As the demand for hybrid cloud solutions surges, organizations are seeking more adaptable infrastructure that balances on-premises and cloud capabilities. Industry leaders are responding to this shift with collaborations that bring together complementary strengths in computing and storage to meet evolving needs in flexibility and scalability.

Dell Technologies Inc. and Nutanix Inc., for instance, are enhancing enterprise options through their strategic partnership, allowing customers to leverage a streamlined approach to hybrid cloud. This alignment promises new capabilities for scaling compute and storage independently while ensuring infrastructure can support the modern applications that enterprises rely on today.

“From our perspective, customers need a modern data center that’s smart, flexible and resilient,” said Travis Vigil, senior vice president of product management at Dell Technologies, in an exclusive interview with theCUBE. “Those last two, flexibility and resiliency, are top of mind for us at Dell Technologies because we’re continuing to build out a virtualization portfolio that offers customers choice.”

This feature is part of SiliconANGLE Media’s exploration of Dell’s market impact in enterprise AI as part of the Hybrid Cloud Made Easy With Dell Technologies and Nutanix event, an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio.*

As the IT industry increasingly shifts toward cloud-like operating models across on-premises and edge environments, the collaboration between these two tech giants is redefining how enterprises manage their infrastructure. In August, Dell unveiled its XC Plus appliance that will allow the Nutanix software stack to be deployed on Dell PowerEdge servers, and Dell’s PowerFlex software-defined storage will now be integrated in Nutanix’s platform, allowing users to scale compute and storage independently.

By integrating Nutanix’s cloud platform with Dell’s server and storage technology, they are offering solutions that provide IT customers with greater flexibility and scalability, positioning themselves for a competitive edge in this evolving landscape.

AI adoption favors the hybrid cloud model

The growth of AI, along with interest in edge, hybrid cloud and cloud-native deployments is leading IT practitioners to seek new ways to oversee a diverse set of infrastructure solutions. Nutanix has pivoted its business model to support this new reality by enabling the movement of apps and data from on-prem models to various clouds. This has become particularly timely and relevant with the need to train models and deploy them in different environments.

As reported by SiliconANGLE in May, Nutanix chief executive Rajiv Ramaswami met with journalists and described how AI adoption has favored the hybrid model, with latency limitations in the public cloud driving customers to adopt his firm’s hyperconverged infrastructure. “AI workloads will go where the data is,” Ramaswami said. “Some could be in the public cloud, but a lot of proprietary data won’t be there. For that, model training will be done on-prem.”

This move to on-prem for AI model training has created new market opportunities for both Nutanix and Dell. Ramaswami told journalists that his company was seeing rapid adoption of software containers and the Kubernetes orchestrator for new applications that could be deployed across hybrid infrastructure. The process of managing workloads in the modern stack revolves around containers, and Kubernetes has become instrumental in cloud-native management.

In response to customer interest in the container orchestration tool, Nutanix announced a broad set of enhancements to its core infrastructure software that included the Nutanix Kubernetes Platform for managing the container tool across on-prem, hybrid and multicloud environments. The enhancements included an ability to manage clusters in non-Nutanix platforms, such as the public cloud and disconnected “air-gapped” configurations.

“For the first time, we’re not running our stack on a hypervisor either delivered or managed by us,” said Lee Caswell, senior vice president of product and solutions marketing at Nutanix, in SiliconANGLE’s coverage of the news in May. “It’s an opportunity to run in a containerized manner on infrastructure delivered by someone else.”

Enhancements for servers and storage

Dell’s response to shifting trends in the HCI market has been to focus on tailoring its PowerEdge server, XC Plus and PowerFlex storage to address the need for more streamlined workload management in the enterprise.

“Dell XC Plus is really hybrid cloud made easy…we’re leading with simplicity or streamlining operations and optimizing performance,” Vigil said. “We start with the workload and then design the servers from the ground up to meet the unique requirements of that workload and deliver the right combination of technologies to deliver that outcome.”

Dell’s announcement of PowerFlex software-defined storage with Nutanix Cloud allowed organizations to scale storage and compute separately in their hyperconverged infrastructure. This offered new windows of flexibility as users could now scale applications accordingly.

“Dell PowerFlex with Nutanix Cloud enables customers to really unlock their storage and solves for virtualization flexibility,” Vigil explained. “It provides a high scale across anywhere that your applications will run and with it you’ll get a single interface for hardware management, the ability to run your choice of hypervisor, the openness and flexibility to run a variety of ecosystems on a consolidated infrastructure solution and support for private and public cloud deployments.”

The market significance behind these announcements and Dell’s collaboration with Nutanix speaks to an evolution of the modern data stack. The separation of compute and storage enables a data platform that can support intelligent applications in real time, an environment where compute can operate on a unified view of data elements at scale. It brings a cloud operating model to hybrid infrastructure.

“Being able to scale compute and storage separately has always been a desire,” said Rob Strechay, principal analyst at theCUBE Research, in an analysis of the Dell/Nutanix announcements. “Nutanix and Dell customers are probably sitting there clapping at home saying it’s about time for this.”

Market opportunity as competitive landscape shifts

For many years, Dell and VMware LLC jointly delivered a strong HCI solution – VxRail – to the enterprise market. However, the acquisition of VMware by Broadcom Inc., which became official in November, has led to a more competitive environment for infrastructure solutions, according to Strechay.

“This acquisition has introduced a degree of uncertainty among VMware customers, many of whom are reevaluating their infrastructure strategies in light of the change in ownership,” Strechay noted in his recent research analysis. “These concerns are driving some customers to explore alternative solutions, creating an opportunity for competitors like Nutanix to capture market share.”

Nutanix’s opportunity has crystallized in data provided to SiliconANGLE by Enterprise Technology Research. Survey results indicated a strong increase in customer adoption of Nutanix’s offerings. The data also identified an increase in Nutanix’s presence inside Dell’s customer base.

While the acquisition has provided Dell and Nutanix with an opportunity to position themselves as a credible alternative to VMware, it should be noted that Dell has not completely severed ties with the virtualization pioneer. Although Dell ended its distribution deal in January, the company announced the signing of a resale agreement with Broadcom/VMware in June.

With Dell’s presence in the appliance world and Nutanix’s sizable footprint in enterprise software, the collaboration between the firms underscores how market dynamics can impact business direction for even the largest companies in a major way.

“If you look back at the history of the company and the long history we’ve had with Dell as a partner…back in the day, Nutanix was an appliance vendor,” said Thomas Cornely, senior vice president of product management at Nutanix, in an exclusive interview with theCUBE. “The first time we actually went into doing software with partners was with Dell, doing the XC appliance at the time using Nutanix on Dell servers. It’s only logical that if we continue to extend the reach of our products and basically add support for what we refer to generally as IP-based external storage, we would do it with Dell. This is a big deal, it’s a statement of direction for us.”

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Hybrid Cloud Made Easy With Dell Technologies and Nutanix event. Neither Dell Technologies, the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

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