IBM jumps on the hyper-converged bandwagon

Steve Kaplan , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

IBM jumps on the hyper-converged bandwagon

Last week’s announcements further show that HCI has gone mainstream.

One of the world’s largest and most storied legacy players, IBM, said it is investing $1 billion in SDS. This BusinessInsider article, In another brilliant move, IBM just budgeted $1 billion to take down EMC,  discusses IBM’s strategy. It also features Nutanix as the “poster child for this new market”.

In the introductory article to this blog site, I described how seven legacy datacenter manufacturers control $56 billion of the annual $73 billion server and storage market. Here’s an updated status of their participation in the HCI space:

HP:                         StorVirtual & EVO:Rail

IBM:                      Announced HCI strategy

Dell:                       Dell XC (Nutanix OEM) & EVO:Rail

Oracle:

Hitachi:               EVO:Rail

Cisco:                    Teamed with Maxta & Simplivity. Investment in stratoscale.

EMC:                     VSPEX Blue & ScaleIO

NetApp:               ON TAP EVO:Rail

As IBM’s server business transitions to Lenovo, the Chinese giant should replace IBM on the list. Lenovo hasn’t yet announced an HCI offering – but undoubtedly it will.

Springpath

Springpath, another HCI start-up, came out of stealth mode last week. Formerly known as Storvisor, Springpath was founded by a couple of VMware veterans (maybe they decided to grab the new name since VMware spun off SpringSource to Pivotal?).

Springpath has $34 Million in funding from Sequoia, Redpoint and other VCs. VMware’s Duncan Epping wrote a complimentary piece about the company on Yellow-Bricks, though Forbes was somewhat critical. I do think that their subscription model is intriguing.

FalconStor

Last week also saw an erroneous headline claiming that small but 15-year old IT company, FalconStor, announced a hyper-converged solution. The new FreeStor is actually a “horizontal converged data services platform”, but it just goes to show how hyper-convergence has become so top-of mind.

Other HCI Players

In addition to industry leader Nutanix and the large legacy players and their partners mentioned above, the other manufacturers who have, or who have announced, HCI solutions include:

Atlantis Computing

Citrix Sanbolic (recent acquisition)

DataCore

Huawei (partnered with DataCore)

NIMBOXX

Pivot3

Pure Storage

Scale Computing

StorMagic

VMware VSAN

Nutanix support wins world class award – again. Here’s what it means for partners.

Steve Kaplan , , , , ,

Last year, Nutanix was one of only 35 companies recognized by Omega Management Group for “Delivering World Class Customer Service”. We did it again this year while increasing our Net Promoter Score (NPS) from a sky high +73 to an even more remarkable +88. This is all very good news for our partners for three primary reasons:

1. Validating Partner Evangelists

The most successful Nutanix partners are iconoclasts – they are not afraid to challenge the prevailing belief in the separation between compute and storage. They put their own reputations on the line by strongly encouraging their clients to consider Nutanix Web-scale as a superior architecture for hosting a virtualized datacenter.

The Omega and NPS scores provide these partners with additional ammunition in the fight against the status quo. They help validate that Nutanix not only has great technology, but also that our emphasis on customer service ensures their implementations will be successful.

Omega

2. Increased Partner Business

Nutanix’s product, like any software in the industry, is not perfect. But there is a saying, “Hardware eventually fails, software eventually works, and the people make all the difference.” Nutanix treats support as a competitive differentiator rather than as a cost center. If a customer has an issue, the Nutanix support team will quickly get to the bottom of it – and won’t rest until it is resolved.

Embracing world-class support as part of the company’s core competency helps create repeat buyers. As customers see how well the technology works and how simple it is to manage, they expand their initial use case, and then purchase still more nodes and services for other initiatives. Nutanix becomes almost a type of annuity business for our partners.

3. Indication of Nutanix Success

A concern that Nutanix partners sometimes encounter, often played up by legacy competition, focuses around the relative young age of Nutanix as a company. Customers want to know what will happen if Nutanix gets acquired.

Partners can provide many responses to combat this concern including Nutanix’s phenomenal growth, its HCI industry domination, our OEM deal with Dell, and the prevalent public speculation about an upcoming IPO.

Nutanix’s extraordinary NPS is yet another argument for continued accomplishment. Ever since its introduction in a 2003 Harvard Business Review article, Net Promoter Score continues to be advocated by many as the most important indicator of business success.

