Startup Nutanix announced its first product, a virtualized server it named Complete Cluster. The 2U or 3.5 inch high VMware-based box comes equipped with four x86 nodes, each containing eight 8 Intel Xeon processors that add up to a combined 48 cores and 192GB, or  768GB RAM. Complete Cluster offers  20TB worth of Seagate SATA hard drives, 1.2TB of  Intel SSDs and 1.3TB of PCIe-based flash by Fusion-io, which is designed for metadata collected about the data stored on the system.

“Similar to some larger storage area networks (SANs), the Complete Cluster product is able to dynamically migrate data from higher performance storage, such as Intel’s SSDs, to higher capacity storage, such as Seagate’s hard drives, depending on the performance matrix surrounding the data,” reports Computerworld.

This takes off a lot of workload from companies, meaning that they can achieve savings in terms of manpower and overhead costs. CEO Dheeraj Pandey reckons that his company’s offering can shave costs by 40 to 60 percent on the long-run, which has been pointed out as Complete Cluster’s main advantage.

Currently, the offering is priced at $115,000 for one Cluster Complete with four nodes, and there are a few other packs available. That’s not considered to be cheap (an average of $7 per gigabyte), but the fact Cluster is an all-in-one offering can be much cheaper than a combination of products from multiple vendors, says Forrester analyst Andrew Reichman.

VMware is facing increased competition from Microsoft, Citrix and others, but vCenter is still the dominant hypervisor out there. That’s why HotLink, a startup that just emerged out of stealth, developed a platform that makes it possible to set up deployments across XenServer Hyper-V and  Red Hat Enterprise Linux  systems from vCenter.  With VMworld 2011 nearing, we can also expect to hear of several more companies with integrated solutions for the industry leader.