Dell Technologies has just announced the availability of its PowerFlex software-defined storage, which includes Nutanix Cloud Platform and Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure. While the Dell-Nutanix partnership was announced last year, today marks the availability of the joint solution. Dell is the first known vendor to support NCP and the Nutanix hypervisor (called AHV) in this scalable, two-tiered model.
Let’s dig into the announcement in more detail and explore the competitive landscape for this new offering.
(Note: Dell and Nutanix are clients of my firm, Moor Insights & Strategy.)
HCI Versus SDI And The Need For Software-Defined Storage
Hyperconverged infrastructure has made life easier for IT organizations — significantly easier. First, HCI makes it about 60% faster to deploy and provision compute, storage and network infrastructure. HCI also simplifies ongoing management thanks to automation and a single control plane to manage all of these elements. Further, developers and other users can provision their own environments through self-service portals. So, it’s easier for IT administrators and easier for users — a win-win. This is why over half of enterprise IT organizations now deploy HCI to some extent.
However, the rigidity of HCI can make it challenging to use it for workloads with significant scale requirements. Take, for example, a database environment where the compute resources are adequate but more storage is needed. In traditional HCI, this would require deploying a new pool of compute, storage and networking resources because the architecture scales linearly. In other words, if you sign on for more storage, you take on more compute and networking whether you want it or not. So you end up wasting the extra compute and networking just to achieve optimized storage.
Fortunately, software-defined infrastructure that uses external software-defined storage as a core component addresses this problem by enabling the independent scale of these resources. With SDI, the database environment mentioned in the above example could be supported by provisioning more storage without deploying additional compute.
The above diagram is a good example of how software-defined storage helps an IT organization grow its infrastructure much more easily. In this case, Nutanix’s AHV hypervisor would reside on each of the external storage servers and be available to the Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (the NCP compute cluster). If you need more storage, just deploy another storage server with AHV.
Beyond database and mission-critical workloads, SDS is ideal for IT modernization efforts, such as cloud-native 2.0 and AI, where scalable, persistent, high-performance storage is important for supporting containerized and data-intensive environments.
Dell PowerFlex With NCP
This primer on HCI versus SDI and SDS may seem basic, but it’s essential to set the context for the potential impact of today’s announcement, where PowerFlex has become the first external storage to support the Nutanix Cloud Platform. Some refer to this as a two-tiered architecture; others refer to it as disaggregated. Whatever you choose to call it, the high-performance and scalable capabilities of the Dell hardware are combined with Nutanix’s software-defined architecture (NCP) to deliver the ease of HCI to the enterprise — without the traditional limitations of HCI.
The above diagram shows how PowerFlex works with NCP to drive support for enterprise workloads in a disaggregated way. Dell PowerFlex compute-only nodes (labeled CO in the diagram) running the Nutanix stack (AHV, NCI operating system) support enterprise workloads. It is important to note that these CO nodes do not access any NCP storage; rather, they simply act as compute servers. This is the Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure element of NCP.
These NCI nodes connect to a PowerFlex storage cluster (bottom row) that provides all of the external storage through SDS. As shown in the earlier Nutanix graphic, adding more storage is as simple as deploying another PowerFlex storage server, and adding more compute is as simple as deploying another PowerFlex compute node.
If not familiar with PowerFlex, this may sound a little confusing. In fact, it may lead to the question of whether PowerFlex is SDI or SDS. The answer is yes to both. PowerFlex is an SDI platform with SDS as a key element. SDS can be internal or external. While internal SDS can deliver slightly better latency, external SDS enables the scale, manageability and resiliency necessary for real enterprise adoption.
If you’re familiar with this space, you’ll know that this disaggregated architecture is nothing new. Looking at Dell’s main competitors, HPE has a fairly rich SDI portfolio comprised of its own solution (dHCI) as well as support for VMware and other platforms. Likewise, Lenovo’s ThinkAgile portfolio is competitive. In fact, Lenovo just refreshed its VMware solution to drive down VMware licensing costs from the perspective of core counts and storage tiers.
Regardless of the hardware vendor, the market for HCI and software-defined in general has largely been a two-horse race, dominated by Nutanix — the pioneer in this niche — and VMware. For industry context, it is important to note that, after its acquisition by Broadcom, VMware’s recent consolidation of its portfolio into VMware Cloud Foundation and vSphere Foundation has changed its licensing and pricing considerably. (That’s part of what Lenovo is responding to with its refresh.)
What This Means For Nutanix
With this PowerFlex offering, Dell is the first external storage partner to leverage NCP as the software-defined architecture layer. This is significant because today more organizations are looking for alternatives to VMware, and Broadcom’s licensing changes have led to considerable price hikes for many customers.
With Nutanix evolving NCP and Dell supporting NCP with PowerFlex, this solution can become a natural landing spot for some of those disgruntled customers. Further, Nutanix has tried to ease the migration with tools like Move to help IT orgs transition from another hypervisor to AHV. (That said, Nutanix also supports hypervisor choice.)
I expect Dell to be the first of many hardware partners to support NCP with external storage. As NCP continues to be evaluated by so many large IT organizations that want to use it across the business, that creates market pressure on storage companies to support it. The embrace of NCP has been made easier by the partner-friendly approach Nutanix has taken with all vendors — Cisco, Dell, HPE, Lenovo, Supermicro and others. In doing this, the company appears to be thinking beyond marketing campaigns and dollars. Based on all my conversations with the company and its customers, Nutanix seems to be one of those vendors that genuinely goes beyond lip service to co-engineer partner solutions that leverage the technologies of both companies for the benefit of customers.
What This Means For Enterprise IT
I suspect enterprise IT is going to respond quite well to the availability of PowerFlex with NCP. This solution was announced about a year ago, which leads me to believe there has been a lot of customer testing to put the solution through its paces. This would fit with larger trends, because both Dell and Nutanix are maniacal about customer experience. For starters, the PowerFlex customer base appears to consist of about 3,000 large enterprise organizations. I expect many of these customers to be giving this solution a hard look.
Finally, expect other infrastructure companies with storage portfolios (both server OEMs and storage-only vendors) to jump into the fray and offer their own NCP platforms. Now that Dell has done the heavy lifting associated with being first to market, a blueprint has been established.
Nutanix’s customer conference, .NEXT, is next week. I imagine the company will have a lot to say about this solution then. Expect to hear more from Dell as well, both at .NEXT and its own customer conference, Dell Tech World, in a couple of weeks.
Final thought. While this is a win for Nutanix and Dell, it’s a big win for those larger enterprise IT organizations that have already adopted the Nutanix experience in HCI and can now implement it that much more readily with Dell hardware. It’s also a big win for organizations looking for a competitive and more cost-effective software-defined architecture, given the turmoil in this market over the past couple of years.
Game on.
Moor Insights & Strategy provides or has provided paid services to technology companies, like all tech industry research and analyst firms. These services include research, analysis, advising, consulting, benchmarking, acquisition matchmaking and video and speaking sponsorships. Of the companies mentioned in this article, Moor Insights & Strategy currently has (or has had) a paid business relationship with Broadcom (VMware), Cisco, Dell, HPE, Lenovo and Nutanix.
