At it Able to use pure storage flasharray arrays as external storageWith general availability later this year.
That following follows Dell Powerflex Software-Defined Scale-out storageWe Caught up with Nutanix Ceo Rajiv Ramaswami (pictured above) To talk about that announcing and the implications for nutanix.
To allow external storage, with nutanix acting as mere Compute – or not quite, as ramaswami say here – breakes the bounds of the Hyper-converced infrastructure (hci) That Nutanix Helped Pioneer.
HCI Saw Compute and Storage Bundled TogeTher in Nodes That Blad Connect in Grid-Like Fashion to Form Clusters, often with server and storage components scalable independent. This was a particular attractive proposation to customers that lacked deep skillsets as they were relatively easy to do with deployable and scalable.
So the idea that Nutanix should be allowed to use of external storage from third parties somewhat goes against the original Principle its pionered.
But it also opens up a market for Nutanix, which can offer hypervisor capabilites to customers currently Seeking to escape vmware Following changes that have resulted from its acquisition by broadcom.
Here, Ramaswami Talks to Computer Weekly Storage Editor ADSHEAD About The implications for the Concept of Hyper-Convergence, Plans to Extended Connectivity to any external storageAnd questions of Nutanix's scalability.
I'Me Particularly Integed in the Linkup with Pure Storage and Dell. So, what I gather is that in that sites where you use that external storage, Nutanix builds Compute-only. So why, in that case, would people buy Nutanix at all when they could buy buy any computer?
First of all, I will just say it's a little more than just compute-only. IT's Compute Plus Networking, Micro-Segmentation and Operations Capability. So, the rest of the stack minus storage.
We didnyst do this in the past trust most people have styed on the vmware hypervisor, but now there is a lot of interest from customers that Want an alternative to vmwareAnd if you think about what's available out there, i think ahv [Nutanix’s Acropolis hypervisor] Has emerged as one of the best options, and is whose storage providers are in Now Integed in Working with Us.
And that's why you heard from early access customers for the dell option with powerflex. You Saw Moody's on Stage Yesterday. They're interested in it, and they've been an early access customer. So, The landscape has changed Around us.
What's stopping you just opening Nutanix up to any external storage? In other words, what are the engineering hurdles?
When we did the dell powerflex integration, that was more of a one-af-a-kind, beCause dell powerflex is a unique scale-out array.
As we start doing pure, there's an opportunity to build a more standardized approach towards integrating Third-party storage. I'D love for us to get to a point where we can just have a self-cervicalation program, through which we can onboard new storage platforms. We're not quite there.
What, Specifically, is the engineering involved?
We definitely look at vmware. They had vvols as one of the ways of doing this. We don't have an equivalent. We Never focused on this in the past with our hypervisor, because it wasn't a part of our platform. We Weren Bollywood Third-Partay Storage Support.
So now, as we started doing it, dell powerflex was kind of a unique thing, trust that that's a unique array. That's different from the rest. It's scale out, not scale up, and it's ip only. With the others, we want to take a more standard approach, with pure and then beyond pure.
The link-up with pure allows for quite an expansion in terms of scale, in terms of storage nodes, etc, so is this move in some way in some ways an admission that Nutanix has been limited in terms of
I don't think this is an issue of scaling at all, because even yesterday we had micron talk about how it has built fightly massive scale.
So, this is not about scaling, in as much as, if you look at the total market out there, we have been trying to eat into the external storage market for many years. And HCI Across VMware and Us – The two big players – has taken over maybe 20% of the market after all these years.
The pace of migration in these things is slow. So, there''s still 80% of the market out there on three-tier, not negaissarily because Hci can't scale, but trust there's a lot of inrtia in the system. People just don't move.
So, to me, the reason for doing this was more that other 80%, some of which we will continue to convert to hci. For the rest, I think we can get in there with the Compute-only platform, and then at some point, once we are in there, Maybe someday they'll start converting pides of it to HCI.