Data centre infrastructure and storage vendor Nutanix is looking to make a trade.
San Jose, Calif.-based Nutanix, which has Canadian offices in Toronto, has developed a trade-up program targeted at customers with expiring Vblock maintenance from VCE. Nutanix is offering a customized trade-up program to replace existing Vblocks with new Nutanix Web-scale converged infrastructure.
This program is being positioned by the company as a cash-flow neutral plan and, in some cases, can be purchased at the cost of existing Vblock support and maintenance.
The way this program works is that Nutanix’s Global Service Organization, in conjunction with its channel partners, will be offering a Vblock-to-Nutanix migration service. This offering is available worldwide and provides a planned, low-risk process to migrate all virtual workloads to Nutanix. The service includes a free detailed assessment of all virtual workloads in the Vblock environment and a multi-phase, step-by-step cutover plan.
In addition, Nutanix’s Global Service Organization will be made available to implement Nutanix clusters, along with performing the actual application and workload migration. Where the channel partners fits in is unclear.
Nutanix is a 100 per cent channel friendly company. All of the company’s revenue is through channel partners and they have programs such as deal registration, margin discounts, market development funds and a new customer opportunity program. The company currently has five channel partner tiers: authorized, premier, elite, distributor and consultant.
Parmeet Chaddha, vice-president, global services for Nutanix, said the enterprise data centre is at an inflection point as it tries to keep up with rapid advancements in technology.
“Some vendors have turned to duct-taping legacy technologies in a 42U rack and selling it as next-generation converged infrastructure. Nutanix is committed to helping these IT professionals simplify their architecture to meet the management, scalability and economic challenges of the cloud era,” Chaddha said.
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With the Vblock Trade-Up program, Nutanix wants to bring “true” Web-scale simplicity and economics to enterprise IT underserved by VCE converged infrastructure.
According to Nutanix, CIOs and data centre architects have long recognized the need to scale infrastructure on demand, and avoid expensive overprovisioning that prevents an IT cost model competitive with cloud providers. Many of these Global 2000 companies have turned to pre-cabled and pre-engineered systems in hopes of reducing complexity and lowering costs. Unfortunately, these same systems are constructed with legacy technologies, and lack the genuine IT innovation necessary to meet the scalability and economic challenges facing large enterprises in the cloud era.
What Nutanix is proposing it to have channel partners build flexible, massively scalable private clouds one server at a time. Nutanix would provide the advanced Web-scale technologies and can replace Vblock installations running nearly any virtualized workload, including virtual desktops, Microsoft enterprise applications and databases. The company claims that Nutanix’s Web-scale IT platform supports multiple virtualization hypervisors such as VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V and open source KVM. Vblock, obviously, only supports vSphere.