The NPS and Omega Award go hand-in-hand with the raving fans that Nutanix and its partners are engendering around the globe. In the month of January, for example, Nutanix featured a new customer success story every business day. It is typically not easy to convince organizations to be featured in a success story, but they tend to be very happy to share their experiences with Nutanix.

When legacy competitors try to fling the FUD about Nutanix’s young age, I encourage partners to counter by asking these firms to provide their own Net Promoter Scores. Assuming they’re even willing to share them, the contrast should be quite enlightening.

 “Nutanix support is absolutely fantastic. They’re super responsive, they’re all smart, and they aren’t afraid to go ask someone else for help. On top of that, they treat you like the engineer you are. You worked hard to get to where you are, to know what you know. When you call HP or Dell support, they start by saying things like “Did you reboot?”. Even if you say Yes, they still will force you to do the tier 1 troubleshooting first.

With Nutanix support, they take information you’ve provided and infer what troubleshooting has been done. If you tell them you’ve rebooted something, they won’t force you to do it again, because they trust you. They’ll then pursue to look for other solutions. They’ll more than likely know off the top of their head the exact solution, then pull up impeccable documentation on how to fix it.

They have a very knowledgeable staff, all of whom are willing to help each other. When having a drink with our SE the other night, we were talking about this very thing. He never feels that he is out in the dark on his own. He can throw a question about Citrix in their Yammer rooms and within a short period of time, have another engineer who is a Citrix specialist on a call, ready to assist. That’s an amazing amount of internal support, they don’t fight between regions, they don’t assume that you know everything, they help each other.”

– Unsolicited January 2015 blog post from an early Nutanix customer.

 

It Takes an Eco-System

NPS reflects not just the support organization, but the interactions customers have with every aspect of the Nutanix organization as well as with our partners. A reputation for world class support is dependent not only upon the quality of the product, but also upon its successful implementation. Nutanix’s innovative education organization and Authorized Consulting Partner Program enable partners to architect and deploy very successful Web-scale environments.

Nutanix and our partners have a mutual objective of continually raising the bar in respect to customer satisfaction and the repeat business that results. The NPS and Omega Award show that we’re hitting the mark. And as Nutanix Senior Director of Global Support, Deepak Chawla, said, “We will keep our laser focus on the customer and aim for ‘three-peat’ of awards next year.”

Thanks to both Deepak Chawla (@dchawla2005) and Lukas Lundell (@LucasLundell), Director Solutions and Performance Engineering of Nutanix, for contributions to this article.

Why Nutanix isn’t singing the VSPEX BLUEs

Steve Kaplan , , , , , , ,

Does EMC’s announcement of VSPEX BLUE pose a roadblock to Nutanix’s record-setting momentum?  It’s actually the opposite. Nutanix is not going to revolutionize the $73B server and storage market without a lot of good competitors. And there is no hardware manufacturer more important than EMC to validating hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) as the future of the virtualized datacenter.

The Clout of EMC

EMC started the whole storage array industry in 1990 with its introduction of Symmetrix. The company continues to dominate with a 30% share of the $23.5B storage market. And it has augmented its storage business with many other very successful acquisitions over the years including VMware, Data Domain, Avamar, RSA and Isilon.

The Hopkinton giant has also done an admirable job in developing channel partner loyalty despite selling directly to certain customers. Partners appreciate both the leads EMC brings them and the help it extends in closing deals. They also like the distinction they earn by acquiring EMC certifications. These certs translate into back-end services revenues for integrating EMC’s complex stable of storage products.

But all is not roses. “The Federation” has stumbled a bit the past few years as its revenue growth rate has declined. EMC recently had to absorb the highly unprofitable VCE partnership, and the company was known to have shopped itself out to HP, and possibly others, late last year.

Despite these setbacks, EMC continues to be one of the most influential companies in the datacenter. Customers and partners across the globe take note of its vision and purchase its products. As a recent example, even all of the pain of the disruptive XtremeIO upgrade didn’t squelch its title as the fastest-growing EMC product ever (albeit a lot of this growth is likely coming at the expense of declining VMAX sales).

Positioning of VSPEX BLUE

EMC is going to market with an EVO:Rail solution as part of its VSPEX group which now also includes VCE. VSPEX, of course, is a converged infrastructure reference architecture including servers, storage and network while Vblock is a manufacturer-integrated solution. In neither case is there any actual convergence of infrastructure. Customers still face the same extensive rack space requirements, management challenges and scalability issues as when purchasing the products individually.

