Nutanix is Windows Server Hardware Certified

K

KapsZ28

2[H]4U
Joined
May 29, 2009
Messages
2,114
http://www.nutanix.com/microsoft/

Honestly I would just like to know the real story. Nutanix seemed to go rogue on VMware. It is all about Citrix and Microsoft now. Hell, if you go to their website and look at their partner list, VMware isn't even listed. http://www.nutanix.com/partners/technology-alliance-program/

Best part is how much they like to talk about all their VCDX employees. I met a lot of them at VMworld 2014. I like their product other than pricing. But their whole attitude seemed to change dramatically. There must be a story behind it more than just competing with VMware.
 
The Nutanix page you linked is a list of partners that have signed up for Nutanix's partner integration. Not who they (Nutanix) has signed up for.

Nutanix hasn't "gone rogue". They released their own custom KVM-based hypervisor and they compete head-on with VSAN and EVO:Rail. So there is absolute competition against some VMware business units. Other units, like VMware's EUC team love Nutanix.

I see the problem as less that Nutanix is going rogue and more that VMware is expanding and creating conflict with partners. I'm not a big fan of the attitude that the Nutanix guys sometimes take..but they are good people. I know many of them all the way through the org.
 
NetJunkie said:
I see the problem as less that Nutanix is going rogue and more that VMware is expanding and creating conflict with partners. I'm not a big fan of the attitude that the Nutanix guys sometimes take..but they are good people. I know many of them all the way through the org.
Click to expand...

Can't argue that. Our VMware reps prior to VMworld 2014 were telling us how they would help advertising by putting our company on the front page of their vCloud Powered service providers. That never happened, then next thing you know VMware started offering their own private cloud.
 
I spoke with an employee at Nutanix yesterday and have some renewed faith. I admit I stopped following their product for the most part after getting a quote last year that was incredibly high. As it turns out, that could have just been our VAR not getting us a good price. Which wouldn't surprise me and the person from our VAR that I was dealing with at the time has since been let go from that company. The prices I was hearing yesterday sound a lot more reasonable and there is no doubt they make an awesome product. I would also be curious as to Acropolis and any potential cost savings. Not saying I would completely eliminate VMware, but to have a mix of the two.
 
nutanix gives away ridiculously high margins

with rubrik f.e. which is hell of an overpriced vendor we got 50% immediately !!

nutanix did 60% just to push their stuff over us as msp

they do indeed come with a cheaper pricing at least in europe where their sales are flat and they do have quite many returns

KapsZ28 said:
I spoke with an employee at Nutanix yesterday and have some renewed faith. I admit I stopped following their product for the most part after getting a quote last year that was incredibly high. As it turns out, that could have just been our VAR not getting us a good price. Which wouldn't surprise me and the person from our VAR that I was dealing with at the time has since been let go from that company. The prices I was hearing yesterday sound a lot more reasonable and there is no doubt they make an awesome product. I would also be curious as to Acropolis and any potential cost savings. Not saying I would completely eliminate VMware, but to have a mix of the two.
Click to expand...
 
next year we'll get storage spaces direct going g.a. and nutanix will have to fall in love with somebody else :D

hyper-v will have own software defined storage like vmware now has !!

KapsZ28 said:
http://www.nutanix.com/microsoft/

Honestly I would just like to know the real story. Nutanix seemed to go rogue on VMware. It is all about Citrix and Microsoft now. Hell, if you go to their website and look at their partner list, VMware isn't even listed. http://www.nutanix.com/partners/technology-alliance-program/

Best part is how much they like to talk about all their VCDX employees. I met a lot of them at VMworld 2014. I like their product other than pricing. But their whole attitude seemed to change dramatically. There must be a story behind it more than just competing with VMware.
Click to expand...
 
Olga-SAN said:
nutanix gives away ridiculously high margins

with rubrik f.e. which is hell of an overpriced vendor we got 50% immediately !!

nutanix did 60% just to push their stuff over us as msp

they do indeed come with a cheaper pricing at least in europe where their sales are flat and they do have quite many returns
Click to expand...

Most companies I have dealt with are like that. But in this case I found out that our VAR marked it up about 50% and then took 15% off. This could be one of the reasons why that person no longer works for the company.
 
Olga-SAN said:
next year we'll get storage spaces direct going g.a. and nutanix will have to fall in love with somebody else :D

hyper-v will have own software defined storage like vmware now has !!
Click to expand...

From what I heard about 85% of their business is still VMware.
 
Let's remove the Nutanix people and the blog drama between them and VMware over performance and vSAN and just look at it from a purely technical and implementation perspective.

Where does the Nutanix product fit?

If an organization is entrenched in vSphere then it's reasonable to assume that the organization has already created a unified infrastructure (doesn't matter which vendor, central management is a given). If the same org is looking for distributing storage across compute nodes then vSAN is a no-brainer from any which way one looks at it.

That means that established vSphere orgs are not the target market for Nutanix. It just doesn't make any sense to switch to Nutanix hardware.

That leaves non-vSphere orgs. However, that market is so fragmented and largely exist due to orgs not wanting to pay the VMware premium that it's tough to break into that market at any reasonable volume.

Nutanix remains privately held despite several rounds of funding. Nutanix chose to not disclose revenues for the 2014 SEC filings during which Goldman Sachs gave them 140 million. So despite the company being around since 2009, and despite "successful" Series E funding in 2014, there's still no substantiated IPO talk. Early in 2015 there was some news about Nutanix shopping around for banks for the IPO, but nothing came of it. Likely because the target valuation was far too outsized for the revenue Nutanix generates.

