Nutanix Teams With IBM To Build Hyper-Converged Cloud Hardware

Hyper-converged superstar Nutanix has formed a multi-year agreement with IBM to bring new workloads to hyper-convergence deployments that will be sold through IBM and its channel partners.

The integrated offerings will combine Nutanix's Enterprise Cloud Platform software with IBM Power Systems, targeting critical workloads in large enterprises, according to IBM.

"With this partnership, IBM customers of Power-based systems will be able to realize a public cloud-like experience with their on-premise infrastructure," Nutanix CEO Dheeraj Pandey said in a statement. "With the planned design, Enterprise customers will be able to run any mission-critical workload, at any scale, with world-class virtualization and automation capabilities built into a scale-out fabric leveraging IBM's server technology."

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The Nutanix IBM hyperconverged solution will be sold exclusively through IBM's sales force and channel partners.

The partnership will deliver a full-stack combination with built-in AHV virtualization (AHV is Nutanix's enterprise-ready hypervisor) for a simple experience within the data center, according to Stefanie Chiras, vice president of Power Systems at IBM.

"Our partnership with Nutanix will be designed to give our joint enterprise customers a scalable, resilient, high-performance, hyperconverged infrastructure solution, benefiting from the data and compute capabilities of the Power architecture and the one-click simplicity of the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform," said Chiras, in a statement.

The companies say the partnership will deliver the first simple-to-deploy, web-scale architecture supporting IBM's Power Systems computing for a continuum of enterprise workloads including big data, artificial intelligence and machine learning. The joint initiative also focuses around workloads such as cloud-native workloads including full-stack, open source middleware, enterprise databases and containers.

Specific timelines, models and supported server configurations will be announced at the time of availability, according to IBM.

Earlier this month, Nutanix said it's making its software stack available for deployment by channel partners on Hewlett Packard Enterprise's ProLiant servers.