Barely three months after word first came out that Nutanix Systems Inc. was working on a hardware-agnostic implementation of the software powering its hugely-popular integrated appliances, the product is making its official debut. Nutanix is seeking to lower the barrier to joining the converged era with what is essentially an onboarding tool that wary CIOs can use to test converged systems.

The all-in-one systems that Nutanix sells are intended to offer a fast and easy way to set up a scalable on-premise environment compared to the traditional approach of manually cobbling together separate servers, storage and networking equipment. The converged model is especially convenient for smaller organizations that lack the talent to assemble everything in-house and then maintain that gear on an ongoing basis.

But even the cheapest model from Nutanix still costs tens of thousands of dollars, which is more than many CIOs are willing to pay just to pilot a product. The newly unveiled Community Edition of the company’s software reduces the costs associated with trying out its value proposition to effectively zero.

The release allows potential customers to implement the capabilities of Nutanix’s hyperconverged systems on up to four of their existing x86 servers. The software consolidates the storage cards attached to each box into a unified pool of capacity and layers value-added management capabilities such as replication and snapshotting on top.

The concept of offering a full-featured but limited version of a software platform for trial purposes is hardly new; EMC introduced a free version of its software-defined storage platform only last week. But Nutanix’s Community Edition is a first for the converged infrastructure world, which means that the launch is bound to attract similar moves from the competition.

The software is currently in private beta, with a publicly-available version due to release in June at the company’s .NEXT conference. Community Edition can run on any x86 servers from Dell, HP and a number of other major vendors.
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