil Sellers. I'm the director of Modern Data Center here at XenTegra. And uh I can't do this alone. I'm joined with my team members, Chris Calhoun and Andy. Andy Green, both solutions architects on the team. Uh, Chris, uh, how's life been treating you?

0:37 - Speaker 3
Fantastic, I think is my default answer, sir.

0:40 - Speaker 1
Um and see, I've no I've worked with Chris uh long enough to know that that's exactly the answer I was gonna get with the exact enthusiasm I was gonna get. Uh it's a joy working with you, Chris, because um you're always just uh enthusiastic.

0:58 - Speaker 3
Love hanging out with this crew.

1:00 - Speaker 1
Yeah, it's a good crew. Um, Andy Green, how are you doing?

1:06 - Speaker 4
Doing well. Excited to be here. Uh, what could be better than hanging out with your friends and recording a podcast?

1:12 - Speaker 1
Well, I'm gonna say this episode um might be our hurricane party episode. Uh we've got a tropical storm just off the coast of the Carolinas. And so uh, you know, Chris and I are far enough inland that it's just a little bit of rain, but Jyre and Andy. Uh you guys are a little closer to it. Um any weather problems for you, Jira, other than maybe a little rain?

1:37 - Speaker 2
Nothing so far. Uh I was feeling okay about it. Now I feel a bit more nervous. Thanks. Thanks, Philip.

1:43 - Speaker 1
Hey, as somebody that lived on coastal um uh property for many, many years, uh, we we've weathered our fair share. Um but uh it's always something to watch. Will take a hurricane over a tornado any day. Oh true that I I could not uh make It in the middle of the country because uh those things pop up too quick. Well, uh today we want to talk a little bit about something new that's coming soon. Um, it's interesting because we don't get the opportunity to talk about futures a lot, and I think that's on purpose from Nutanix. They they talk about what they're delivering and what's uh on the truck, uh, but we do have an opportunity to kind of talk about it a few episodes ago. We talked about about pure storage announcements from.next and um we've got another external storage announcement um so without spoiling it because the title is gonna spoil it gyra what have we got so uh yeah this is very close to breaking news uh or or mere days old at this point uh Dell Power Store coming to Nutanix um which is very exciting wait didn't Dell already announce external storage for Nutanix I don't know if you know, Philip.

3:00 - Speaker 2
Dell has an awful lot of kinds of flavors of external storage. Um but it's funny, that does give me some great memories, right? It was you and I sitting in Barcelona about sixteen months ago. Yeah. And at that time there was zero flavors of external storage for Nutanix. And now sixteen months later, which is not really all that much time in the world. Uh we've we now have one solution that's fully GA with Dell PowerFlex, one that's in early access with pure storage, and now we've So uh it's just it's just Rain and Storage over here at Nutanix.

3:36 - Speaker 1
That uh well, that goes with our hurricane party theme.

3:40 - Speaker 3
Don't get so kids, don't get hit by a flying surgery.

3:42 - Speaker 2
That is not that is not a joke.

3:44 - Speaker 1
Well well done. Um yeah, so you're right though. I mean it's only been 16 months, and I remember at that announcement, um we had a colleague who had just returned from a partner technical advisory board. We were talking about how should it work, what's the benefits? Should we do it? Should we not do it? Um and this is really kind of a response to industry demand. It is really customer demand driven. Um what's going on there, Jaira?

4:15 - Speaker 2
Um you know as more and more customers looking to replatform their hypervisor in the data center, um, we don't catch every customer at an opportune time around, hey, do your software refresh and buy new compute and buy new New storage, um, which for the first, you know, what, 16 years of our history as a company has been the way to buy Nutanix. Right. So this is a really wonderful journey that we're on here to add more flexibility technically for even more flexibility. Government, there we go, made that work. Um, to help customers meet them where they are, right? If you've if you've got an 18-month-old power uh power store array, you're probably very excited to hear this news that you now can bring Nutanix to that party, keep the power store. That you've got lots of life left in, um, but make that software change that you so critically need to make.

5:06 - Unidentified Speaker
Yeah.

5:07 - Speaker 1
Yeah, there's not a lot of choices. Uh and I feel for customers, our clients right now, because uh they're faced with some pretty difficult decisions in terms of where their infrastructure runs. Um, the the Broadcom factor has become a major talking point. You know, at one point earlier this year, it was 50% of all of our conversations. I think it's an undercurrent in almost every conversation we're having now. So nearly 100% of conversations really kind of centering around this. Chris, you know, for our clients and stuff listening, what what does this external storage announcement with PowerStore mean for them?

