At its .NEXT conference Tuesday in Copenhagen, Nutanix announced general availability of the integrated private cloud “as-a-Service” solution with HPE (first announced in April) and a new integration with the popular IT management platform ServiceNow.
A top player in the hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) software market, Nutanix’s strategy has been to integrate its software with as many hardware vendors as possible. It’s also been selling its own hardware appliances, where the company is second to Dell EMC in market share.
Selling and managing turnkey cloud infrastructure housed in customers’ own data centers or colocation facilities but charging them based on how much they use is one of HPE’s core strategic pillars today. Its rival Dell Technologies is pursuing a similar strategy, trying to make the experience of consuming on-premises infrastructure as similar as possible with the public cloud user experience.
HPE’s services sold this way come under the brand GreenLake. The company's CEO Antonio Neri said earlier this year that every product it sells will be available as a service by 2022.
The new HPE GreenLake for Nutanix solution is a fully HPE-managed private cloud, consisting of HPE hardware running Nutanix’s Enterprise Cloud OS and the HCI company’s AHV hypervisor. HPE, which has its own HCI brand, SimpliVity, will not sell the service; Nutanix and its channel partners will, an HPE exec told DCK earlier this year.
The partners also announced at the conference an integrated HCI solution customers can buy and manage on their own. Called HPE ProLiant DX, it’s Nutanix’s software pre-installed on HPE ProLiant and Apollo servers shipped to customers from HPE factories.
The ServiceNow integration announced at the show automates management of customers’ Nutanix private clouds via the ServiceNow IT Operations Management solution. It discovers Nutanix private cloud infrastructure automatically, provides catalog-based automatic provisioning, and automates alerts for Nutanix private cloud incidents, such as host power loss or maxing out of capacity.