VMware’s EVO:Rail, on the other hand, is genuinely hyper-converged infrastructure. It includes consolidation of redundant hardware and elimination of multiple management tiers. (As an aside, “hyper” in hyper-convergence stands for “hypervisor”, not for “excessive”. Hyper-converged products only work, at least today, with virtualized workloads).

VSPEX BLUE’s product name and category grouping indicates that EMC considers hyper-convergence to be just another offering in its vast array of storage oriented products. EMC Chairman, Joe Tucci, reinforced this perspective in his 01/30/2014 earnings call: “Let me add a little color. When our sales force goes in they don’t think about [deciding] what’s declining, what’s growing, what they think about is, what are the customers’ needs and then we have a whole portfolio of products and as you can see, that’s our strength and as we are doing that, you can also note that our gross margins are doing well.”

Nutanix: One Mission

While Nutanix describes its offering as “Web-scale” in reference the Google-like infrastructure it introduced to the enterprise, the overall industry increasingly recognizes the broad category as “hyper-converged infrastructure”.  Nutanix, with a 52% market share, is the clear leader in the hyper-converged space.

IDC HCI chartUnlike EMC, Nutanix does not consider hyper-converged infrastructure to be a storage line-item. We live, eat and breathe Web-scale as not only a vastly superior platform for hosting a virtualized datacenter, but as the inevitable future.

If you go to Nutanix’s engineering department, you don’t find a lot of ex-storage folks. Instead, engineers from companies such as Google, Facebook and Twitter work to enable massively scalable, very simple and low-cost infrastructures for government and enterprise customers. It’s a completely different mindset.

This same scale-out mindset is pervasive in marketing, finance, channels, operations, HR, professional services, alliances and sales. Sr. VP of Sales, Sudheesh Nair, recently commented in a blog post, “EMC is a $60B company with one of the fiercest and meanest enterprise sales engines ever assembled on the face of the earth (I say this as a compliment with full admiration).”

But as good as EMC’s sales force may be, messaging hyper-convergence as just another approach to a virtualized data center is going to be difficult to convey with the same conviction as Nutanix’s sales folks. Nutanix is focused on revolutionizing the data center – or as our federal team likes to say, #OneMission.

So Who Will Win, Nutanix or EMC?

A big answer to this question, of course, is dependent upon the channel. Channel partners hold a lot of sway over their customers and are instrumental in helping them select the best technology for their requirements.

Fortunately, we’re seeing a rapidly increasing number of channel partners adopt the same type of Web-scale passion as our own sales teams. Partners are realizing that while they may not be able to charge their customers for the same back-end integration services that EMC products enable, they develop a deeper trust and many more higher margin services opportunities in areas such as hybrid and private cloud enablement, big data, Splunk, metro cluster, VDI and so on.

The VSPEX BLUE launch, paradoxically, is going to help Nutanix partners make a huge leap forward. Marketing gurus Al Ries and Jack Trout describe “Law #1: The Law of Leadership” in their book, The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing. This law states, “The leading brand in any category is almost always the first brand into the prospect’s mind.”

In other words, by promoting VSPEX BLUE, EMC sets the stage to win against the real competition – the $73B of servers and storage sold every year. Both Nutanix partners and their customers will win as a result.

See Also

EMC’s VSPEX BLUE Joins the VMware EVO:RAIL Family of Systems. 02/03/2015. Mornay Van Der Walt. VMware Blogs.

EMC’s Joe Tucci on Q4 2014 Results – Earnings Call Transcript. 01/30/2014. Seeking Alpha.

EMC Combines VCE, VSPEX into New $1B-plus Converged Infrastructure Business. 01/28/2014. Joe Kovar. CRN.

IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Hyperconverged Systems. 01/26/2015. Storage Newsletter.

On Classless Winners and Classy Losers. 01/26/2015. Sudheesh Nair. LinkedIn.

EMC said to Explore Options Ahead of CEO’s Retirement. 09/22/2014. Beth Jinks. Bloomberg.

XtremIO Craps on EMC Badge. 09/18/2014. Nigel Poulton. Nigelpoulton.com

 

 

 

 

 

Citrix’s Sanbolic acquisition: The s**t has hit the SAN

Steve Kaplan , , , , , ,

Citrix announced its acquisition of Sanbolic at its partner conference last week, giving it a hyper-converged solution to compete with VMware’s VSAN. But reading between the lines, the acquisition, along with VSAN, further validates that the SAN is dead for End User Computing (EUC).