5:53 - Speaker 3
I definitely think that like you said, it's it's you've got to meet customers, uh as Jara mentioned. Through their journey. And if they've already purchased and invested in Dell Tech Technology for storage, they want to have the flexibility to be able to reuse and repurpose as they move forward and that not getting locked into a solution of choosing from the past three to five years. They want that flexibility to explore with Nutanix and have the the comfort to know that um you're not going to have to repave and re-architect a whole new solution. That's really the key because that investment is a tough decision to make. You know, and once once a a business of any size commits to that decision, they need to stick with it. Not having to be able to just turn around and print money and go a different route out the very next year when uh VMware uh changes their or Broadcom changes their direction and let it be a decision that they make. And I think that that's really uh a key about again using the hardware compatibility list that Nutanix is uh focusing on I think is key because to me, like you we just talked about, hey, wasn't there a mention just recently about Dell? And to me that gives the idea that hey, this is repeatable process with external storage in the sense that we're looking at the technology starting with Dell um uh and or starting with the PowerFlex and now now moving to Power Store it's again something that you can expect going forward for Nutanix doing and looking like simplicity but taking difficult tasks and making making them easier for They're in user customers. And I think that that's really important.

8:03 - Speaker 2
Yeah, it's it's been lovely, lovely to see that. Um that it was an it was an early design goal that the experience of administering an HCI cluster is fully, fully uh relevant to administering a cluster of Nutanix with external storage. The create VM button just works, the create v disk button just works, the you know um volume groups just work, extending a V disk just works, nothing else to learn there, right? The day one, the way Install it is a little bit different. Day two, the way you operate it is identically the same.

8:34 - Speaker 4
And if if you think about it, you know, this isn't an entirely new concept from Nutanix. Uh, they've always had a very tightly controlled hardware compatibility list. That's how we can guarantee the performance that we're looking for. It's how we guarantee things like we're not going to wear out the uh the SSDs inside of the servers. Um, but they they've always had that ability to run on top of those standard, uh, you know, just in these industry standard Intel servers. So we're seeing this expand. Into the the sand market as well. But we're, you know, it really follows suit with things that we've seen previously. Um we had the uh Del XC uh Nutanix ready notes um and and other OEM vendors as well. So um you know I I think this is a good thing for the clients out there. Uh they have the existing relationships, they have existing investments in technology and it just gives them uh you know that that freedom of choice that we've talked about so much in the past.

9:27 - Speaker 1
Yeah, I I think You know, we talk about core themes, right? One of those is simplicity, another of those is uh you know performance, um, high level of support. Um, but this is now a a continuing conversation around flexibility as well. And so this same goodness that we've gotten to know around our VM estate in HCI world is now coming with external storage, but to Jyra's point, it's going to manage. The same way. So there's no retraining. That's simple it uh simplification. So now it's simplification with flexibility. Um you know what can we expect, Jyra? Uh out there, do you what what can customers expect?

10:15 - Speaker 2
Um well if I look back a little bit over some very recent history, what do customers like out of our our ultra recent um external source partnerships? It's that the array that they love stays the array that they love. Right, remains high performance, uh, provides still provides all the great D dupe that they are used to that they or or let's just say data reduction, broadly speaking. Um all the data reduction that they're used to uh still is there, uh still managed separately. They can forecast for storage uh separately, which is the whole reason why people love that kind of architecture. So all that goodness just is fully preserved, and now we're able to just run Nutanix next to it.

10:53 - Speaker 1
Yeah. So in a lot of ways, this is kind of the answer to a drop-in vSphere replacement. You know, you're getting an ecosystem, but it's VM centric and you're going to be able to really migrate workloads. Andy, I'm going to throw it to you. Let's talk a little bit about migration because that's a huge concern. You know, as you're looking to replatform from one to the other, migration's an inevitable part of that. What's Nutanix got um that helps within that regard.

11:32 - Speaker 4
Yeah, Nutanix has a tool called Nutanix Move that's included with your Nutanix subscription. And it's basically a tool that we can use to help migrate from other platforms into Nutanix. So it's going to uh you know do do the initial seeding of data from the the previous hypervisor into the Nutanix platform. And then it it'll keep those two environments uh you know in in sync with one another until we're ready for that cutover point. And When we cut over, we're basically just powering down the VM on the uh production side and bring bringing it back up on Nutanix.

12:05 - Speaker 1
Yeah. Uh and we've done uh I would dare to say a million of those as integra over the last few years. Um that's the number I'm sticking to. It may be marketing, but um it it feels like it. I mean, we we've moved large, large enterprise environments. Uh move maybe a no-cost tool. But it's a high value tool. And uh being able to do that and or highly orchestrate that migration is a huge benefit. Um you know, one of the things that strikes me too, Chris, is that you know, as gyra describes the the way that it works with the external storage, sounds very tightly coupled. Um Nutanix is in charge. Yes. Is that accurate?

12:56 - Speaker 3
Yes, absolutely.

12:58 - Speaker 3
To me, it's it's Goes back to the management that you know of Hey, and one of the things that we used to say is, like, whenever you first got your smartphone, you didn't follow procedure to Read a manual or anything like that. It's simply put, just basically intuitive, and that's really what makes this technology an expansion of the simplicity of Nutanix. Intuitive to continue to use that backend storage that you know. You've got guys that are reliant and have used that in the past and you want to have them branch and extend their their technical knowledge and that's Nutanix. It is a drop-in replacement, but it's also the capabilities of the foundation of Nutanix from even our past podcast of hey, this leads you now down to a can uh containerized platform. It's the foundation of your future expansion of a cloud-like platform, whether it's on premises in this case, or even ties into a public cloud. Nutanix is really seeing the vision of bringing a modern approach to what has been an investment for some people in the past and reusing that investment. And I think that that's really the key as they continue To make these type announcements going forward.

