Nutanix announced external storage support for its platform.
And for those who live in the vSphere bubble, it feels a lot like “whatever” or, more boringly, “Really?”
It’s about perspective. Nutanix has delivered Raghu’s vision of an SDDC in a way VMware and VCF have not.
When Raghu stood before everyone in 2012 to argue for SDDC, he envisioned a software control plane that would allow infrastructure programmability.
Realizing that vision forced Nutanix and VMware to focus on limiting customer choice to provide simplicity. It was a necessary first phase of the market.
VMware and Nutanix adopted a solution in which customers had to back off their choice of hardware to gain the benefits of the SDDC. The software systems imposed various constraints on workloads and on data center construction.
VMware made some progress with VCF, but VCF only fulfills that promise with a very brittle system and a complex set of software choices that only partially realize the potential.
VCF’s answer to the need for customer choice was to provide that choice and simultaneously sacrifice the simplicity and vision of SDDC. You want choice, you get choice, but the integration of the system is sacrificed.
VCF software architecture forces customers to either not use a feature or not get the value of VCF.
The failure of VCF and Nutanix did not mean that the market demand did not exist for an SDDC that delivers programmability of infrastructure, choice, and availability.
And that’s what Nutanix has delivered. The Nutanix system uses Dell Powerflex storage, which gives customers a consistent operating model across SDDCs and hardware choices without sacrificing features.
Nutanix, because the software system is built using a distributed database with microservices that interact on a consistent data model, has—again—taken a better approach.
VCF forces you to choose between the simplicity of vSAN, the hardware choices of VMFS, and the complexity of SDDC manager and NSX while requiring new hardware and software infrastructure to deploy any of these. Furthermore, the feature set of vSphere is artificially constrained in a VCF deployment due to the limitations of the overall solution.
Nutanix offers an elegant model that works fantastically for HCI and now for external storage. Customers now possess a software platform that delivers the SDDC and is not tied to a specific hardware architecture.
External storage with all the availability, simplicity, and advantages of HCI. Because it’s Nutanix, it also offers the availability and recoverability that such a system requires.
Most importantly, Nutanix has delivered an infrastructure that allows applications more choice in the hardware trade-offs they need while retaining a consistent interaction model.
Calling what Nutanix did – “external storage support” – is like calling the telephone a device to exchange pleasantries. It’s both accurate and misses the change.
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