Nutanix opened its .NEXT conference in Copenhagen today, announcing an HPE GreenLake deal, its software pre-installed on HPE servers, and integration with ServiceNow for automated incident handling and management.
Nutanix’s Enterprise Cloud OS software, including the AHV hypervisor, is to be offered as part of a fully HPE-managed private cloud with customers paying on a service subscription basis. The agreement is initially focused on simplifying customer deployments of end user computing, databases, and private clouds.
GreenLake Nutanix is available to order across the 50-plus countries where HPE GreenLake is offered. Customers have the option to outsource operations to HPE PointNext services.
The second part of today’s HPE announcement is that Nutanix software – Acropolis, AHV and Prism – will be pre-installed on HPE ProLiant DX servers and shipped from HPE factories as a turnkey solution.
The focus is on enterprise apps, big data analytics, messaging, collaboration, and dev/test.
ProLiant DX with Nutanix is generally available now. The hardware is supported by HPE and the software by Nutanix.
SimpliVity under pressure
Blocks & Files sees this as a near OEM deal; not a full one as the Nutanix SW is still visible to customers and there is split support. The announcement comes days after HPE’s adoption of the Datera server SAN into its line-up for resellers. The turnkey Nutanix and Datera offerings both compete with HPE’s own SimpliVity HCI systems.
IDC noted that Cisco’s HyperFlex HCI product overtook SimpliVity to take third place in HCI market revenue share terms in this year’s second quarter. HPE also said SimpliVity sales grew four per cent in its third fiscal 2019 quarter, down from it25 per cent growth in the previous quarter.
It looks like the SimpliVity product is not motoring fast enough to meet all of HPE’s HCI sales needs.
ServiceNow
Nutanix has integrated its hyperconverged infrastructure system with ServiceNow’s IT Operations Management (ITOM) cloud service. Nutanix and ServiceNow customers can automate incident handling with ITOM automatically discovering Nutanix systems data: HCI clusters, individual hosts, virtual machine (VM) instances, storage pools, configuration parameters and application-centric metrics.
ServiceNow users can provision, manage and scale applications via Nutanix Calm blueprints, published as service catalog items in the Now Platform.
ServiceNow’s ITSM service is linked to Nutanix’ Prism Pro management facility and its X-Play automation engine. There is an X-Play action for ServiceNow so IT managers can notify their teams of incidents and alerts in the Nutanix environment, such as a host losing power or server running out of capacity.
Nutanix says automated incident handling is a mundane part of IT department activity but reduces the time spent on servicing incidents and issues.
Rajiv Mirani, Nutanix Cloud Platforms CTO, issued a quote “By integrating Nutanix software with ServiceNow’s leading digital workflow solutions, we are making it easier to deliver end-to-end automation of infrastructure and application workflows so that private cloud can deliver the same simplicity and flexibility as public cloud services.”
You can read a blog about the Nutanix ServiceNow integration. This ServiceNow capability is available now, through platform discovery for Acropolis and a Calm plug-in in the ServiceNow Store.