Nutanix expands beyond HCI

The Pure Storage integration will also be supported within Cisco’s FlashStack offering, creating a “FlashStack with Nutanix” solution with storage provided by Pure, networking capabilities as well as UCS servers from Cisco, and then the common Nutanix Cloud Platform.

Cloud Native AOS: Breaking free from hypervisors

Another sharp departure from its past for Nutanix is the new Cloud Native AOS platform.

“The idea of Cloud Native AOS is that we can now push deeper into the cloud and further out to the edge,” Caswell said.

Cloud Native AOS is a containerized version of Nutanix’s storage technology that can run without requiring a hypervisor. This represents the first product delivery from “Project Beacon,” a vision Nutanix announced three years ago.

Caswell explained that for decades the hypervisor was the core foundation for delivering services, with data and other capabilities bolted on top. Now the general view is that hypervisors are a commodity. “Most clouds, including Amazon, have an underlying hypervisor, so they’re running their Kubernetes runtime on that,” he explained. “So basically, you’re taking out any sort of nested virtualization.”

The value is not in the hypervisor, but rather in the data. The cloud-native approach also is built on containers, which are the cornerstone of modern application development.