The Hyper-converged Bandwagon

Citrix and VMware, of course, dominate the EUC market. Both organizations have been partnering with Nutanix for some time. They are enthusiastic about the ability of hyper-converged infrastructure to dramatically accelerate VDI by slashing the cost, complexity, risk and performance inconsistency of a virtual desktop deployment. With the advantages of hyper-converged infrastructure, 2015 may well finally be the year of VDI.

IDC HCI chart

A first-ever market share report for hyperconverged solutions from IDC ranks the contenders as of August 2014 based on execution, strategy, and market share. The size of a vendor’s bubble reflects that vendor’s market share. Nutanix is firmly in the leader position with 52% of the entire market. IDC’s next report will presumably include Citrix along with other datacenter incumbents and yet more start-ups.

What about Sanbolic vs. Nutanix?

Not unexpectedly, several partners at Citrix Summit asked me how the Sanbolic acquisition is going to affect Citrix’ relationship with Nutanix. I do not anticipate any disruption to the momentum between our companies for the following four reasons:

  1. Sanbolic Technology Still Needs to be Improved and Integrated. Sanbolic is a 14 year old company with approximately 30 employees. Sanbolic has been partnering with Citrix since at least 2010. The Nutanix and Citrix relationship is much more recent, but is rapidly building great traction including the only hyper-converged CVS (Citrix Validated Solution). Nutanix already enables the software-defined simplicity, elegance and automation that Citrix CEO, Mark Templeton, spoke about in his keynote.
  1. VSAN Parallel. A similar situation has been taking place with VMware VSAN. Even though Nutanix competes with VMware in the hyper-converged space, we still have a strong partnership – particularly with VMware EUC. This bodes well for continued momentum with Citrix.
  1. Citrix-Specific Innovation. Nutanix continues to innovate to add further value to Citrix customers. At Summit, we formally announced the Nutanix Plugin for Citrix XenDesktop. This patented capability enables the desktop folks to handle the infrastructure tasks. The Plugin for XenDesktop provides full SLA management direct from the XenDesktop Studio Console. No one else does this.
  1. Citrix Partners. Nutanix continues to work closely with leading Citrix partners across the globe. At Summit, the most commonly expressed Citrix partner description of Nutanix was that it is a “game-changer.” As Jim Steinlage of Choice Solutions remarked, “[Nutanix] allows us to have the applications up and running much more timely and with more predictable results. And Nutanix enables us to achieve our goal of providing users with a better experience than their physical desktop from day one.”

The Rapidly Growing Competitive Landscape

Beyond the contenders featured in the IDC hyper-converged report, five of the seven leading datacenter hardware manufacturers now all have launched or announced hyper-converged solutions (not even including EVO:Rail solutions): Dell, HP, EMC, Cisco and NetApp. This is expected. Nutanix is not going to turn the $73B server & storage market on its head without lots of competition.

As the competition starts to mature and improve, the onus will be on Nutanix to continue innovating and raising the bar in areas such as performance, simplicity and scalability as well as in capabilities such as hybrid cloud enablement and management. This is the only way we will maintain our leadership position. I believe Nutanix is up to the challenge.

 

Citrix’ Bill Burley on building a disruptive channel business

Steve Kaplan , , , ,

I used to run a Citrix partner business in the San Francisco East Bay. We weren’t in the first group of Platinum partners, but we were close behind. I remember the first Citrix Platinum Partner meeting I attended in the late 1990s in Florida. As sometimes happens with channel partners, we were complaining a bit. I remember Citrix’s head of North American Sales, Bill Burley, berating us – saying, “You should be bleeding Citrix colors!”

Burley

I thought about what Bill said, and realized he was absolutely right. It was the ability of Citrix to open new doors and to differentiate our organizations that was the engine powering most of our growth. Bill has long since moved onto other duties at Citrix (he is currently VP, Business Integration of Acquisitions), but with Citrix Summit approaching next week, I thought it would be appropriate to seek his perspective about channel partners and disruptive technology:

SK:  Can you give me some personal background about how you came to Citrix?

