SiliconAngle Studio B host Winston Edmondson stopped by Nutanix’s booth at Hadoop Summit to bring you a fresh perspective on its flagship Virtual Computing Platform. Karthik Ranganathan, a member of the company’s technical crew and a former lead programmer at Facebook, walked him through the details.

Ranganathan describes the solution as a converged infrastructure appliance geared towards virtual machines. The platform’s built-in distributed file system stores data locally to reduce virtualization tax, which means that it’s fast enough to run CPU-intensive workloads such as Hadoop. The system is also much easier to manage than traditional deployments.

Ranganathan explains that most virtualized environments consist of remote SAN or NAS, a server cluster, and a networking layer that connects them with one another. In contrast, the Virtual Computing Platform is an integrated solution that he says is easy to operate, maintain and upgrade.

Another important feature of Nutanix’s system is that it can effectively run Hadoop alongside other workloads. This capability enables users to start out small and grow their deployments as they starts to pay dividends in the form of business insights.

Ranganathan concludes the interview by going over Nutanix’s vision. He says that his company wants to even the playing field for enterprises and SMBs that can’t afford to operate their Hadoop clusters on the scale as hyperscale giants such as Facebook and Google, but still want to extract value from their data.

See the video below for the full interview.