A Cisco & Nutanix Partnership

On August 28, 2023 - Cisco officially announced a partnership with Nutanix. Forged in the land of Modor, in the fires of Mount Doom ... no. Not really (though that may depend on who you ask). But a lot of rumors and questions immediately started floating about why. Why would Cisco partner with Nutanix when one could argue that they've been competitors for years with Cisco's own hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) stack; HyperFlex? Doesn't Nutanix already run on Cisco UCS?

Let's address HyperFlex first. At the same time that Cisco announced their partnership with Nutanix, the end-of-sale (EoS) and end-of-life (EoL) of the HyperFlex platform was also announced. This effectively consolidated the HCI market to two major players: Nutanix and VMware vSAN (we don't talk about my past). The reality is that HyperFlex was lagging behind in the HCI market and while it definitely had its moments and features that customers truly loved, it was time to sunset the technology.

The next question is a bit nuanced. Yes - technically the Nutanix software did run on top of Cisco UCS servers, however, this wasn't a partnership. As you can see from the Nutanix blog, it was done independently without Cisco's involvement. The "support" (if you want to call it that) was simply that the software was validated. This was done with the best of intentions of course, but in 2016, Cisco had different plans for their HCI strategy.

Rumors Travel Fast

One of the rumors I often heard around this partnership was that Cisco was readying to buy Nutanix. What's the saying? "A rumor travels half way around the world before the truth puts its shoes on". Two years post-announcement, Nutanix is still very much an independent company, and a very successful one at that. On a personal note - I am quite glad this wasn't the reason.

A big reason Nutanix has historically been successful has been it's ability for their software to be hardware agnostic, giving customers a choice. Unfortunately for HyperFlex - this wasn't something that was easily overcome. Let's not make the mistake twice.

That choice of hardware, however, is an important distinction to forging this partnership and how Cisco comes to market and differentiates itself with the solution. We'll get into that in another post.

Timelines

One thing that isn't always clear, is that before the partnership was publicly announced, months of work on the product had already been done between the two companies. Cisco's server architecture (UCS) introduced several new features and functions that needed to be co-developed and co-engineered to bring the product to market.

Technologies unique to Cisco such as the virtual interface cards (VICs) to fabric interconnects (FIs) and UCS manager, all of which were foreign concepts to the typical way Nutanix had historically done deployments and hardware qualifications.

One other major intersection between the two companies was connecting the two support organizations to provide our joint customers a top tier support experience. We'll dig into these differentiators in a later posts as well.

As mentioned above, the partnership was announced on August 28th, 2023 and the product officially launched to market on April 10th, 2024. At the time of writing, the partnership is still less than 2 years old and the product has been shipping for less than 1 1/2 years. If you look back on everything that's been executed between the companies, it has truly been at break-neck speeds. This is a testament to not only both companies working towards a common "north star" but also to the engineering teams co-developing the product.