BB:  I ran sales at LANSystems which is where I first met [Citrix CEO] Mark Templeton. After Intel acquired the company, I joined Citrix to head up North American sales which included running channels.

SK:  What do you see as the importance of channel from a manufacturer perspective?

BB:  The channel allows manufactures to touch many customers. This allows manufacturers to scale far faster and easier than trying to utilize a direct sales force. Back when software came in a box, it was a boat anchor unless someone integrated it and made it a solution. The channel was the perfect vehicle for accomplishing this then, but is also instrumental today in helping customers deploy enterprise solutions.

SK:  How did you build out Citrix’ channel?

BB:  Coming from a leveraged channel model at LANSystems, I established a similar motion while at Citrix.  We started out recruiting Novell resellers. Before long, we helped the resellers get NT certified because our platform was NT-based. This had the side benefit of gaining Microsoft’s deep appreciation which in turn helped us recruit more partners.

SK:  When Citrix Presentation Server was introduced, it was a radically different approach from other products then available.  How did you help partners be successful in selling it?

BB:  When I first met [Citrix founder] Ed Iacobucci, he told me, “Bill, we’re going to change the way the world computes!”  From the beginning, we made sure that the partner community knew we were not just another “me too” product – but that we had a solution which would help their customers lower costs and increase employee productivity. The smart partners understood this opportunity – they could smell it. Like many new technologies, we started off small – targeting individual departments. Eventually, we took over the whole enterprise.

SK:   How did you build the great channel loyalty for which Citrix is famous?

BB:   We weren’t selling widgets or math coprocessor chips. We were selling business transformation. This entailed a lot of partner investment and commitment – if we had only emphasized software margin alone, the partners would have gotten up and left the room. Citrix was probably the first manufacturer to show the “drag” of other products and services that our technology pulled along. At one point, for every dollar of Citrix software, partners were realizing an average of $7 of associated pull-through. This drag, along with the ability of Citrix technology to enhance our partners’ role as trusted advisor with their customers, was very compelling to the channel.

SK:  What advice do you have for partners on how to capitalize on disruption?

BB:  It is important for partners to understand where they came from. They should be truthful to what their business is, what their customer base is, and how they serve those customers. Customers always rule. A partner’s job is to invest. I believe that partners should either commit, or get out of the game. Dabbling is a mistake. Partners who don’t invest in training, education and understanding of the opportunity won’t be successful.

Partners can, of course, be smart about embracing new technologies. They should run the technology by their core customers – the ones who will give them honest feedback. But if the good customers tell partners that the technology is golden, partners need to pull out the stops.

Citrix Summit 2015

Bill unfortunately is not going to be able to make Citrix Summit this year, but Nutanix is a gold sponsor and in addition to our booth, we have a meeting room, hospitality suite, presentations, etc. If any partners would like to meet with either me or with other Nutanix executives – please shoot me an email: kap@nutanix.com.

Channel partners rally behind Nutanix Web-scale converged infrastructure

Steve Kaplan , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

“Really?!”

That was the one word email I received from Nutanix’s Sr. VP of Sales (and my boss), Sudheesh Nair, in response to the Q4 2013 Piper Jaffray Storage VAR Survey. The surveyed partners ranked Nutanix second to last in terms of sales performance relevant to plan.

Needless to say, I was frustrated. The channel perception of Nutanix was out of synch with Nutanix’s record-setting sales in 2013 as the fastest-growing infrastructure company of at least the past ten years.

But understanding and successfully positioning Nutanix has been a learning process for the channel. When Nutanix CEO, Dheeraj Pandey, first approached Lightspeed Venture Partners almost five years ago, he made it clear that his new company would disrupt the storage industry – including the venture capitalists’ existing investments. Unlike most entrants into the suddenly popular hyper-converged space, this revolutionary vision is integral to everything we do at Nutanix.

Partners can’t simply pitch a “faster, cheaper, better” storage array as they can with the other early stage companies in the survey. Partners need to be able to articulate and evangelize to their clients how Web-scale is a sea change that is fundamentally altering the infrastructure of the modern, virtualized datacenter.

The Difference a Year Makes

2014 continued the trajectory of rocketing sales and, gratifyingly, a much broader spectrum of channel partners caught the Web-scale fever as well. From small partners building their businesses around Nutanix to multi-billion dollar channel organizations moving Fortune 500 clients over to Web-scale, Nutanix is changing the channel landscape.