14:31 - Speaker 1
Yeah. The blog post goes on to say continuing to raise the bar, Dell's collaboration with Nutanix uh continues to evolve. Um, you know, guided by real-world customer needs and a shared vision for the future. Um, you know, PowerFlex was one step, Power Store is another. But they're really embracing the Nutanix way, that highly orchestrated thing. And so it talks a little bit about Automated lifecycle management. Andy, can you tell us a little bit more about what Dell's planning between their XC platform and the PowerFlex and PowerStore?

15:11 - Speaker 4
Yeah, I think what they're looking towards is to uh you know fully integrate this solution into Nutanix's uh ecosystem. So think tools like Lifecycle Manager to uh you know manage both everything from the hypervisor down to the storage. Uh gives us that ability. Ability to um, you know, now we can independently scale the compute and storage, but we can also reduce complexity and and make it much easier to keep all of this tooling uh up to date and and in sync with one another.

15:44 - Speaker 1
Well, last question obviously is this is early. We said it's a future. So, Chris, when are we gonna get these goodies?

15:52 - Speaker 3
I was just looking for the the goodness. Um so early access is spring of So looking at what maybe six months uh for early access or so. And then um uh targeted GA coming in summer of 2026. And as so stay tuned.

16:15 - Speaker 1
Yeah, stay tuned. But as with all things, developments may timelines may change, things like that. Um, like I said, we don't get to talk about futures all that often. So this is fairly exciting. Um, we're looking towards GA and Again for pure storage at the end of this year, uh, with PowerStore coming uh by summer of next year. So uh it's exciting times for our customers. Um, you know, so I'm I'm gonna have to revise the way I talk about Nutanix. You know, it's a platform based in simplicity, performance, and flexibility. So um, you know, that that flexibility piece is becoming even more evident. Uh, reuse of hardware and now reuse of Of existing storage investments. That's a huge, huge differentiator. There's not really a competitor in the market space other than VMware. And we all know that that's where our clients are trying to escape from So it helps justify Nutanix as that alternative choice. Well, guys, thanks so much for spending a little bit of time kind of talking about this announcement. Since it's a future, there's not a lot more that we can share or talk about at this point, but I look forward to getting together again in six months as we approach that GA and there's more details because I know there's a lot of PowerStore out in the marketplace. Um I'm excited to to have an updated conversation soon. Any closing thoughts, Andy, Chris, uh before we we head out?

18:00 - Speaker 3
I think it's a good time to be in technology from a Nutanix perspective. Um, I've got customers that are um itching to hear this news, itching to see it in action. And that's to me um exciting uh in the sense that you know in the past it's you kind of expected as a we'll say a VMware customer in the past, you knew what your um your infrastructure would look like, There's a back-end Death Star Santa fiber channel running all throughout your data center. Um and then front-ended with some type of uh typical x86 servers. Obviously Nutanix is taking that and revamping the approach, allowing you to be flexible and yet still use some of your, I'll say legacy gear because some of it may be choices like you said, um 18 months old, halfway into the lease cycle or something like that. So thinking about that is really to me, um, the future. Like you said, Philip, it's exciting to see where Nutanix is going. So I think that that's something that um will definitely be um something that we as a group keep our uh eyes uh eyes peeled for future advancements because if they can continue this route with Dell, um, and obviously there's been mention of uh pure in the past. What's next? You know, what technology is next that uh Nutanix can integrate their simplicity with uh future advancements.

19:44 - Speaker 1
Andy, what's your thoughts?

19:47 - Speaker 4
Um quick closing thoughts, uh I would say, you know, I'm I'm excited about this this uh announcement from Nutanix and Dell. Um you know we we know that Dell has a very high performance Enterprise grade file system. We've seen a lot of our clients out there using it. I think this is a good thing for all parties involved. It gives us a lot of flexibility, especially around architecting for database solutions where we may be limited in the number of cores that we want inside of the solution. So, you know, my thoughts are I'm excited to see Nutanix broadening their horizons and and uh you know with this being the third disaggregated storage that we've seen I I hope that that we'll see more to come.

20:38 - Speaker 1
Yeah that's a great point. You know sometimes sometimes we don't make decisions purely technically driven. Sometimes it's financial, sometimes licensing constraints. Uh you know we break apart clusters based on Linux here, Windows there, SQL here, Oracle there. Yeah that's That's a really good use case, I think, for you know this type of a platform, you know, is to be able to truly control the number of cores required in a virtualized database environment. So it's a great call out. Um well, guys, thanks for joining me. As always, Jyra, Andy, Chris. Really appreciate your point of views. Uh, thanks for sharing. And uh for everybody listening, we really appreciate you spending a little bit of time with us. We know that you're talking.