UPDATED 21:00 EST / JUNE 28 2017

CLOUD

Why does Plexxi’s CEO want to stay invisible?

By basing its technology on the “invisibility” of a cloud infrastructure, Nutanix Inc. has built a successful business around the concept of a worry-free system. So it was inevitable that a new set of companies would emerge to supply the Nutanix ecosystem with technology built around a similar idea.

“In the same way that Nutanix talks about being the invisible infrastructure, we’re the invisible network,” said Rich Napolitano (pictured), chief executive officer of Plexxi Inc. “It’s so well integrated into Nutanix, you don’t even realize it’s another network. It’s just embedded.”

Napolitano visited theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile livestreaming studio, and answered questions from hosts Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Stu Miniman (@stu), during the Nutanix.NEXT event in Washington, D.C. They discussed how Plexxi is working to simplify network deployment and the potentially significant impact of non-volatile memory express technology on data transfer. (* Disclosure below.)

Switches and software provide seamless provisioning

Plexxi has shown “tremendous revenue growth” over the past year, fueled by interest among information technology executives in finding new ways to deploy infrastructure with a minimum of headaches, according to Napolitano.

“What people want is simplicity,” he said. “We’ve built a lot of complexity into every layer of the infrastructure.”

Plexxi’s goal is that as data center managers provision virtual machines or storage in the Nutanix environment, the network simply comes along for the ride. “What we bring to market is an integrated solution with a set of switches that builds a fabric, but our software controller allows you to provision the network seamlessly,” Napolitano said.

People should not underestimate the future impact of NVMe, a storage protocol and controller interface that is designed to dramatically speed-up data transfer between enterprise systems and solid-state drives, Napolitano pointed out.

“It is clear that the next tsunami is NVMe. We’re awaiting the day that NVMe hits the market in a big way, because it will blow apart every other network,” he said.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s independent editorial coverage of the Nutanix .NEXT US 2017 event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Nutanix .NEXT US. Neither Nutanix Inc. nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE

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