According to the latest Piper Jaffray report, channel partners now rank Nutanix sales performance in the #1 position – ahead of CommVault, Dell Storage, EMC, HP Storage, NetApp, Nimble, Pure Storage, Veeam and VMware.

Piper Jaffray

 

The Stern Agee Channel Survey similarly shows a huge improvement in channel recognition of Nutanix. Channel partners listed Nutanix as the second leading key company disrupting the established storage sector – right behind Pure Storage (but quickly catching up). Nutanix is ranked ahead of Nimble (and rapidly increasing the spread), and is ranked far ahead of Tintri, Violin Memory, Nimbus Data, Nexenta, Solidfire and everyone else.

sterne Agee

 

Looking Forward to 2015

It’s exciting to see Nutanix partners across the world enthusiastically embrace the Web-scale opportunity. They’re leveraging Nutanix to differentiate their companies, gain new customers, increase sales and shorten sales cycles.

I want to thank all of our partners for your continued faith and trust. The good news is that Nutanix is really just getting started. New capabilities such as one-click hypervisor upgrades, metro availability, connectivity to AWS and Microsoft Azure, among many others, mean extraordinary continued opportunity in the year ahead.

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NetApp joins the hyper-converged froth

Steve Kaplan , ,

I’m surprised that The Register, with its humorous yet poignant headlines, didn’t run an article titled something along the lines of:

NetApp to VMware: “EVO is nice for branch offices and stuff, but leave the heavy lifting to us”

Apparently, the whole NetApp EVO:Rail announcement took VMware by surprise.  Duncan Epping, Chief Technologist at the VMware CTO office commented in his blog, “Although I have been part of the EVO:RAIL team, it is not something I would have seen coming.”

From a datacenter disruption standpoint, the EVO:Rail partnership is important because it indicates yet another of  the “big 7” have now announced their own hyper-converged solutions; only IBM and Hitachi remain without an offering (not counting standard EVO:Rail for Hitachi). But I have my doubts about how serious NetApp actually is:

  1. NetApp has publicly stated, “FlexPod works more in the enterprise data center and large offices, while EVO: RAIL is more for department and branch office deployment outside the core data center.” I can just imagine that the VMware folks are grinding their teeth about that quote.
  2. Adding a Filer, or any SAN/NAS storage,  kills the EVO:Rail scale-out story – one of the most powerful attributes of a hyper-converged architecture. In other words, once customers fill up the Filer, they’ll need to purchase another Filer.
  3. EVO:Rail isn’t cheap. And even if an organization has a VMware ELA, it must still purchase the EVO:Rail licensing on an OEM basis from the manufacturer. When it is time to upgrade the hardware, the licensing must be purchased again. Adding NetApp will, of course, make the solution still more expensive.
  4. There is confusion about what the offering really is. No one even knows which servers will be used (best guess: Lenovo or Fujitsu). One thing is almost for certain, it will be complex. NetApp and VMware are probably banking on VVOLS with policy management to help administer the environment, but VVOLS itself is not yet proven.
  5. Since NetApp cannot compete with a truly hyper-converged solution, it is trying to move the EVO:Rail architecture back toward the FlexPod/Vblock architectures by adding capabilities such as data deduplication, compression, cloning, replication, etc. But it will be difficult to message the NetApp EVO offering in respect to FlexPod. Support will likely be challenging (is it a VMware EVO or NetApp issue?), flexibility will be limited, and resiliency constrained by the RAID and other archaic options of an array-based solution.

NetApp appears to have rushed this announcement to market – it didn’t want to be left out of the hyper-converged revolution. I suspect that while NetApp may use its EVO:Rail offering to open doors, that its reps will still primarily be pushing FlexPod.

Time, of course, will tell whether I’m right or totally off-base. In the interim, I would be very interested in hearing from readers, especially from channel partners and potential customers, about your take on the NetApp EVO:Rail announcement.

EMC implies that SANs may not be so great for hosting virtual machines after all

Steve Kaplan , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The inventor of the storage array, EMC, has indicated that a hardware-designed architecture is perhaps no longer the best solution for hosting a virtualized datacenter. The Register reported today that EMC will utilize ScaleIO as a VMware kernel module.

