Nutanix has bounced back from its recent partnership snub by Hewlett Packard Enterprise, through striking a hyper-converged deployment deal with IBM.
Targeting high performance workloads, the multi-year initiative aims to combine Nutanix’s Enterprise Cloud Platform software with IBM Power Systems.
Designed to deliver a turnkey hyper-converged solution applicable for large enterprises, the partnership plans to offer a full-stack combination with built-in AHV virtualisation for the data centre.
“With this partnership, IBM customers of Power-based systems will be able to realise a public cloud-like experience with their on premise infrastructure,” Nutanix CEO Dheeraj Pandey said.
“With the planned design, Enterprise customers will be able to run any mission critical workload, at any scale, with world-class virtualisation and automation capabilities built into a scale out fabric leveraging IBM’s server technology.”
Pandey said the joint initiative will deliver the first “simple-to-deploy, web-scale architecture” supporting IBM Power Systems.
Specifically, this includes next-generation cognitive workloads, including big data, machine learning and artificial intelligence, alongside mission-critical workloads, such as databases, large scale data warehouses, web infrastructure, and mainstream enterprise applications.
In addition, the partnership is targeting cloud native workloads, including full stack open source middleware and enterprise databases and containers.
“Hyper-converged systems continue on a rapid growth trajectory, with a market size forecast of nearly $6 billion by 2020,” IBM vice president of Power Systems Stefanie Chiras added.
“IT teams now recognise the need, and the undeniable benefits, of embracing the next generation of datacenter infrastructure technology.
“Our partnership with Nutanix will be designed to give our joint enterprise customers a scalable, resilient, high-performance hyper-converged infrastructure solution, benefiting from the data and compute capabilities of the Power architecture and the one-click simplicity of the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform.”
With the combined offering to be sold through IBM's direct sales force and channel partners, both vendors plan to target the big end of town, specifically global 2000 enterprises.
The partnership follows a public shutdown by HPE earlier this month, when the tech giant slammed media reports about a new enterprise cloud software agreement.
In response, a HPE blog post entitled ‘Don’t be misled... HPE and Nutanix are not partners’ questioned Nutanix’s claims, instead directing partners and customers to utilise in-house HPE technology.
“It came as no surprise when I read the news: Nutanix wants to run its software on HPE ProLiant,” HPE vice president of software-defined and cloud group business Paul Miller said.
“It was only a matter of time. Customers love HPE ProLiant—the DL380 is the best-selling server in the industry. Now, Nutanix wants a piece of the pie… but then again, what software vendor wouldn’t?
“Here’s what we believe: if you’re considering running hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) on an HPE server, you should consider the HPE HCI offerings.”
