Despite claims that web scale is nothing more than a marketing term, Nutanix, Inc. drives down data migration costs by bringing web scale architecture into the complex enterprise environments.  The company provides a cost effective, seamless way to move data around the enterprise, preventing it from being trapped in silos, as Binny Gill, Chief Architect at Nutanix, explained in his live interview from VMware, Inc.’s annual VMworld conference, speaking with theCUBE co-hosts Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman.

“We have come a long way since we’ve started,” Gill said. “Early on we talked about converging the hardware. We’ve gone through all of that, now the entire world understands why convergence is a good thing. Now we’re talking about web scale,” providing a solution for the large scale at which the storage functions, he explained.

“What we have done is, instead of tackling just the storage problem at the get go, we took a pause and looked at how web companies advanced the data warehouse. For massive scale, they changed the storage architecture, they shift the compute piece where the storage lacked,” Gill said. “All that goodness does not apply to the enterprise data center,” mostly because of the large number of legacy applications. Nutanix addressed the problem by building a web scale architecture, then took this foundation and built storage on top, he furthered.

Dissolving silos for seamless integration

As the enterprise is a complex environment, the challenge was to “provide web scale to those environments in a seamless way,” Gill said, adding that when “you put Nutanix into a box and you don’t have to do anything.”

Vellante pressed the issue by sharing his perspective, that “seamless” meant adding more to the infrastructure with no downtime and asked if that was the case for Nutanix. Gill explained that when Google takes a new node, they have no downtime, and that web company philosophy was what Nutanix adhered to. That happens when “upgrading is not just our software stack, but things in our ecosystem,” he said.

To provide seamless data migration, enterprises should be making sure there are no silos. In the current state of affairs, however, “you don’t have a single monolith that everyone can’t point to and get to data,” explained Gill. Typically companies have data scattered around the enterprise, and some of it will be trapped within silos. The solution is what Gill called “fine grain data migration. That is where the complexity of metadata lays. That dissolves the silos in the data center,” and drives down the cost of migration, explained Gill, adding that “if you’re running on the Nutanix virtual platform, there is no migration cost.”

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Asked about Nutanix’s take on cloud and their recently announced Cloud Connect for hybrid environments, Gill said that “it comes back to solving silos.” Today we have a divide between the public and private cloud. Admins want to move apps from private cloud to public, they also want freedom of choice in terms of cloud providers.

“We have taken our architecture and put in on EC2, providing the same services as in the data center. We don’t have a software crutch,” said Gill. “Moving forward is about moving data around from one location to another seamlessly. If you look at our intellectual property, it’s all in software.” The packaging may differ from a virtual machine, to a bunch of processes, or bare metal, and “nothing stops us from running our software on a laptop,” on a container or on bare metal, said Gill.