As I pointed out in the introductory post to this site less than two months ago, IDC says that $56B of annual server and storage sales go through just seven datacenter manufacturers: HP, IBM, EMC, Dell, Cisco, Oracle and NetApp. EMC’s announcement means that the majority now have a certified hyper-converged solution (not even counting EVO:Rail):

  • EMC:     ScaleIO
  • Cisco:    Maxta. Cisco also has invested in Stratoscale.
  • HP:         StoreVirtual
  • Dell:       XC Series web-scale converged appliances, powered by Nutanix software

Despite their dependency upon legacy 3-tier infrastructure for tens of billions in revenues, these datacenter giants recognize the necessity of joining the hyper-converged revolution. The threat of public cloud combined with much faster access to information is resulting in an astounding pace of its adoption.

SAN Huggers

Back in the aughts, we had to contend with the server huggers who staunchly refused to believe that their applications could run as well, let alone better, as virtual machines. But the financial and other advantages were too compelling to resist, and datacenters are now approaching an 80% virtualization rate.

Today, server huggers have been replaced by SAN huggers. These are the folks who insist that it is preferable to move flash and disk away from the compute and put them into proprietary arrays that must be accessed across the network. Never mind the issues around complexity, performance, resiliency, time-to-market and cost.

But just as virtualization provided an enormous opportunity for forward-thinking channel partners last decade, Web-scale has even more potential over the next several years. The key is introducing the concept in a way that will resonate with customers steeped in years of 3-tier infrastructure tradition.

Financial Modeling

It is natural for technologists, including channel partners, to jump into speeds and feeds and attributes and deficiencies. But I suggest taking a different tact. Help customers see a bigger picture, and consequently adopt a more strategic approach, with the aid of financial modeling.

IT leaders are realizing that to remain relevant, they need to run their internal operations with the same type of efficiency, responsiveness and accountability as the public cloud providers. This necessitates a more comprehensive process for selecting infrastructure than simply comparing up-front costs of similar solutions.

Cloud providers ruthlessly evaluate all of their on-going costs to ensure they are maximizing every square meter of datacenter space. Transitioning to ITaaS requires evaluating not only the equipment purchase price, but also expenses such as power, cooling, rack space, support, administration and associated hardware and software requirements.

One approach is to boil everything down to a lifecycle cost metric that can be easily applied to competing solutions. I describe a TCO per VM model in a recent Wikibon article. But regardless of how partners present the results, financial modeling on its own is insufficient for optimally determining an organization’s datacenter future.

Financial modeling is the hook to capture a prospect’s attention and to guarantee an audience with decision-makers. It is the key for partners to really understand their client’s pain points and objectives. They can then incorporate other vital variables such as risk, expandability, agility, reliability, resiliency, and so on within a framework that will resonate with their customers.

Going through this process positions a solutions provider to help its customers begin the datacenter migration process. It also provides the opportunity to incorporate private cloud, active/active datacenters, virtual desktops and other use cases made economically feasible by a hyper-converged infrastructure.

Disruption Made Easy

Even a compelling Web-scale evaluation can still leave a partner challenged to disrupt existing buying habits, processes and governance policies. But now that EMC has joined VMware and three of the other leading hardware manufacturers in validating hyper-converged infrastructure, it is easier for partners to initiate a conversation around datacenter strategy.

The winners in the new software-defined era will be those solutions providers who help their customers understand, select and implement the best architecture for their environments. The losers will be the VARs who continue to push legacy solutions without even bringing the Web-scale options to the table.

Cisco jumps into the hyper-converged game

Steve Kaplan , , , , , , , , ,

Cisco changed the datacenter game with UCS – the only server designed from top to bottom for virtualization. Despite widespread skepticism that the networking giant knew nothing about servers and would fail miserably, in less than five years UCS became the number one blade seller in the Americas.

In our new compressed disruptive-cycle world, Cisco itself has now fallen far behind when it comes to optimally hosting a virtualized datacenter. The company is, however, scurrying to catch up. Within the past few weeks, it’s been revealed that Cisco both invested in hyper-converged startup, Stratoscale, and also blessed Maxta as the first, and so far only, certified hyper-converged solution to run on Cisco UCS.

How UCS Thumped the Server Leaders

I’ve been a vocal fan of UCS from the beginning. In late 2009, when “over 100 companies” were using UCS, I wrote a blog post comparing UCS vs. the HP Matrix. While competitors scoffed at UCS as a “one-size-fits-all product”, I maintained that it would revolutionize datacenter virtualization.

