What IT Leaders Should Know from Nutanix .NEXT

Over the past year and a half, almost three-quarters of IT organizations have reported experiencing a price increase due to changes in their primary hypervisor's licensing model. In response, IT teams have been placed at a crossroads. Do they increase investment with VMware? Accelerate container-based modernization with Red Hat? Shift more investment to the public cloud? Pursue an alternative? All of the above?

At this year's.NEXT conference, Nutanix took several significant steps forward in bringing to life its vision of simplifying modern application environments that span both virtual machines and containers, anywhere across the public cloud, data center or edge. Any organization harboring concerns over hypervisor costs or lock-in and seeking alternative options should be paying attention to what Nutanix announced and what it means for the virtualization space moving forward.

Some highlights from the announcements include:

1. Nutanix Kubernetes Platform (NKP) Metal -- Nutanix announced the addition of bare metal support for containers with NKP. Despite the potential efficiency benefits, enterprises have been slow to deploy containers on bare-metal infrastructure due to the high complexity, often opting instead to run containers within virtual machines. Nutanix's approach claims to deliver a consistent Day-0 and Day-2 operational experience for bare-metal deployments that matches that of existing Nutanix operations.

Why this matters -- With the bulk of new development happening in containers, any new platform investment must simplify combined virtual machine and container ecosystems. Among organizations that have experienced increased hypervisor costs, 39% identified planning to shift to a new platform that will be able to manage both virtual machines and containers. A siloed approach to containers will just be too inefficient and costly to be viable in the long term. The industry needs easier-to-use container orchestration platforms, and preferably ones that can support virtual machines as well. Nutanix's NKP improvements are a welcome addition, one that should increase the scrutiny that IT organizations can place on competitors such as VMware and Red Hat.

2. Support for Dell PowerStore, NetApp, and Lenovo ThinkSystem Storage -- While Nutanix's AHV hypervisor already supports Dell PowerFlex and EverPure (formerly Pure Storage) external storage, the addition of more storage systems and vendor options reveals an important strategic shift for Nutanix. It is becoming a more flexible application platform less tied to hyperconverged configurations for on-premises deployments.

Why this matters -- This announcement benefits enterprises seeking hypervisor alternatives. The flexibility to use your organization's preferred external storage option reduces the cost and complexity of migrations. More importantly though, the newly expanded breadth of external storage support reflects a strategic focus to support a broad portfolio of external storage options for the long term, reducing the risk of increasing your enterprise's reliance on Nutanix as a hypervisor of choice.

3. Nutanix Agentic AI -- Nutanix announced its Enterprise AI software over a year ago. It helps simplify the deployment and management of AI infrastructure by providing a dashboard interface and tools for deploying, securing and testing models. This year, Nutanix announced its Agentic AI software, which incorporates its Enterprise AI and NKP technology along with advances to its AHV hypervisor and Flow Virtual Networking to improve AI workload optimization. For example, AHV can automatically optimize workload placement to help improve GPU utilization, and Nutanix Flow Virtual Networking can use Nvidia BlueField DPUs to offload virtual networking overhead and free up additional CPU cycles for AI applications. At the storage layer, Nutanix Unified Storage enhancements provide low-latency performance using NFS over RDMA. Nutanix has also announced that S3 over RDMA is scheduled as a future deliverable on their roadmap. 

Why this matters -- With Agentic AI, Nutanix provides another consolidated tool to a crowded and rapidly evolving market, with infrastructure vendors such as Cisco, Dell Technologies, HPE, SuperMicro and Lenovo all providing AI Factory offerings. The good news for IT decision-makers is that this increased wealth of consolidated solutions provides a wide variety of options to accelerate internal AI initiatives. The less good news is that, given the pace of innovation, it is difficult to standardize on a single option for the long term. Nutanix's integrated approach and scalable design provides the potential to accelerate in-house AI projects, but optimizing the return on AI infrastructure investment depends on a variety of factors specific to your organization, your data, and your use case and requires detailed analysis before investment.

In a nutshell, these announcements strengthen Nutanix's position as more than just hyperconverged infrastructure; it is a viable enterprise hybrid cloud application platform. While it has been more than a year since Broadcom adjusted the licensing model for VMware, enterprise organizations continue to investigate alternatives, looking for a platform that can simplify the management of both containers and virtual machines across on-premises, cloud, and edge environments. For IT decision makers looking for hypervisor options, Nutanix is not alone; VMware, Red Hat, HPE, Microsoft and Verge.io provide options along with several open source flavors, but these announcements highlight how quickly this space is evolving and makes the case for taking another look at the options.

Ultimately, there is more urgency to define your organization's virtualization and container platform strategy than you might expect. IT is on the precipice of a complexity crisis. According to Omdia, a division of Informa TechTarget, research, 82% of organizations say their overall IT infrastructure environment has become more complex in the last two years. And 69% of IT administrators say that the complexity of their IT infrastructure environment slows IT operations and digital initiatives. The rapid investment in AI is only going to make this complexity worse, before AI has a chance to potentially make it better.

As organizations shift their personnel and budgets to support AI initiatives, efficiency gains from optimizing existing operations and infrastructure will be necessary. Consolidation will likely become more critical as the extended use of multiple disparate hypervisors and container orchestration options will likely become costly inhibitors as your organization seeks to optimize its focus on AI.

Scott Sinclair is practice director with TechTarget's Enterprise Strategy Group, now part of Omdia, covering the storage industry.

Enterprise Strategy Group is part of Omdia. Its analysts have business relationships with technology vendors.