Dell and Nutanix partner on web-scale appliances

The reformation of Dell following its departure from the world’s stock markets, continues apace as the company positions itself to play a significant role in most aspects of cloud infrastructure delivery and service.

The new Dell XC Series of Web-scale Converged Infrastructure Appliances are the latest move by the company in that direction. These are a combination of PowerEdge servers running Nutanix software, and will be available in multiple variants to meet a wide range of price and performance options. This is the result of an OEM agreement Nutanix has signed with Dell.

The software and hardware combination is aimed at delivering a flexible, scale-out platform. It is designed from the ground up to deliver innovative web-scale technology to enterprises of any size.

The agreement also includes joint sales, marketing, support and service investments, as well as alignment of product roadmaps.

The new Dell XC Series of Web-scale Converged Appliances will deliver high-performance converged infrastructure specifically designed for powering a broad spectrum of popular enterprise use cases, including virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), virtualised business applications, multi-hypervisor environments and more.

Nutanix’s web-scale software runs on all popular virtualisation hypervisors, including VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V and open source KVM, and is able to span multiple hypervisors in the same environment. The appliances are scheduled for availability in the fourth quarter of this year and will be sold by Dell sales teams and channel partners worldwide.

“Nutanix is a recognised leader in the converged infrastructure market with a software-driven offering that fits with Dell’s efforts to redefine datacenter economics and simplify IT for our customers,” said Alan Atkinson, vice president and general manager, Dell Storage. “By combining market-leading infrastructure and software technologies from both companies with Dell’s world-class go-to-market capabilities, we believe our new solutions will be positioned to be a significant player in the growing, multi-billion dollar converged infrastructure market.”

Web-scale infrastructure is fundamentally a new approach to designing, deploying and managing datacentres that are radically simple and efficient. Web-scale architectures and technologies were pioneered in large cloud and web companies – such as Google, Facebook, Twitter and Amazon – and are now being adopted by mainstream enterprises.

“Dell is a world-class leader in servers, storage and networking, and has established itself as a valuable IT partner for many of the world’s largest organisations,” said Dheeraj Pandey, Nutanix co-founder and CEO. “Nutanix is teaming with Dell to accelerate our global sales growth through Dell’s vast direct and channel sales networks. In Dell, we chose a company that shares our vision of disrupting traditional datacentre infrastructures with intelligent software running on x86 hardware to power all datacentre services.”