ESG Blogs

Hyperconverged infrastructures (HCIs) are anchored in virtualization—virtual storage, virtual compute, and virtual networking. And we know the big names in the hypervisor space: VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V. Recent ESG research asked organizations what they consider to be their primary hypervisor deployed in production. Fifty five percent of organizations selected VMware vSphere, while another 36% primarily leverage Microsoft Hyper-V.

There isn’t a day without a new comment or report from industry observers about the tremendous adoption and growth of hyperconverged infrastructures (HCI). Recent ESG research indicates that, for end-users, HCI is about efficiency, operational excellence, and cost and that HCI is delivering on its promise to help drive operational excellence. Production workloads are increasingly running on HCIs anchored by Nutanix software. Specifically, our research points to 1 in 3 organizations running at least 30% of their production applications on HCI.

In this video, I speak with Rajiv Mirani of Nutanix at the .NEXT conference about one of their latest acquisitions, Netsil, a digital native application performance management solution built specifically for containers and microservices. Learn about its different approach to collecting information and providing actionable information. We discuss how this innovative solution fits into the Nutanix mutli-cloud strategy and how customers will benefit from it, and Rajiv provides some insight into how the technology will evolve to better serve hybrid cloud environments by integrating with Nutanix FLOW and the role it will have automating brownfield segmentation. 

I was able to catch up with Binny Gill at the Nutanix .NEXT conference to have a quick discussion about one of their newest product announcements – Beam. This announcement is important in many aspects as it is Nutanix’s first SaaS offering and serves as the foundation for its customers to truly understand multi- cloud environments. Organizations can leverage Beam to fully understand their cloud footprint, costs, and compliance with best practices. Binny also shares some examples of how customers are leveraging Beam and provides some insight into where Nutanix will leverage it in the future.

Intriguingly located just down the New Orleans Convention Center hallways from a cannabis-growers conference that was also called ‘Next,’ Nutanix just held its user and partner event. What were the folks at the Nutanix .NEXT event ‘smoking!?' This year it was a heady mixture of (to borrow the company’s theme) “freedoms” – not just in terms of infrastructure and on-premises IT, but also in terms of a hybrid multi-cloud world…and even personal progress.

Well Nutanix .NEXT has come and gone and as I continue to digest all the announcements from Nutanix, one word comes to mind that expresses my thoughts: ambition. Why? They don't want to just be the HCI infrastructure in a data center. They want to be the data center. They want to enable hybrid cloud. They want to enable multi-cloud. They want to simplify the smart edge and enable IoT. And they want all the complexity associated with all of it to be invisible.

While HCI offers several impressive benefits related to simplicity, manageability, scalability, and cost savings, challenges still exist. ESG asked over 200 IT pros who have implemented HCI what their top challenges are since implementing HCI in their organization and the most commonly cited challenge was difficulty finding the root cause of issues. And when you think about it, it makes sense.

As of late, the server market has been heating up. Companies like Dell, IBM, Cisco, Super Micro, and Huawei all saw growth in server shipments, while many saw double digit revenue growth year-over-year. So what’s driving the growth? Some argue it’s from the big web-scalers like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, and to an extent, that is true. When the big guys do something, many follow suit, but I think the growth is also due in part to the mandate within many organizations to digitally transform by leveraging HCI.

Nutanix held its user conference - .NEXT – last week in Washington D.C. If it felt a bit cult-like that was only in the good sense, as befits an organization with NPS scores over 90% for three years running (that is ethereal territory).

As many other vendors are running hard, hoping to catch Nutanix and steal/borrow its “HCI cloak,” so it is running just as fast to try to ensure that spot is vacant by the time any others get there. It spent the conference explaining and promoting the malleability and expansion of its “Enterprise Cloud” approach.

Some key takeaways from, and comments about, the event can be found in the ESG On Location video that my colleagues Terri McClure, Brian Garrett, and I shot while there.

This week Nutanix kicks off .NEXT, its annual user conference. I'm looking forward to it because it provides such a great opportunity to catch up with many Nutanix customers, partners, and executives in a very short time. I have to be careful not to get lost in the echo chamber though—when I attended my first .NEXT last year, it was a bit surreal. It was like being at a cult meeting—Nutanix users I spoke with were seriously enthusiastic about the Nutanix experience!