Nutanix CEO Reinforces Data Infrastructure and the Software-Defined Compute/Storage Tier
Nutanix Co-Founder & CEO Dheeraj Pandey stepped in on theCube at VMworld 2012 to share some perspective on convergence, data infrastructure, and the new era of computing. Nutanix is right at the heart of the exciting convergence space and implements all of the buzzword technology such as cloud, solid-state, Big Data, and so on. By combining computing and storage into one tier, Nutanix has effectively delivered a simplified datacenter solution, putting costs in check and lowering footprints along the way. While eliminating the management cost and capital costs of external network storage, the company delivers with their enterprise-class platform that is well suited for virtualization and other high-end technology. This converged platform is projected by many to represent the vision of tomorrow’s datacenter.
Formed in September of 2009, Nutanix has gone through a series C round of funding of 33 Million dollars, notably with investment from Goldman Sachs. The company has in total raised about 72 Million dollars overall and has some 50 Million of that set aside. The company has seen an opportunity to “flip the switch” in the business, building on 3 quarters of good sales feedback. The company is hot because of the perfect storm of data transformation, Big Data, the convention of flash, software-defined storage and the supporting technology explosion. Their cluster solution is built on x86 servers, and utilizes VMware as the virtualization hypervisor. It further implements local flash storage from industry phenom Fusion-IO along with highly redundant distribution. The mission is to decouple hardware from the rest of the software, until everything is running within the substrate. The product then becomes a scalable building block, with performance and value throughout, depending on a company’s needs.
The simplified datacenter answers staffing questions, and illustrates the advantages of convergence.
Pandey reinforced the concept of data infrastructure- that is the tenet of cutting-edge technology that is focused on and ultimately is based on the value of data. When compared plainly to converged infrastructure, it is clear that data infrastructure is all about the application, because the true value is ultimately seen in the applications. By using off-the-shelf components, Nutanix has created a product whose value is in that the componentry of the underlying hardware is negligible to the end-user. Pandey states:
“We believe there is a way to embarrassingly parallelize the datacenter”
Meaning that that apps can take advantage of this ability to scale. On their “special sauce” he continues:
“We never use hardware as a crutch”
Nutanix lives this through implementing enterprise features such as High Availability, Clustering, RAID, Fault Tolerance, and performance all through software. On the topic of Hadoop, Pandey states that in order for Hadoop to be a mission-critical application, it has to be build with features such as snapshots, fault tolerance, cloning, backups and so forth all part of the solution in the most simple reliable way possible.
Nutanix is creating this disruption that is characterized as bringing this simple powerful appliance to the actual users and thus creating instant value. The biggest business value is seen through this dynamic – fast, scalable technology that delivers peace of mind.
Pandey projects that on the future of the data, there will be more convergence taking place. With this newfound velocity, application deployments see greatly reduced times. SLA and policy are then defined by the infrastructure administrator, and isn’t bound to one-function hardware.
Looking at VMware and what they need to work on, Pandey adds that VMware needs to gather focus and alludes to Oracle, which at one time came to realization that they were not a consumer company. The market for virtualization itself is moving towards a place where the midmarket will definitely be taking a look at alternative technology such as Hyper-V as “good enough”. So much as Oracle gave way to MS SQL Server in that market and focused on high-end of the spectrum, Pandey feels that VMware needs to shift their focus on what they are good at. Pandey also looks at the open source vs. scale-up proprietary strategies in the industry and finds that co-existence between the two is a very viable scenario. The interview can be viewed below:
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