Nutanix .NEXT 2024

Last update: May 21st, 15.55

If you like true hybrid multicloud infrastructure, you have to be in Barcelona this week. Today, the annual event of Nutanix begins. Barcelona is a lovely city and even the weather became better and better. Outside no clouds to see, so we can focus on cloud on the conference.

This blogpost will contain an overview of the announcements of Nutanix that will become clear in the keynote sessions of today and tomorrow.

The general session just finished. An inspirational chat with Sebastian Vettel concluded the session. But in the 90 minutes before that interview, a few announcements were made.

First big deal is a more intense partnership between Dell and Nutanix. Of course, Dell is already capable of delivering Nutanix certified hardware, but Dell is going to service the Nutanix stack completely. More deteails are coming soon.

Also the partnership with Nvidia is expanded. Also with Nvidia a new product is added to the partnership. Recently Nvidia announced NIM, a set of easy-to-use microservices for accelerating the deployment of foundation models.

Great announcement is that Nutanix is accepting external storage for the hypervisor AHV. This is not available yet, but the first external storage that will be allowed to the hypervisor is Dell Powerflex.
This change in the policy of Nutanix will make sure recent investments in storage devices other than Nutanix can be utilized. In my opinion it is best to make sure that these storage devices are phased out as soon as possible to get the best out of your Nutanix cluster. External storage will have an impact on the total user experience of the Nutanix infrastructure.

Fine addition are the Compute Only nodes. If storage is not the problem, CO nodes can be added to the cluster. Again, the goal is to prevent recent investments to be lossed. All hardware can be utilized. Of course this will take some time to be sure that the integrity of the Nutanix cluster is not affected. Main goal is to be certain that the data is secure and reliable.
CO nodes are also helping in reducing license costs, for example Oracle licensing. To prevent Oracle virtual servers to migrate from CO nodes, only a small amount of core have to be licensed.

Nutanix Cloud clusters are already available in AWS (2020) and Azure (2022). Nutanix is trying to get NC2 available in GCP as well. A time frame is not communicated during the first keynote. A few weeks ago Google announced to make the bare metal offerings available to 3rd parties like Nutanix. So, it can be available really soon, depending on the issues that will be during the design of this concept.

A few more announcements were made. Those will added later to this post.