A while ago, someone asked the question: given that VMware and Nutanix have similar capabilities, what makes Nutanix the only real SDDC?
It was a great question. And to be quite honest, I was stumped. What was it? Was I being a fan of my employer, or was there something there? And I came up with the following answer –
It’s about the vision and the reality.
If you aim to assemble pieces of software, orchestrate them, and deal with their complexity, then you’re trading off hardware complexity for software complexity.
If your goal is a control plane that absorbs different hardware infrastructure, has a simple-to-deploy and operate model, and offers a consistent API and user experience, that’s the SDDC.
And yes – if you are willing to fight with the complexity of the VCF stack and work around its limitations, you can make it do incredible things.
But that wasn’t the SDDC that I envisaged.
That isn’t programmable, dynamic, flexible infrastructure.
Worse, VCF’s intrinsic limitations of the availability of the control plane make it a poor solution when the control’s availability defines the infrastructure’s availability.
SDDC is more than just a bag of features you can script together. It’s an operating model of infrastructure that is programmable and works. Nutanix delivers on that.
At VMware, I passionately argued for such a system. And ultimately, the company had other priorities.
VCF is on a long journey to get there.
Nutanix is on a long journey to add the features.
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