External Storage

Motivation

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Nutanix pioneered Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI), bringing a unique way to deploy infrastructure. Over time Nutanix has become a platform company that provides choice and flexibility to customers in how the use their infrastructure. The motivation behind integrating Nutanix with external storage providers is to extend that choice to storage and provide best of both worlds to customers: the operational simplicity, VM-centricity, and robust virtualization of Nutanix Cloud Platform and Prism, combined with the dedicated performance, specific data services, and independent scaling of modern external storage arrays. The goal is to preserve the frictionless Prism experience while opening the Nutanix Cloud Platform (NCP) to the broader storage ecosystem.

The integration of external storage addresses three primary motivations:

• Disaggregated Scaling: Decoupling compute and storage allows scaling compute-intensive workloads without adding unnecessary storage nodes, or vice-versa.
• Leveraging Existing Investments: The market reality is that significant capital investments exist in external storage arrays (e.g., Dell PowerFlex, Pure Storage, Dell PowerStore, NetApp). This integration allows migration to the Nutanix Cloud Platform without abandoning existing storage hardware.
• Operational and Control Plane Uniformity: By integrating external storage into the AOS control plane, Nutanix now provides the same VM-centric operations and single pane of glass for management, snapshot orchestration, and disaster recovery, regardless of the underlying storage.

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