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nutanix free software?

Sounds like they are trying to get more customers to buy into their product especially because it is so expensive. That is how I felt about VMTurbo. It was just way over priced. The next thing I know, VMTurbo has a free version available.
 
Define "expensive?" CapEX, it's still costly, by operationally much more efficient than supporting and maintaining different stacks separately.

We need to get out from under a rock around what Hyper-Convergence is delivering here and stop looking at this as a single CapEX expenditure that has people running for the hills.
 
Vader said:
Define "expensive?" CapEX, it's still costly, by operationally much more efficient than supporting and maintaining different stacks separately.

We need to get out from under a rock around what Hyper-Convergence is delivering here and stop looking at this as a single CapEX expenditure that has people running for the hills.
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Expensive in terms of how much equipment we have. I think that is where people get hung up on cost and OpEX. People like Nutanix and Nimble come in telling us how much money they will save us, but the problem is, they won't. Our company isn't huge, so our NetApp literally only takes up a single cab. Most of the compute power can also fit into a single cab. I can assure you that the cost of the cabs per month and electricity is nowhere near high enough that spending 4 times as much on Nutanix is going to save us money in the long run. If we had 50 cabs of compute and storage, that may be a different story which is what I find disappointing about Nutanix. Their prices are geared towards much larger businesses and us small guys can't really benefit from it.
 
I'm sorry, but comparing a NetApp Array to Nutanix is no where near an accurate comparison, it's way more than storage. On top of that are you comparing like to like functionality out of the box without having the need to get a la carte licencing for all the functional benefit?

The problem is that for too long we have allowed this conversation to be Hyper-Converged VS SAN and it's way more than that.

They are literally taking a shit ton of stack and putting in code, WAN Acceleration, Backup, Data Reduction Tech, Operational Analytics, on top of dead simple to include scale, upgrades, implementation, etc
 
I tested Nutanix in the early days (around 3-4 years ago) and it was a cool product but not ready for prime time. As other have mentioned the whole thing is really pricey too.

It's basically just the software that's special about it. With the introduction of VSAN from VMware, there isn't too much that they have to offer beyond that.
 
Vader said:
I'm sorry, but comparing a NetApp Array to Nutanix is no where near an accurate comparison, it's way more than storage. On top of that are you comparing like to like functionality out of the box without having the need to get a la carte licencing for all the functional benefit?

The problem is that for too long we have allowed this conversation to be Hyper-Converged VS SAN and it's way more than that.

They are literally taking a shit ton of stack and putting in code, WAN Acceleration, Backup, Data Reduction Tech, Operational Analytics, on top of dead simple to include scale, upgrades, implementation, etc
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That is true, but I am not just comparing NetApp to Nutanix. I am looking at the overall costs of storage, compute, backups, etc verse the cost of Nutanix. I can get a lot more compute and storage capacity sticking with the non-converged. If it gets to the point where latency or storage performance is inadequate, then I would probably consider Nutanix, but I would probably be running a lot more high performance systems than I am currently running. The point is, Nutanix is not for everyone. If you could give me the same amount of CPU, memory, and storage capacity at the same price as I am currently paying, I will switch now.
 
KapsZ28 said:
Sounds like they are trying to get more customers to buy into their product especially because it is so expensive. That is how I felt about VMTurbo. It was just way over priced. The next thing I know, VMTurbo has a free version available.
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VMTurbo is imho on its way out in enterprise deployments. VMware has done an outstanding job of working with major software vendors to build end-to-end metrics into vRealize (guess vCOPS just didn't stick) that make performance troubleshooting of applications a lot easier. VMTurbo will retain market share in SMB where users don't care about the specific enterprise app reporting, but there's literally no reason for an enterprise to buy/keep VMTurbo anymore.
 
If you could give me the same amount of CPU, memory, and storage capacity at the same price as I am currently paying, I will switch now.
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This isn't about Solution vs Solution more than it's about an acceptance of a complete shift in the way things are and have been done in the DC over the last 10yrs.

Did you work through an ROI with Nutanix or just look at "comparable" solutions?

Again, for you it's about Capacity/Performance. If you are looking at just those things, then there isn't really any conversation that I could have where you would see benefit, especially if your only driver is cost. This is also the same argument I continue to see around VSAN, btw, all about cost. Putting a hard number to operational efficiency is extremely difficult, however Hyperconverged players like Nutanix are very good at it.

When I pitch Hyperconverged, it's for a reason. These are customers who just don't have the resources to manage traditional stacks, and see that they can provide more value with the time they will save, without sacrificing anything or there are specific use cases that require greenfield or separation.

Is it a tough sell to displace investments already made? Sure it is, i'm essentially asking you to rip and replace, however this is typically not how it's positioned unless you are EOS/EOL on all or a majority of the stacks. My view is go the Hyperconverged route for use cases, like VDI, DB's, Development, ROBO to start, then I can truly show the benefit and as time goes on, and replacement activities are on the horizon, it's a much easier conversation.


VSAN, IS expensive on it's own, btw, and again, comparing VSAN to Nutanix is certainly not one for one either. Still looking at storage only which is predominately how these conversations are had. Most aren't looking at all the functionality and benefit you get with a mature hyperconverged platform end to end.
 