The dominant server manufacturers of the day were perfectly happy with the status quo. But Cisco realized that virtualization would become the datacenter standard and that a new type of server was required. Cisco initially approached IBM and HP to jointly develop a product, but both companies declined. So Cisco instead funded VMware cofounder, Ed Bugnion, and a team of engineers to spend three years building UCS.

UCS helped mitigate virtualization challenges with capabilities such as FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet), hypervisor bypass, extended memory, services profiles and a GUI that can help the server, storage and network teams collaborate more effectively.

But UCS’s Achilles heel is that it really only addresses a small part of the virtualized datacenter issues – the compute. By far the majority of the pain in the modern datacenter has to do with storage. Not surprisingly, four storage manufacturers, EMC/VCE, NetApp, Hitachi and Nimble, all incorporate UCS as an integral component of their so-called “converged infrastructure” solutions.

Channel partners across the globe, such as the one I worked for, understood that as customers increasingly virtualized their datacenters, they would want the enterprise capabilities and features that UCS offered. These partners worked with Cisco to make UCS the number two blade seller in the world.

Descending into Irrelevance

Ah, but all things must change – especially in a software-defined world. While Cisco was promoting the superiority of custom-designed ASICs, Nutanix was bringing the advantages of commodity-driven web-scale architecture to the enterprise. The impressive innovations that Cisco unveiled over five years ago are now not just obsolete, but superfluous.

  • Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE): Unlike the converged infrastructure offerings built around UCS, FCoE is an example of true convergence of the network stack – melding fibre channel and IP Ethernet networks. But today, Web-scale eliminates the requirement for SANs and switching fabrics entirely.
  • UCS Manager GUI: Lets storage and server teams collaborate more effectively together. Not so useful when separate storage administrators are no longer necessary.
  • Custom ASICs: Cisco boasts 12% increased performance from proprietary hardware. Nice but inconsequential when Moore’s Law doubles performance every 18 months anyway. Nutanix utilizes commodity hardware, but increases performance nonetheless with regular software updates that improve hardware effectiveness.
  • Services profiles and templates: These were great in the day for relatively fast provisioning of ESX hosts. Nutanix Foundation is much faster and doesn’t require zone masking or manual hypervisor installs.
  • Integrating the Cisco Nexus switch: Making the network the management center was key to Cisco gaining traction with its network administrator constituency. But Web-scale eliminates the requirement for complex, intelligent and expensive converged network switches.

The leading converged infrastructure manufacturer, VCE, proudly advertises that it only takes 45 days to order and put a Vblock into production – 5 X faster than with conventional servers and storage. In contrast, Nutanix can be ordered, received, installed and in production in around five days.

VCE ad

Upgrading VMware vSphere requires a corresponding upgrade to the entire Vblock – a process that can easily require a team of consultants several days to accomplish. And even then there are risks involved. A former Vblock customer that recently migrated to Nutanix was still running three versions back of vSphere because they didn’t want to have to deal with the associated Vblock upgrade.

Contrast all of this time, expense and risk with doing a vSphere (or Hyper-V or KVM) upgrade on Nutanix. The process is literally just a single click. No cost, no downtime and no risk.

Lesson for Nutanix

UCS and Nutanix both target the same customers – virtualized enterprise environments. I’ve heard from multiple partners that despite our relatively tiny size, Cisco has declared Nutanix to be its number one competitor. Not HP. Not VMware. Nutanix. Cisco’s announcements around Maxta and Stratoscale reflect its determination to, albeit belatedly, get into the game.

Cisco is one of the most successful and well-run companies of all time. While known for its innovations in areas such as routing, switching, VoIP and collaboration – perhaps nothing has been as impressive as Cisco’s accomplishment in the datacenter. Cisco upended all of the existing dominant server players by developing UCS to fulfill the computing requirements of the virtualized datacenter.

The lesson here for Nutanix is that if Cisco can fall into complacency, anyone can. We’ve got to keep our heads down, be humble, stay hungry and keep innovating – even if we have to eventually disrupt our own technologies.

Lesson for Channel Partners

Cisco, VMware, Nutanix, Dell and HP, in addition to the other EVO:Rail partners and lots of startups, validate that hyper-converged infrastructure/web-scale is the future of the virtualized datacenter. There’s a $50 billion + annual server and storage market out there just begging to be disrupted by those channel partners with both the vision and the desire to execute.

Thanks to @vmmike130, @langonej, @evolvingneurons and to @richardarsenian for input.