Nutanix partners with IBM on data centre product
Tue 16 May 2017
Nutanix, creator of hyperconverged data center products, has partnered with IBM to create a new series of data center hardware using IBM Power Systems for business apps.
The new product, a full-stack solution with built-in virtualization, will combine the Nutanix cloud platform with IBM Power Systems. The end result will be a turnkey solution targeted at large enterprises with big data analytics needs.
Together, Nutanix and IBM intend to create web-scale architecture for hyperconverged deployments in enterprises where these types of systems have yet to penetrate, including big data, machine learning, and artificial intelligence.
The new products will be the first created by Nutanix that do not use Intel processors. Nutanix CEO Dheeraj Pandey told Fortune that the new Nutanix stacks powered by IBM will be used for a different type of job than the company’s standard, Intel-based product line.
“With this partnership, IBM customers of Power-based systems will be able to realize a public cloud-like experience with their on-premise infrastructure,” he elaborated. “With the planned design, enterprise customers will be able to run any mission critical workload, at any scale, with world-class virtualization and automation capabilities built into a scale-out fabric leveraging IBM’s server technology.”
IBM Power Systems provide wide-ranging data processing capabilities, and are particularly well-suited to advanced data processing tasks including artificial intelligence applications and big data analysis. IBM’s Watson AI applications run on the Power Systems framework.
IBM’s VP of Power Systems, Stefanie Chiras, said that target applications for the Nutanix/IBM product could include fraud detection in finance, optimizing shopping experiences in retail, and diagnostic results in the healthcare industry. While these are very different applications, they are united by the fact that they require massive amounts of data to be analyzed for patterns with near real-time results.
Nutanix went public last fall, with an initial public offering with the highest ‘pop‘ in the first day of trading for a tech stock since 2014. The stock more than doubled in the first two weeks, reaching a high of $38, before evening out to the current $17 per share.
Nutanix, a pioneer of bundled solutions for the data center, has focused on providing an all-in-one hyperconverged products combining compute, network, storage and software in a single package. However, the company recently began selling software as a stand-alone product as well, allowing customers to build their own data center solutions using Nutanix software certified to run on Dell, HPE, and Cisco servers.
