Recently Nutanix annound the launch of the Xpress edition. With this model, Nutanix wants to serve the SMB customers, so they can enjoy all the benefits of the enterprise cloud platform, as there are:

• Ease of deployment; as the regular edition, the Xpress edition is deployed and configured very easily.
• Ease of Management; the whole infrastructure can be managed from a single interface. Because of the self-healing capacities of the platform, administrative effort is decreases dramatically.
• Great performance; customers will enjoy the performance of this 2U block.

What exactly is the Xpress edition?

The Xpress edition is a 3- or 4-node appliance, based on the SX-1065-G4 node. Each node has two Intel Broadwell processors, and can contain 1 SSD and 2 HDD disks. You can read all about the specifications on the site of Nutanix, http://www.nutanix.com/products/xpress/.

One difference with the regular edition is the limitation of 4 nodes in a cluster. Where you can grow unlimited with the regular edition, this is not possible with the Xpress edition. So you have to be sure, the growth of the IT infrastructure of your company will fit in the Xpress configuration. At this time, it is unknown if an upgrade from the Xpress platform to the enterprise cloud platform will be available.

Almost all features of the enterprise cloud platform will be available in the Xpress edition. See the datasheet for the platform at the site of Nutanix.

Some limitations with disaster recovery

The Xpress edition has some limitations regarding replication and disaster recovery. In the enterprise platform you have a wide variety of options, as there are one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-one. In the Xpress edition, you will have the possibility to create just one remote site, so only a one-to-one replication will be possible. The datasheet is not clear about it, but according my latest information, only replication between SX clusters will be available. So replication to a NX-cluster will not be available.

Interested?

You can look at the website of Nutanix, the link is provided earlier… The launch event will be on June 28th, you can register here. If more information is available, I will post some updates about the Xpress edition.