Lenovo gives Nutanix some real muscle

The news that Lenovo has signed up for a strategic partnership with Nutanix looks likely to start an even more rapid march of hyper-converged data center architectures into the heartland of mainstream business IT.

Snaffling one of the Big 4 server vendors – Lenovo - as a global strategic partner has to something of a coup for hyper-converged systems software vendor, Nutanix.

The news that Lenovo has signed up for a strategic partnership with Nutanix looks likely to start an even more rapid march of hyper-converged data center architectures into the heartland of mainstream business IT.

But it won't be an immediate indicator that Nutanix will be taking what might appear to be the next logical step - pulling out of offering its own hardware as part of a full-package appliance.

As he indicates that the first year customer re-order rate of 70% or more showed that there was still a strong demand for the company's own boxes, Greg Smith, Senior Director of Product and Technical Marketing with Nutanix, says:

Nutanix is, fundamentally, a software company. However, our customers still like the idea of buying appliances from us, so we will stay in that business.

The new Lenovo partnership, however, does add one of the major global server vendors as a supplier. It joins Dell as a strategic partner to Lenovo, and brings with it a particular advantage for both parties. Smith says:

The Lenovo partnership is important to us as users do like the fact that different suppliers are available to them. It is also fair to observe that we appear as a still relatively new company to many established enterprises. So Nutanix has not always had the time to make it onto their approved vendor lists.

One advantage of the deal is that Lenovo, unlike Dell, has no pre-existing storage business to accommodate or protect where as Dell does - and if the EMC acquisition goes through it will have and even bigger one.

On the other side of that coin, of course, partnering with Nutanix gives Lenovo a storage option to sell to both its existing and new customers.

At the heart of the partnership lies a new family of Lenovo hyper-converged appliances that are complementary to the Nutanix appliance rather than competitive. They will be based on the System X technologies acquired by the company when it took over the IBM server product families. These will provide the grunt behind the Nutanix software, which will be able to run nearly all workloads,  including enterprise applications, databases, virtualized desktops, and big data analytics.

This will include the recently announced full certification as an SAP platform.

Marketplace fillip

Nutanix has already generated considerable traction as a replacement for incumbent systems, and sees the partnership with Lenovo as giving that market a significant fillip to this significant marketplace. Smith says:

Though this is a new approach, we are definitely in the business of incumbent replacement. Of course, the ideal is to find a greenfield customer, but our reality is customers facing an infrastructure refresh. The scalability of the systems means that we can offer them a specific logistics advantage as well as everything else. Customers need buy only what they require right now, rather than have to guess the resources needed for a full data center refresh.

That makes it a great deal cheaper to start a refresh, and quicker. We have even been able to deploy servers and get them into production, all on the day of ordering. The scalability means they can then buy the additional systems as they are needed and grow the refreshed infrastructure incrementally.

This plays to a long-running operational model that will be familiar to many of the IT staff involved in such a refresh - that of having `one server for one application'. Users can upgrade with a level of granularity that suits their specific needs.

It also gives Nutanix a strong position in the burgeoning Chinese marketplace, says Smith:

Nutanix does have a growing business in the Chinese market with customers such as Senzhen Airlines, Everbright International and Chun Yuan Steel.    However, China is a fast growing economy and there is a great opportunity to accelerate the Nutanix presence there through partnerships such as with Lenovo.

Lenovo is showing a commitment to the long haul for the partnership by making sizable investments in a dedicated global sales team. The combined solution will also be sold through Lenovo channel partners worldwide, as well as by Lenovo's broader enterprise sales teams.

On the Nutanix side the company's sales teams work to terms that encourage agnosticism and indifference to the actual hardware platform a customer might choose to use, so no bias or infighting is expected to get in the way of customers making the choices they feel best for them. Smith explains:

The only proviso is that Nutanix software gets into the account.

The only possible downside is that it is unlikely that users will be will be able to `mix'n'match' Nutanix and Lenovo systems together in the same infrastructure. This is not because of technical inconsistencies but rather because of inevitable support management issues.

My take

Nutanix has no stated plans to back away from producing hardware as well as software – and it is easy to see why it would have been necessary at the start. But now it has two of the top for global server vendors signed up as strategic partners it can only be a matter of time. And in a way, without its own hardware corner to defend, it could be freed up to push future developments even harder and faster.