the nutanixist 05 – Nutanix is the RDS of your enterprise.

I was chatting with one of the many brilliant folks I’ve worked with over the years about what makes Nutanix easy. As we talked, it hit me: If you reduce the operational challenge of managing all of the software to manage your enterprise to just managing a database, the operational challenges are much simpler.

Why is that even theoretically possible?

An enterprise infrastructure system has three elements:

1. The software that interacts with the physical infrastructure (the data path)
2. Meta data that describes that infrastructure.
3. Stateless software that interacts with the metadata to configure and monitor the physical infrastructure (the control and management)

A fundamental problem for any enterprise infrastructure system is protecting metadata from being lost.

At the enterprise scale, the operational challenge is that the more you want to do with software, the more you invest in operationalizing the software, which means the less money and time you have to do stuff.

You spend so much time setting up software that it bottlenecks you from doing more things.

Databases are a great example. Standing up databases and getting them to work, backing them up, and setting up DR get in the way of actually using a database.

RDS addressed that operational challenge, and now, more folks in an enterprise use databases than they would otherwise.

Nutanix solved the really hard problem of building a distributed database. And can now reap what it has sown.

Nutanix, by encapsulating all infrastructure metadata into a reliable, scalable, and transparent database, reduced the most complex operational problem of metadata management to a database operations problem.

The operational challenges of a single database can be solved. It’s not easy, but it can be.

So, when you look at Nutanix, you see very small customers deploying SDNs. Why? Because the deployment’s operational complexity is slight. Why? Because managing the SDN’s metadata database is easy.

It’s easy not because the SDN system has its own database and the rest of the control system has another one but because they are—literally—the same one.

Solving operational challenges for one feature eliminates the need to set up another database and address the operational problems associated with it, as well as the challenges of maintaining two databases in sync.

And so the complexity of deploying the SDN is significantly lower. This makes the consumption of the capability less costly and easier to do.

And the value of an SDN is real.

And if you’re in the business of running a business, shouldn’t you be spending your time using stuff instead of figuring out how to deploy it?