Nutanix Targets Critical Enterprise Workloads With IBM Deal

Nutanix has signed a deal with IBM so that the storage startup can build hyper-converged systems out of IBM Power servers.

It is the first time that Nutanix has not used Intel chips in its data centre bundles, targeted at ‘critical workloads in large enterprises’.

Nutanix has of late been positioning itself as a rival to the likes of Amazon Web Services (AWS), by claiming that the public cloud is too costly and complex for many enterprises.

IBM Deal

The deal with IBM sees Nutanix’s Enterprise Cloud Platform software combined with IBM Power Systems.

The simplified private enterprise cloud aims to ease the complexity that is often associated with crunching large quantities of data, and combine it with analytics, cognitive skills, and machine learning.

Nutanix’s offerings are also suited for mission-critical workloads, such as databases, large scale data warehouses, web infrastructure, and mainstream enterprise apps.

“Hyperconverged systems continue on a rapid growth trajectory, with a market size forecast of nearly $6 billion by 2020,” said Stefanie Chiras, VP of Power Systems at IBM. “Our partnership with Nutanix will be designed to give our joint enterprise customers a scalable, resilient, high-performance hyperconverged infrastructure solution, benefiting from the data and compute capabilities of the POWER architecture and the one-click simplicity of the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform.”

“With this partnership, IBM customers of Power-based systems will be able to realise a public cloud-like experience with their on premise infrastructure,” said Dheeraj Pandey, CEO at Nutanix.

“With the planned design, enterprise customers will be able to run any mission critical workload, at any scale, with world-class virtualisation and automation capabilities built into a scale out fabric leveraging IBM’s server technology,” he added.

Other Partners

The Nutanix/IBM combo will only be available via Big Blue’s sales force and channel partners, and pricing information will only be made public when it is available.

This is not the only partnership deal Nutanix had made recently. Last year for example it validated Cisco’s Unified Computing System (UCS) C-Series servers to run its Enterprise Cloud Platform software, apparently following demand from Cisco customers.

Prior to that in 2015 Nutanix and Lenovo revealed offerings (based on Lenovo’s x86 server products and powered by Intel processors) that integrated compute, storage and virtualisation, whilst running Nutanix software.

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