Vader said:
This isn't about Solution vs Solution more than it's about an acceptance of a complete shift in the way things are and have been done in the DC over the last 10yrs.

Did you work through an ROI with Nutanix or just look at "comparable" solutions?
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I find it hard to believe that Nutanix would be anywhere near a decent choice for true datacenters. Nutanix is an SMB solution and it's got a good chance there. On the Enterprise side the value proposition just isn't there. Companies who actually have datacenters are much more likely to either go the converging on Tier 1 vendor route or the Google route and buy all consumer grade stuff and make up for failure rates by distributed redundancy.
 
I find it hard to believe that Nutanix would be anywhere near a decent choice for true datacenters. Nutanix is an SMB solution and it's got a good chance there. On the Enterprise side the value proposition just isn't there. Companies who actually have datacenters are much more likely to either go the converging on Tier 1 vendor route or the Google route and buy all consumer grade stuff and make up for failure rates by distributed redundancy.
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Nonsense, but you're entitled to your opinion, i'll let the market back mine up.

Anyone can see that the technology is geared toward Enterprise/Service Provider especially in scale. I'm not going to argue the solution. Nutanix is not, I repeat not an SMB solution, look at the feature set. Yes, they make ROBO platforms but even those are robust for ROBO.

What do you think Nutanix is? It's software built for distributed redundancy to run on commodity. Just because they offer a hardware/software solution today, doesn't mean the hardware is not commodity.

Show me a non-Hyperconverged solution that does that today with single management interface. VCE, VSPEX blah blah blah, they made their money by providing reference Architectures with Lifecycle MGMT and Single Support. Not taking away from that, HyperConverged makes that model much better and easy.

The killer app for tomorrow's DC is dead simple.

Nutanix is in many enterprises AND Service providers and they own the share of the Hyperconverged market and the adoption rates of Hyperconverged are extremely high, but you don't have to take my word for it.
 
Vader said:
This isn't about Solution vs Solution more than it's about an acceptance of a complete shift in the way things are and have been done in the DC over the last 10yrs.

Did you work through an ROI with Nutanix or just look at "comparable" solutions?

Again, for you it's about Capacity/Performance. If you are looking at just those things, then there isn't really any conversation that I could have where you would see benefit, especially if your only driver is cost. This is also the same argument I continue to see around VSAN, btw, all about cost. Putting a hard number to operational efficiency is extremely difficult, however Hyperconverged players like Nutanix are very good at it.

When I pitch Hyperconverged, it's for a reason. These are customers who just don't have the resources to manage traditional stacks, and see that they can provide more value with the time they will save, without sacrificing anything or there are specific use cases that require greenfield or separation.

Is it a tough sell to displace investments already made? Sure it is, i'm essentially asking you to rip and replace, however this is typically not how it's positioned unless you are EOS/EOL on all or a majority of the stacks. My view is go the Hyperconverged route for use cases, like VDI, DB's, Development, ROBO to start, then I can truly show the benefit and as time goes on, and replacement activities are on the horizon, it's a much easier conversation.


VSAN, IS expensive on it's own, btw, and again, comparing VSAN to Nutanix is certainly not one for one either. Still looking at storage only which is predominately how these conversations are had. Most aren't looking at all the functionality and benefit you get with a mature hyperconverged platform end to end.
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You have very valid points and no I didn’t do an ROI with Nutanix, but I also don’t think it will be helpful because they don’t know the true numbers on how much it costs us to maintain what we have. I had the same issue with VMTurbo when they came back to me with their ROI. It was completely garbage. For one they are showing me how they are going to consolidate our servers and save all this electricity, rack space, licensing, etc. Clearly they had no idea what any of that costs. We subscribe to VMware VSPP and licensing costs and not that expensive. Also we either lease wholesale cabs or have or own datacenter. So there isn’t to save on there, by reducing our footprint.

It is funny you mention VSAN and state that it is expensive. For us, VSAN would be the least expensive solution. I am not sure if you are familiar with VSPP, but the amount it costs per terabyte is extremely low compared to anything else I have looked at. This even includes purchasing all the drives that would be required to setup VSAN. And yes I know VSAN is definitely not the same as Nutanix. I think Nutanix has a far superior solution and although at first glance it looks like a VSAN solution, it is quite a bit better.

I absolutely agree that it could be great for use cases such as VDI and that is something I would love to play around with Nutanix for and test out a VDI solution. But as it stands we do not do VDI. We support a decent amount of DB’s for eDiscovery, but performance has not been an issue and no customer has requested a certain amount of IOPS or latency that we can’t currently deliver.

Storage capacity is the biggest concern for us which is where I don’t think Nutanix could deliver. Just one of our clients has about 70 TB of tier 2 storage replicating from a NetApp on the east coast to a NetApp on the west coast and vice versa. Being that we use NetApp, we already have a filer in place with tier 1 storage for all the applications. So adding a ton of capacity for tier 2 is not very expensive. And that amount of storage doesn’t need any compute power behind it which is what you get with a hyperconverged setup. So what would Nutanix’s solution be if you need say 100 TB of tier 2? Would they sell you something or tell you it is best to have separate storage for that?

