Nutanix Unveils Program to Upgrade Vblock Customers to Web-Scale Converged Infrastructure 

Nutanix today announced a company-wide initiative to bring true web-scale simplicity and economics to enterprise IT teams underserved by VCE converged infrastructure. CIOs and datacenter architects have long recognized the need to scale their infrastructure on demand, and avoid expensive overprovisioning that prevents an IT cost model competitive with popular cloud providers. Many of these Global 2000 companies have turned to pre-cabled and pre-engineered systems in hopes of reducing complexity and lowering costs. Unfortunately, these same systems are constructed with legacy technologies, and lack the genuine IT innovation necessary to meet the scalability and economic challenges facing large enterprises in the cloud era.

Nutanix delivers radical improvement in IT simplicity, while enabling datacenter managers to build flexible, massively scalable private clouds one server at a time. Nutanix solutions incorporate advanced web-scale technologies and can replace Vblock installations running nearly any virtualized workload, including virtual desktops, Microsoft enterprise applications, databases and more – and deliver these services with 9x faster performance and 10x faster time to deployment. Unlike Vblock, Nutanix’s web-scale IT platform runs on all popular virtualization hypervisors, including VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V and open source KVM. It also enables customers of all sizes to standardize their infrastructure across both datacenter and branch office locations.

Customers are gravitating to Nutanix to advance their converged infrastructure strategies, and Nutanix continues to win against large legacy IT vendors. For example, in just the last three months, Nutanix was chosen over VCE Vblock by:

• A top 3 global mining company that needed a simpler converged infrastructure for remote locations. Nutanix delivered a solution that consumed only two rack units (RU), compared with the smallest Vblock system that needed 24 RU;
• A 35,000 student public university that needed a flexible scale-out design for their central IT hub. The pay-as-you-grow capability from Nutanix proved superior compared to the static legacy infrastructure behind VCE;
• A large U.S. military branch that chose Nutanix to build a highly secure virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI); and,
• An APAC regional government body looking for a cost-effective VDI approach. Vblock was quickly dismissed after a short total cost of ownership (TCO) comparison against Nutanix.

To ease the transition to modern web-scale technologies, Nutanix’s Global Service Organization (GSO), working in conjunction with Nutanix channel partners, is now offering its customers a Vblock-to-Nutanix Migration Service. This new offering is available worldwide and provides a planned, low-risk process to migrate all virtual workloads to Nutanix. The service includes a free detailed assessment of all virtual workloads in the Vblock environment and a multi-phase, step-by-step cutover plan. Additional GSO services are available to implement Nutanix clusters, and perform the actual application and workload migration, plus full training on the Nutanix-based infrastructure in order to streamline ongoing datacenter operations.

“The enterprise datacenter is at an inflection point as it tries to keep up with rapid advancements in technology,” said Parmeet Chaddha, vice president, global services. “Some vendors have turned to duct taping legacy technologies in a 42U rack and selling it as next-generation converged infrastructure. Nutanix is committed to helping these IT professionals simplify their architecture to meet the management, scalability and economic challenges of the cloud era.”

For organizations with expiring Vblock maintenance, Nutanix is offering a customized trade-up program to replace existing Vblocks with new Nutanix web-scale converged infrastructure. With this program, Nutanix solutions can be purchased cash-flow neutral, in some cases, at the cost of existing Vblock support and maintenance. Additionally, enterprises can dramatically reduce future operating expenses because Nutanix requires much less rack space, power and cooling requirements than Vblock, and because Nutanix support and services costs are a fraction of what Vblock customers typically pay annually.