Christine Austria and Curvature’s Nutanix Specialist, Matt Swann, discusses the Nutanix Portfolio and Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI).
Christine: Hello and welcome back to another episode of Ask The Expert. We’re joined today by Matt Swann, Curvature’s Nutanix specialist. Thanks for hopping on, Matt.
Matt: Yeah, hey Christine, happy to be here. How would you like to kick this off today?
Christine: So why don’t we begin with defining what HCI is and how it pertains to Nutanix? As we often see, this term come up when talking about Nutanix and their offerings.
Matt: Absolutely. HCI stands for Hyperconverged Infrastructure and this is basically an infrastructure design strategy that has been gaining popularity over the years compared to your traditional three-tiered architecture. So, while the traditional three-tiered architecture is going to leverage siloed server, storage, and networking hardware, often with all having their own unique management interfaces that must be configured to talk with each other, the flip side hyperconverged infrastructure natively combines these three entities into a simple hardware stack, which heavily relies on virtualization to allow them to all communicate, interact, and interact with each other seamlessly. And that’s just going to drastically simplify your hardware monitoring workload.
Christine: Got it. So, Nutanix’s product offering, is it primarily HCI?
Matt: Correct, yeah. And actually, as a fun little fact, Nutanix is the first company to offer an HCI product on the market and this was called the “Complete Cluster,” which they released all the way back in 2011.
Christine: Hey, that’s cool! So, what does their modern HCI product offering look like?
Matt: At a high level, Nutanix’s main product offering can be broken down into three core products. First, we have their Acropolis operating system, or AOS, and then there’s the Acropolis hypervisor, AHV, and finally is their management console, which is called PRISM. So, AOS can be thought of as the main operating system environment that really handles all that intricate underlying communication and virtualization of the main Nutanix offering. And then, AHV is actually going to be the hypervisor that supports and manages all those virtual machines that get created by the user. And then finally, PRISM is that single pane of glass management console that really just allows users to interact with all parts of their infrastructure and just eliminates that need for accessing multiple user interfaces.
Christine: Okay, that all sounds like software. What about the hardware component?
Matt: Yeah, that’s actually a really good point. And funnily enough, Nutanix actually prides themselves on being a software company. They definitely do have their own hardware offering, but the cool thing about Nutanix is their software is hardware agnostic, so it’s gonna be able to function on most modern enterprise hardware available these days.
Christine: Great, so what else helps separate Nutanix from their competitors?
Matt: So I think Nutanix really excels in a hybrid or a multicloud environment. So, with Nutanix hardware sitting on premises acting as a private cloud, it can actually seamlessly integrate with all major cloud providers. And just to kind of tailor your hybrid cloud experience to exactly how you want it, and I know a lot of what we kind of talked about today may kind of sound confusing, but with Curvature and our parent company, Park Place Technologies, being official Nutanix partners, we have our trusted team of sales solutions engineers standing by ready to discuss what moving to Nutanix might look like for you.
Christine: That’s awesome. Thanks for all the info Matt, and thanks again everyone for tuning in. If you have any questions about Nutanix for one of our sales engineers, leave a comment below or contact us today and we’ll see you next time on ask the expert.
For more information about Nutanix and HCI, contact us today!
