I made an audacious claim about Nutanix: they had the first real SDDC when they added external storage.
Of course, many folks quickly and correctly pointed out the large feature gaps between Nutanix’s offerings and VMware’s. vSphere supports a broader set of storage offerings, NSX has a wider feature set, and vCenter has folders.
Having been the architect behind vCenter (versions 6.5, 7.0, and 8.0, as well as VCF 4.x up to 5.0), I really have a good understanding of the gaps between these products.
My time at VMware was spent trying to build a real SDDC. I have a long list of attempts, code words, and projects I pushed, some with success and some without, within VMware.
I was highlighting another perspective. To me, an SDDC offers a cohesive collection of services that simplifies the physical infrastructure beneath it. This means that, no matter the hardware in use, I can operate consistently and seamlessly. While various hardware might bring a few additional features, my team’s operations remain unchanged and steady.
vSphere’s approach to storage involves creating a new filesystem for each type of storage. vSphere includes VMFS for external storage vSphere features a distinct NFS client that operates differently than VMFS for NFS storage. Additionally, vSphere has vSAN to enhance the performance and capacity of both flash and HDD. Lastly, vSphere introduced another filesystem, VSAN ESA, designed to meet the performance requirements of NVME drives.
Each point product was brilliant, feature-rich, and incompatible, requiring forklift upgrades.
Nutanix took its entire SDDC feature set and ran it on top of external storage. It didn’t create a new file system, data management layer, API, etc.; it just added another storage type.
That simplicity adds business value. What makes it shocking, to me at least, is that they did it in a record amount of time with very few resources.
As a Nutanix customer, incremental new hardware capabilities do not create pools of incompatible infrastructure. It all works the same way; the different hardware just gives you different choices.
There is power and value in that. And that Nutanix could do that with two radically different kinds of storage – HCI and External Storage was incredible.
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