FlashStack with Nutanix - Part 1

Let me set the stage: The day is May 7th, 2025 (maybe it was the 8th, my memory is foggy). Rajiv Ramaswami (Nutanix CEO) is on stage at the Nutanix .NEXT conference where he announces the NCI Compute program and what Nutanix is coming to market with. Then, on the next slide, he shows a picture of FlashStack with Nutanix - a partnership between Cisco, Pure Storage, and Nutanix. Mic Drop - Exit stage right while pointing to the Cisco folks sitting in the front row, the crowd goes wild and gives a standing ovation ...

Alright, the mic drop part didn't happen but it would have been pretty awesome. Almost like the Rudy moment. Regardless, from that day forward, Cisco, Nutanix, and Pure have been hard at work to make the announcement a product reality. I anticipate this offering to be one most successful solutions with the Cisco & Nutanix offering. Let me explain.

The Why

It's hard to start this discussion without talking about the infamous acquisition of VMware by Broadcom. If you know anything about my professional career, you know I built it around VMware (along with a lot ... a lot of other IT professionals). When this all went down - many thought Broadcom wouldn't change (or change much) of a good thing that was VMware. Ya ... so that didn't happen and now, some of us have a bit of a chip on our shoulder <looks in the mirror>. Ripples through the spacetime fabric of IT infrastructure were made.

Overnight - customers were met with an unfortunate reality: We've had a single vendor strategy at the hypervisor layer.

And the reality here is that a lot of customers (though not all) were, at best, annoyed, and at worst, really pissed off, which brough a new market opportunity that revolved around the underlying question of "What do we do?" There are multiple avenues here - a complete migration off VMware, introduce a dual vendor strategy with partial migrations, the "dip our toes in" with a new hypervisor and see how it works, often tied to new projects that demand additional workloads, and ... everything in-between (including stay with Broadcom).

There are a lot of things to consider no matter which route a customer takes and there have been a lot of articles written around this topic around the webs. Maybe if I get some motivation, I'll post my unsolicited opinion sometime in the future. Regardless, the question above is often asked and efforts are started but they hit a analysis paralysis situation with a wide range of challenges that go unanswered.

The Challenges

What causes the analysis paralysis? The challenges that surround a major strategy shift, all of which end up stacking on top of each other.

1. Customers want a flexible solution to meet business challenges.
   At the end of the day - customers are looking for something that won't lock them in to a specific software suite or architecture (including dedicated appliances). The wounds are fresh - they're not making that mistake again.
2. Customers want a solution that provides a hypervisor diversification option.
   Stacking on top of meeting business challenges, said solution must allow customers to run a hypervisor of choice on any given day, whether that hypervisor is VMware, Nutanix, Hyper-V, Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization(ish), or anything in between.
3. The solution needs to be able to reuse the existing data center investments in compute, networking, and/or storage.
   This seems simple but it's harder than one might think. A customer purchases a server, they should be able to use that server however they need to in that moment. They purchased a storage array, same thing applies. This goes back to the notion of building a cloud-like on-premises infrastructure.
4. Customers have time and budget constraints.
   Both of theses are very limited and valuable resources. Time: Most IT teams are stretched thin as it is trying to just keep the lights on. A mandate to diversify the hypervisor doesn't happen overnight and requires a good amount of planning. Budget: Well, if you have a customer with endless budget, have them give me a call. Unfortunately, the reality is - budgets are constrained.
5. The hyperconverged architecture can be somewhat limiting with how it scales resources.
   While HCI is a great technology - it's not a fit for all customers or use cases. When you need to scale resources linearly, it's great - but when you need flexibility in different time scales it can get messy. One day you need compute resources and the next maybe only storage. This is harder to achieve this with HCI.

As mentioned above - the solution often times can't just address one or two of these challenges, but all of them at once. Customers are embarking on a difficult journey and their next solution can't put them in the same situation that they're in now.

Where does FlashStack with Nutanix fit in all of this? For no other reason than to build suspense and anticipation, you'll have to wait for Part 2.