Let's face it, if it were breakthrough technology they would have swept the market already. When it's all said and done, when all the VCDX holders have been purchased, and when all the blog hype is gone the market looks at the reality of things. The market, after years of consideration, decided that Nutanix is a fringe product.

Just to qualify this; being fringe is not bad as long as one is profitable. Given that there were several funding rounds (continuing need for cash) the question one has to ask oneself is whether the company is actually profitable.
 
I don't know. They definitely have a good product in my opinion. As a service provider we use VSPP and pay monthly based on usage. I am actually interested in Acropolis to reduce the cost we are paying for VMware. I would keep VMware, but would have multiple hypervisors. Also, if I am not mistaken, Acropolis runs on all nodes and therefore always available unlike vCenter. I know VMware is making some good changes with vSphere 6 when it comes to management, especially if vCenter is down, and also HA. I used Heartbeat (Neverfail aka Alwaysfail) with 5.5 and was not impressed.

I can also now continue to buy my Supermicro hardware from my reseller and have Nutanix run on it, so I am interested to see the cost. They offer a service provider program now too which may also be beneficial to well..Service Providers.

As for the storage portion of their product, they offer SMB, CIFS, etc. A lot of storage companies aren't doing that or tell you to run Windows or a NAS appliance as a VM.

I could potentially replace 15x 2U ESXi hosts and a rack filled with NetApp with 2x 2U 4-node Nutanix appliances and for a reasonable price.

While I was one to criticize the amount of VCDX's they had as a marketing ploy, I can see how beneficial they can be to the company. They are among some of the most knowledgeable people in the world when it comes to VMware and could absolutely help design a product to be even better.

There are many hypervisors available and Nutanix is making virtualization more agnostic.
 
I work for Pure but have a lot of respect for the hyper-converged players like Nutanix and Simplivity. Their goal is the same as ours -- make hardware infrastructure less of a headache while providing easy management, support, and excellent performance.

That's why I left the VAR space -- the days of hiring expensive ass infrastructure consultants, creating complicated and convoluted architectures, and needing new hardware with a forklift upgrade every 3 years is coming to an end.
 
Child of Wonder said:
I work for Pure but have a lot of respect for the hyper-converged players like Nutanix and Simplivity. Their goal is the same as ours -- make hardware infrastructure less of a headache while providing easy management, support, and excellent performance.

That's why I left the VAR space -- the days of hiring expensive ass infrastructure consultants, creating complicated and convoluted architectures, and needing new hardware with a forklift upgrade every 3 years is coming to an end.
Click to expand...

Pure, huh? Now it is all making sense. :p
 
VSAN very well COULD be a no-brainer..if VMware would get their heads out of their asses. The cost of VSAN is too high. The new license models are helping but they are playing catchup. Customers don't care about in-kernel versus a distributed VSA type model. 98% of the time both will more than meet their performance requirements.

The interface on Prism is simple. The replication on Nutanix is simple. Deployment is simple. People prefer to buy appliances rather than doing their own, contrary to what customers always say. EVO:Rail is a mess right now. We still haven't seen VSAN6 on EVO:Rail and probably won't for a while. So customers are exposed to the political BS between different BUs within VMware.

This leaves a very wide door open for others. And I can tell you...probably 95%+ of Nutanix customers are existing VMware shops looking to simplify infrastructure deployment and management. Simple is the key and it's why Nutanix does get wins against VCE pretty regularly.
 
Anyone know what Supermicro chassis Nutanix uses for their 3000 series? Obviously it looks to be from the TwinPro 2 line, but there are so many different model numbers.
 
I also found out you can mix and match different model nodes which is really cool. So you could get the lower models with 6 TB drives for lots of tier 2 storage and combine it with a higher model that has more CPU cores and SSDs.
 
NetJunkie said:
Simple is the key and it's why Nutanix does get wins against VCE pretty regularly.
Click to expand...

Is this still true over the last say 3 months?
Seems like the premium VCE puts on their offering is now within 10% of the hardware cost (cost to buy the components separately). I am definitely not a VCE fanboi, but at 10% above discounted hardware the VCE offering is starting to look fairly attractive vs Supermicro-based Nutanix?

Are there really folks who pull UCS compute out to put Nutanix in? Yes, Smartnet cost is infuriating, but that alone can't be the reason?

I recently read somewhere that VCE now allows you to buy a barebones block and stuff it with your existing hardware if that hardware meets the model numbers VCE supports. Seems decent for retrofits.
 
Thuleman said:
Is this still true over the last say 3 months?
Seems like the premium VCE puts on their offering is now within 10% of the hardware cost (cost to buy the components separately). I am definitely not a VCE fanboi, but at 10% above discounted hardware the VCE offering is starting to look fairly attractive vs Supermicro-based Nutanix?

Are there really folks who pull UCS compute out to put Nutanix in? Yes, Smartnet cost is infuriating, but that alone can't be the reason?

I recently read somewhere that VCE now allows you to buy a barebones block and stuff it with your existing hardware if that hardware meets the model numbers VCE supports. Seems decent for retrofits.
Click to expand...

Where I work, we did this very thing. One of the reasons was localized disk. We have overseas support teams who use VDI's. My understanding for our going with Nutanix (or like solution) is to reduce the latency and overall hops to get their data and hopefully improve VDI performance. I personally haven't seen any of the tests that have been completed though. It will hopefully reduce our need to explain why their VDI's are slow and adding more cpu/mem to them will not necessarily help.
 
One thing to keep in mind is that there is a lot of Gen 1 UCS gear out there. So if you're going to pull it out now is the time when things like FIs and chassis are up for renewals.

VCE pricing has gotten better for sure...but the sales cycle with them can still be tough and it can still be a lot of work to get the price where you want it.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top