Nutanix OEM Partners: Dell and Lenovo

When I talk about Nutanix to our customers and just interested, and say that Nutanix is ​​software, software, technology inside a virtual machine, they always ask me: “can I buy it separately from your platform, like software”? The answer is yes and no. Nutanix is ​​really software, and in the article I will talk about two companies that actually buy Nutanix as software for installation on their platforms. These are our OEM partners, and you know them perfectly well, these are Dell and Lenovo.

For the past year and a half, Nutanix has been associating with Dell a large OEM agreement, according to which Dell sells the Nutanix solution as part of its systems, which received the name Dell XC in their product line.


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Dell XC is a Dell PowerEdge server as a hardware platform and Nutanix as software on it. This product is sold and delivered through Dell channels, through its partners, as a product of Dell itself.



Over the past year, Nutanix has done a great job with Dell, including significantly expanding our presence in large enterprises and government accounts in the US, where Dell has traditionally been very strong. Dell is still a name, brand, with vast resources and recognition in the United States. At HighLoad, we talked a bit about a very impressive VDI project, completed in September of this year, for 70,000 (!) VDI jobs, for one of the US government customers, the project, which is probably the largest VDI project in the world, and built us together with Dell)

Today, when Dell, after recent acquisitions, has also become the largest player in the enterprise market, our cooperation continues, including plans to finally bring the Dell XC to Russia, where Dell has not been particularly active yet. Already at the beginning of this year, Russian Dell will have demo systems for their Russian customers.

But the development of our relations with industry leaders this year did not stand still. In December, it was announced that Lenovo, along with Dell, was joining our OEM partners.

Lenovo is a company that today owns an extremely successful server (as well as PC and laptop) IBM business. Last year, all x86s (x-series and BladeCenter) from the IBM family switched to Lenovo, adding to its own ThinkServer line-up . This month, Lenovo announced the first Lenovo HX systems that, like Dell,
represent the hardware platform of Lenovo servers, and Nutanix as software on them, in the same way and under the same conditions as Dell.
So now, on the IT market, hyperconvergent solutions will be added using our developments, and this is certainly pleasing.

Although, first of all, Lenovo c HX aimed at the "homeless" for itself and the bottomless Chinese IT market, it is also worthwhile to separately draw attention to the fact that Lenovo is a Chinese company, and this means that a number of restrictions have touched many "western" countries on work with Russia, it does not apply, and this can be very attractive for companies that are unable or unwilling to “buy American.” As far as I know, Lenovo, in connection with this fact, has big plans to increase its share in Russia. Interesting? Talk to your IT integrators.

Officially, Lenovo will present the detailed specifications of the three announced systems as early as January, but for now you can tell that these will be three systems, as in the case of Dell, slightly different from those offered by Nutanix, but also with a flexible configuration, without fixed, pre-configured by the company "Bundles". You can choose at the stage of ordering the types of processors, RAM, disk, SSD types. Three areas identified by Lenovo for these systems will be:

• HX3500 - for VDI and virtualization farms with average volume and performance requirements
• HX5500 - for heavy server virtualization and large amounts of stored data
• HX7500 - for high-performance input-output loads, databases, ERP.

Systems are equipped with memory from 128 to 768GB, SSD and SATA HDD disks, 10G-network, and processors up to E5-2699v3, and can be combined into a cluster of unlimited size in terms of storage volume and the number of server nodes.
For all systems, there are three levels of Nutanix software licenses, differing in the features included, and a service provided by Lenovo for 3 and 5 years.
How hypervisors are supported: Nutanix Acropolis Hypervisor is a free Linux based KVM hypervisor, fornou and modified in Nutanix, included in the default distribution, and VMware ESXi. Separately, I note that while the plans voiced by Lenovo have no support for MS Hyper-V, which is especially popular in Russia. Perhaps this is temporary, since Nutanix itself has Hyper-V support and we will have it saved in the future. If you need Hyper-V, then come directly to Nutanix.

Thus, as you can see, two of the four Tier-1 server vendors are already selling Nutanix solutions as OEM partners, choosing it among others. The remaining two are HP and Cisco, which either have a similar solution in their own development portfolio ( HP CS-series based on HP StoreVirtual), or cooperate with third-party developers (Cisco invests in Stratoscale and Maxta and makes a joint product with Simplivity).

So it would be a mistake to think that hyperconvergence is “tomorrow”, that this is “perspective”, and “next five years”. No, it is today, now. This steam locomotive is not just “making couples”, it has already gone.
In this sense, the current Highload ++ conference, in which Nutanix has been participating for the second year already, is very indicative. We stood there exactly between the two companies. Odin was in front of us, it was a division from Parallels into an independent company that developed Virtuozzo and a hyper-convergent solution, which in its youth was called Parallels Cloud Storage. Odin a couple of months ago for 100 million was bought by integrator and cloud provider Ingram Micro . The guys from Performix AKA flops.ru were behind us , who for a couple of years finished ceph to commercial status, and successfully sell hosting services on a hyperconvergent platform of their own production. In fact, at the same time, three (!) Different hyperconvergent solutions for different segments of the IT market were present at the same exhibition in Moscow. At the same time, I am sure, even a year and a half ago, you even did not even hear such a word.
So, “hurry to take a seat according to the tickets you bought”, we went, in the next two to three years the IT landscape promises to change very radically. Ida with us.