Items Tagged: VCE

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Executive Summary: VCE and Nutanix in the Real World

Taneja Group prepared a Field Report for Nutanix on the real-world customer experience for seven Nutanix hyperconvergence and seven VCE convergence customers. We did not cherry pick customers for dissatisfaction or delight; we were interested in typical customers’ honest reactions.

The same conclusions kept emerging: VCE users see convergence as a benefit over traditional do-it-yourself infrastructure, but an expensive one. Some of the concerns include high prices, infrastructure and management complexity, expensive support contracts, and concerns over the long-term viability of the partnership between EMC, VMware and Cisco. The Nutanix users also shared valuable hyperconvergence benefits.  In contrast to VCE, they also cited simplified architecture and management, reasonable acquisition and operating costs, and considerably faster time to value.

Our conclusion is that VCE convergence is an improvement over traditional architecture, but Nutanix hyperconvergence is an evolutionary improvement over VCE. 

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Converged IT Infrastructure's Place in the Internet of Things

All of the trends leading towards the world-wide Internet of Things (IoT) – ubiquitous, embedded computing, mobile, organically distributed nodes, and far-flung networks tying them together - are also coming in full force into the IT data center. These solutions are taking the form of converged and hyperconverged modules of IT infrastructure. Organizations adopting such solutions gain from a simpler building-block way to architect and deploy IT, and forward-thinking vendors now have a unique opportunity to profit from subscription services that while delivering superior customer insight and support, also help build a trusted advisor relationship that promises an ongoing “win-win” scenario for both the client and the vendor.

There are many direct (e.g. revenue impacting) and indirect (e.g. customer satisfaction) benefits we mention in this report, but the key enabler to this opportunity is in establishing an IoT scale data analysis capability. Specifically, by approaching converged and hyperconverged solutions as an IoT “appliance”, and harvesting low-level component data on utilization, health, configuration, performance, availability, faults, and other end point metrics across the full worldwide customer base deployment of appliances, an IoT vendor can then analyze the resulting stream of data with great profit for both the vendor and each individual client. Top-notch analytics can feed support, drive product management, assure sales/account control, inform marketing, and even provide a revenue opportunity directly (e.g. offering a gold level of service to the end customer). 

An IoT data stream from a large pool of appliances is almost literally the definition of “big data” – non-stop machine data at large scale with tremendous variety (even within a single converged solution stack) – and operating and maintaining such a big data solution requires a significant amount of data wrangling, data science and ongoing maintenance to stay current. Unfortunately this means IT vendors looking to position IoT oriented solutions may have to invest a large amount of cash, staff and resources into building out and supporting such analytics. For many vendors, especially those with a varied or complex convergence solution portfolio or established as a channel partner building them from third-party reference architectures, these big data costs can be prohibitive. However, failing to provide these services may result in large friction selling and supporting converged solutions to clients now expecting to manage IT infrastructure as appliances.

In this report, we’ll look at the convergence and hyperconvergence appliance trend, and the increasing customer expectations for such solutions. In particular we’ll see how IT appliances in the market need to be treated as complete, commoditized products as ubiquitous and with the same end user expectations as emerging household IoT solutions. In this context, we’ll look at Glassbeam’s unique B2B SaaS SCALAR that converged and hyperconverged IT appliance vendors can immediately adopt to provide an IoT machine data analytic solution. We’ll see how Glassbeam can help differentiate amongst competing solutions, build a trusted client relationship, better manage and support clients, and even provide additional direct revenue opportunities.

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Nutanix Versus VCE: Web-Scale Versus Converged Infrastructure in the Real World

This Field Report was created by Taneja Group for Nutanix in late 2014 with updates in 2015. The Taneja Group analyzed the experiences of seven Nutanix Xtreme Computing Platform customers and seven Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) Vblock customers. We did not ‘cherry-pick’ customers for dissatisfaction, delight, or specific use case; we were interested in typical customers’ honest reactions.

As we talked in detail to these customers, we kept seeing the same patterns: 1) VCE users were interested in converged systems; and 2) they chose VCE because VCE partners Cisco, EMC, and/or VMware were embedded in their IT relationships and sales. The VCE process had the advantage of vendor familiarity, but it came at a price: high capital expense, infrastructure and management complexity, expensive support contracts, and concerns over the long-term viability of the VCE partnership (see an opinion of the DELL/EMC merger at end of this document). VCE customers typically did not research other options for converged infrastructure prior to deploying the VCE Vblock solution.

In contrast, Nutanix users researched several convergence and hyperconvergence vendors to determine the best possible fit. Nutanix’ advanced web-scale framework gave them simplified architecture and management, reasonable acquisition and operating costs, and considerably faster time to value.

Our conclusion, based on the amount of time and effort spent by the teams responsible for managing converged infrastructure, is that VCE Vblock deployments represent an improvement over traditional architectures, but Nutanix hyperconvergence – especially with its web-scale architecture – is an big improvement over VCE.

This Field Report will compare customer experiences with Nutanix hyperconverged, web-scale infrastructure to VCE Vblock in real-world environments. 

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The Hyperconverged Data Center: Nutanix Customers Explain Why They Replaced Their EMC SANS

Taneja Group spoke with several Nutanix customers in order to understand why they switched from EMC storage to the Nutanix platform. All of the respondent’s articulated key architectural benefits of hyperconvergence versus a traditional 3-tier solutions. In addition, specific Nutanix features for mission-critical production environments were often cited.

Hyperconverged systems have become a mainstream alternative to traditional 3-tier architecture consisting of separate compute, storage and networking products. Nutanix collapses this complex environment into software-based infrastructure optimized for virtual environments. Hypervisor, compute, storage, networking, and data services run on scalable nodes that seamlessly scale across massive virtual assets. Hyperconvergence offers a key value proposition over 3-tier architecture:  instead of deploying, managing and integrating separate components – storage, servers, networking, data services, and hypervisors – these components are combined into a modular high performance system.

The customers we interviewed operate in very different industries. In common, they all maintained data centers undergoing fundamental changes, typically involving an opportunity to refresh some portion of their 3-tier infrastructure. This enabled the evaluation of hyperconvergence in supporting those changes. Customers interviewed found that Nutanix hyperconvergence delivered benefits in the areas of scalability, simplicity, value, performance, and support. If we could use one phrase to explain why Nutanix’ is winning over EMC customers in the enterprise market it would be “Ease of Everything.” Nutanix works, and works consistently with small and large clusters, in single and multiple datacenters, with specialist or generalist IT support, and across hypervisors.

The five generations of Nutanix products span many years of product innovation. Web-scale architecture has been the key to Nutanix platform’s enterprise capable performance, simplicity and scalability. Building technology like this requires years of innovation and focus and is not an add-on for existing products and architectures.

The modern data center is quickly changing. Extreme data growth and complexity are driving data center directors toward innovative technology that will grow with them. Given the benefits of Nutanix web-scale architecture – and the Ease of Everything – data center directors can confidently adopt Nutanix as their partner in data center transformation just as the following EMC customers did.