By the way, when I first got pricing from my VAR for Nutanix and said no way because the pricing is way too high, he also came back to me with many of the same arguments but asked me to explain why since we have a close relationship and he wanted to know what he was up against when trying to sell Nutanix. I gave him a lengthy email which detailed costs of everything which would clearly show that the ROI on Nutanix, at least for our company in the current state, is much too low and would take way to long before we saw a return. Unfortunately I think VAR’s take a one size fits all approach when they are pitching this solution and discussing ROI and unfortunately don’t know our business model at all and how we manage monthly recurring revenue verse how much we are paying for our hardware (OpEX) since most of it is done through leasing.

If someone could give me hard data that would show a realistic ROI that would work for our business model, I would gladly pitch it to our executive team. Hell, we just recently did our budget which includes storage and compute for the rest of the year. So replacing ESXi hosts and disk shelves with Nutanix wouldn’t be a problem given it doesn’t exceed our budget or at least proved to be a great investment if we did exceed our budget.
 
Unfortunately, the term "VAR" has been so diluted as of late I actually really dislike it. Even though I and others here technically work for one, I just don't lump ourselves in that category. It's disheartening that these smaller organizations or even larger ones driven strictly by product give us all a bad rep when we are all categorized under the same "umbrella."

We hear the term "trusted advisor" and "solution provider" as a result of that.

From our standpoint, we always attempt to become a real business partner and to understand what you do, and what impact that has on your customer/business. This provides long lasting relationships with true alignment. Unfortuantely, this doesn't happen as often as i'd like because the real value on both ends comes from that type of relationship. You certainly can't get an accurate picture if there is no understanding on what you do today or what is planned.

Don't take it the wrong way, I certainly think the traditional model still fits where it fits, absolutely. I just want to make sure that when we are doing a comparison with these solutions, we are capturing all aspects of those solutions from CapEX, OpEX, functionality, etc. If you take a look at most comparisons out there, or even look at the communications on Twitter, it's mostly about storage when this is one piece to a bigger pie. That's not to say Nutanix, for example, is not at fault with their "No SAN" campaign. That's certainly added fuel to the fire.

What's great about where I work is that I have the opportunity to help customers and position everything from traditional semi-converged solutions to VCE/VSPEX/Flexpod, etc to Hyperconverged, so from my standpoint there are solutions for every use case or at least 99.9% of them.

I certainly am not one for one size fits all, however, I am for standardization for ease of procurement, implementation, and operational mgmt.
 
Vader said:
Nutanix is in many enterprises AND Service providers and they own the share of the Hyperconverged market and the adoption rates of Hyperconverged are extremely high, but you don't have to take my word for it.
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And I don't, care to show some stats?

A quick google found me some stats, although they are straight up from the vendor, who by their own admittance was buying up VCDXes to elevate the brand: http://www.nutanix.com/press-releas...l-year-exceeds-200-million-bookings-run-rate/

In mid-2014, 800 customers ...., yup yup, looks like an extremely high adoption rate to me.
 
I have one account running Nutanix for VDI and that's it. Most everyone is IBM, EMC or Hitachi. I also work in Healthcare where 'webscale' isn't a buzzword
 
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And I don't, care to show some stats?

A quick google found me some stats, although they are straight up from the vendor, who by their own admittance was buying up VCDXes to elevate the brand: http://www.nutanix.com/press-release...ings-run-rate/

In mid-2014, 800 customers ...., yup yup, looks like an extremely high adoption rate to me.
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Let's look at independent stats from a company I might remind you that starting shipping product in 2011 shall we:

http://www.storagenewsletter.com/ru...marketscape-worldwide-hyperconverged-systems/

Also Nutanix represents 52% of the Hyperconverged Marketspace with over 100 over $1million deals, yeah..bud..that's SMB alright.

This is a young technology, which is gaining much momentum. (besides VMware, which I might add has 1200 VSAN customers announced at SFD7).

You're right, they shouldn't hire the best talent since VMware is one of the supported Virtualization platforms, I mean why would any company do that? They also have expert open source and Microsoft on staff as well....
 
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1200 VSAN customers. SFD7 was about VSAN. It's only a matter of time before the marketing machine shows up.
 
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Yes that's what I get typing on my iPhone 1200 VSAN customers.
 
I don't discount the technology, or the company necessarily (though it being a startup makes its future all but certain), what I am saying is they cater to a purpose-built niche market.

I'll give you that they are less S and much more M in SMB. A 1 million spent per customer isn't really that much if you think about it. They sweet-talked a bunch of people to abandon their Tier 1 stack (and the crazy support and maintenance fees that comes with it). How much gear do you have to buy to hit 1 M? I don't know, my guess is that it's probably only a few units. So if some folks are lifting their current stack out and put Nutanix in then yeah, it goes back to purpose-built.

Their web page now, 4 years into it, says that they got 1200 customers. I just can't reconcile that with "extremely high adoption rates".

You won't see companies forklift their Isilon, VMAX, 3par, and compute blades out to put Nutanix in anytime soon.
 
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