Nutanix Aims to Ban the SAN From Virtualized Datacenters

SAN JOSE, CA--(Marketwire - Aug 16, 2011) - Nutanix today launched its flagship product, Nutanix Complete Cluster™, the industry's first truly converged server + storage infrastructure for enterprise-class virtualization that removes the need for network storage. Nutanix Complete Cluster is a high-performance hardware plus software solution that enables companies to virtualize their datacenters at a fraction of the cost of traditional server and SAN infrastructure. Only Nutanix Complete Cluster has a scale-out converged architecture that combines compute (servers) and storage in a single tier.

"Our customers will experience a radical improvement in TCO for their Nutanix-based virtualization projects, with savings of 40 to 60 percent in equipment alone," said Dheeraj Pandey, CEO of Nutanix. "The Nutanix difference is that no network storage is required to implement enterprise virtualization, resulting in dramatically simpler and faster datacenters in which data sits right next to virtual machines, not across the network."

Nutanix's key innovation is the company's patent-pending distributed system software layer that converges compute and storage into a single tier, is designed specifically for virtualization, and is optimized from the ground up to make use of flash SSDs in its core architecture. This converged architecture approach, pioneered by Google and innovated by Nutanix, makes big leaps in datacenter performance and efficiency possible. Nutanix envisions datacenters that are much smaller and faster than those with SAN-based architectures, yet simpler and more cost-effective to set up, implement, scale, and sustain.

"In increasingly virtualized datacenters, we believe that storage will gradually cease to be implemented as we know it today and will itself also become completely virtualized, leveraging commodity hardware, being self-optimizing and scaling-out to new levels," explains Mark Peters, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. "The industry, which makes a lot of money by continuing to propagate existing monolithic technology, will be forced to adapt to these new realities or, like the old monolithic server vendors, perish. The Nutanix approach of converging compute and storage into a simple building block for virtualization, enhanced by a Google-like distributed system architecture, is an example that shows us that the technologies to enable this are not futuristic pipe dreams -- they exist right now."

Customers can start a Nutanix-based virtualization deployment with a single Nutanix Complete Block™, a 2U unit containing four x86 nodes. Each Nutanix Complete Block contains 8 Intel Xeon processors and 192 GB RAM (upgradable to 768 GB) for running virtual machines along with 1.28 TB of ioMemory technology from Fusion-io, 1.2 TB of SATA SSD and 20TB of SATA drives for storing virtual machine data.

Each node in a Nutanix Complete Block runs an industry-standard hypervisor (VMware ESXi), and the whole system can be deployed in about 30 minutes. It can be easily managed using an intuitive user interface that provides new levels of virtual machine visibility across compute and storage resources. Expanding a Nutanix-based virtualization environment is as easy as adding another Complete Block to scale out a single Nutanix Complete Cluster in a grow-as-you-go manner.

"The long term impact of the Nutanix solution is that we'll be able to lower all our costs in the datacenter given the simplicity, form factor and scale-out architecture. We've done vBlock, but it's more than twice the footprint of Nutanix and doesn't enable plug and play expansion as one single system," says Neil Ferguson, Technology Director for Orrick, Herrington and Sutcliffe, a top international law firm.

Designed for enterprise class virtualization, Nutanix Complete Cluster provides seamless support for key virtualization capabilities like VMware's vMotion™, High Availability (HA), and Dynamic Resource Scheduling (DRS), along with industry-leading data management features that include fast VM cloning, capacity optimization, and converged backup for instant backup and recovery of virtual machine data without requiring external backup appliances.

"The Nutanix team has delivered a game-changing enterprise product in record time; the channel will love the economics behind collapsed compute and storage," says Bipul Sinha, an early backer and board member from Lightspeed Venture Partners.

Nutanix Complete Cluster is now generally available through the company's certified solution partners, including Lilien, LogicsOne, P1 Technologies and Mainline Information Systems. Please contact sales@nutanix.com for a complete list of partners. U.S. list price for Nutanix Complete Cluster starts at $75,000. Nutanix will also be demonstrating its solution to prospective customers and partners at vmworld, August 29 - September 1, 2011 at The Venetian in Las Vegas. For more about Nutanix and its products, please visit www.nutanix.com and follow them on Twitter @nutanix.

About Nutanix

Founded in 2009, Nutanix is the first company to offer a radically simple compute and storage infrastructure for implementing enterprise-class virtualization without complex and expensive network storage (SAN or NAS). Founded by a team that has built scalable systems like Google File System and enterprise-class systems like Oracle Database/Exadata in the past, Nutanix is based in San Jose and is backed by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Blumberg Capital.

Nutanix and Nutanix Complete Cluster are trademarks of Nutanix Inc. Other marks mentioned herein are trademarks that are proprietary to other companies.