Pure Storage, Nutanix Unveil New Hyperconverged Infrastructure With Pure FlashArray

‘Typically, in storage-heavy environments, it gets really expensive when you have to scale network and compute alongside the storage in typical three-node clusters. If Nutanix wants to satisfy customer demand in the larger end of the enterprise, in the higher-scale environments, they had to create an integration with a true external storage option for their customers. And so that’s where Pure Storage comes in,’ says Dan Kogan, Pure Storage’s vice president of enterprise growth and solutions.

Pure Storage and Nutanix Wednesday unveiled a new converged infrastructure aimed at helping businesses deploy and manage virtual workloads.

The new converged infrastructure was jointly designed with Pure Storage delivering high-performance all-flash storage via its FlashArray storage system and Nutanix’s AHV virtualization platform, said Dan Kogan, vice president of enterprise growth and solutions at Santa Clara, Calif.-based Pure Storage.

“This is Nutanix’s option for customers looking at enterprise-grade scale and mission-critical application performance,” Kogan told CRN. “We’re bringing all the best of what you get with Pure FlashArray, from the performance, the high availability, the data reduction, the scalability over NVMe and TCP in a modern networking protocol, and virtual machine granular level integration directly into Nutanix Prism. So a lot of the best of what customers have had with vSphere and external storage, Nutanix is now bringing to its customers.”

The acquisition of VMware by Broadcom has lets to several changes in VMware licensing and pushed customers to evaluate other options, including Nutanix as an alternative hypervisor option, Kogan said, noting that Pure Storage remains a strong partner with VMware.

He said that in hyperconverged infrastructure environments, about 70 percent of customers use external storage compared to 30 percent who use VMware’s VSAN software-defined storage.

“Typically, in storage-heavy environments, it gets really expensive when you have to scale network and compute alongside the storage in typical three-node clusters,” he said. “If Nutanix wants to satisfy customer demand in the larger end of the enterprise, in the higher-scale environments, they had to create an integration with a true external storage option for their customers. And so that’s where Pure Storage comes in.”

The new deep integration between Nutanix and Pure Storage, unveiled at this week’s Nutanix NEXT conference, brings Pure’s storage services, include virtual machine-granular snapshots and full data reduction at scale, all managed through the Nutanix Prism virtualized data center management technology, Kogan said.

This partnership results in part from Nutanix’s move to introduce a new version of its hyperconverged infrastructure technology that is a compute-only SKU rather than an integrated compute and storage SKU, he said.

“That’s a new business model option for them,” he said. “It’s a version of their product that doesn’t have the compute in it. There’s obviously a lot of engineering work on their side to put the new storage in the data path and break up that that hyperconverged infrastructure they had. So it’s less about Pure not having done this with other vendors. It’s really the work we’ve done together to enable this for Nutanix and its AHV hypervisor.”

The new version of Nutanix without the storage piece is a software-only version, and does not include the whitebox Nutanix hardware that normally comes with pre-integrated compute, storage, and networking, Kogan said.

The compute and networking pieces will be those offered by any of Nutanix’s compute vendors, he said.

The new hyperconverged infrastructure integration is slated to be in early access this summer and generally available by year-end via both Nutanix and Pure Storage channel partner s.

In addition to the new HCI integration with Nutanix, Cisco and Pure Storage are also expanding their partnership of more than 60 FlashStack validated converged infrastructure designs to include Nutanix in the portfolio.

FlashStack is typically configured with Cisco UCS compute and networking along with Pure Storage FlashArray or FlashBlade storage technology, Kogan said.

The new FlashStack configurations will include Nutanix compute technology, Pure Storage storage technology, and Cisco networking along with deep integration with Cisco Intersight to provide unified visibility across both Pure Storage and Nutanix clusters for a complete view of the operating environment, he said.

Anthony Jackman, chief innovation officer at Expedient, a Pittsburgh-based full-stack cloud provider and a channel partner of both Pure Storage and Nutanix, told CRN that the new relationship between the two vendors is very important for his company.

“It’s going to allow us to have more flexibility and more scale in the way we deploy Nutanix clouds for our clients,” Jackman said.

Expedient has been integrating Nutanix storage on top of VMware and running that at very large scale for its shared cloud, Jackman said.

“We’re building very large clusters and then landing many clients on top of them, but for probably 18 to 24 months now, we’ve been doing Nutanix Private Cloud,” he said. “We started with a couple in beta. Early last year, we took that wide as a generally available product, and it has really caught on. We are selling it to a lot of clients. You don’t have to guess why. Someone called Broadcom threw a bomb on this industry. It generated a whole lot of conversations and demand. So we’re selling a lot of Nutanix Private Cloud.”

Hyperconverged storage is great, and Expedient’s experience with Nutanix has been flawless from a performance standpoint availability, Jackman said.

“But when you talk about now spinning up hundreds of private clouds and then having to vary the amount of storage in the boxes and manage disks for hosts and do custom hardware per client, the ability to go to three-tier storage is highly attractive,” he said. “Specifically, doing it with Pure is very attractive because those two companies, in my view, are unique in that they both produce very high-quality software, and they both have a very high dedication to customer satisfaction and support. And when you put those two things together, my confidence that it’s going to work well is very high. And for us, it’s all about operational efficiency and the pace at which we can deploy clouds, the consistency that we can drive across them, the performance we can give to our clients, and then obviously managing cost is kind of number one. And this is going to allow us to drive a little bit more hardware efficiency.”

In embracing the combination of Nutanix and Pure Storage, Jackman said his company is in no way saying goodbye to VMware.

“We’re in a pretty unique position in that we are a very high level, top provider with both Nutanix and VMware,” he said. “We view it as providing customer choice. We’re very ingrained with VMware. We’re one of the largest VMware providers in the country, but we have customers that are asking for something else, and so we’re going to serve them with that. And we were comfortable doing it with Nutanix because their software has been so stable for us, and we also run a lot of our internal workloads on Nutanix. We’ve done that for 10 years, and we’re confident in it.”