How Nutanix is Disrupting the Market for Datacenter Infrastructure and Storage August 22, 2012
Posted by ravimhatre in 2012, datacenter, Infrastructure, virtualization.Tags: 2012, appliance, converged, data center, datacenter, enterprise IT, funding news, infrastructure, Nutanix, storage, virtualization, vmware
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Over the past two years we’ve seen a lot of disruption in the enterprise storage market with everything from the game-changing performance of flash to next-generation storage architectures required to support the cloud and virtualized data center environments
And notwithstanding some early wins from companies like Fusion-io, we believe the underlying data center compute, storage and networking transformation is still in early innings of playing out. A case in point is Nutanix, a company worth paying attention to and one where we recently led an oversubscribed growth round of financing.
So why are we so excited about Nutanix? We believe the company represents the next-generation of IT infrastructure – a CONVERGED storage and compute platform uniquely able to cost-effectively power the datacenters of today and tomorrow.
Nutanix combines enterprise-class compute and storage resources into a single, inexpensive x86 system. It also incorporates elastic scale-out technologies that have historically only been available to some of the world’s largest, and most technically sophisticated companies like Google and Facebook. Now, for the first time, this revolutionary computing paradigm is being delivered to mid-range and large enterprises that are also looking to ride the disruptive economic wave afforded by cloud computing and large-scale virtualization.
The Nutanix magic is in its’ software which is highly sophisticated and delivers the world’s first SDS (Software-defined Storage system), similar to Nicira, also a LIghtspeed portfolio company, which built the world’s first SDN (Software Defined Network system). The combination of SDS, inexpensive compute, and a radically simplified appliance form factor which is easy to deploy and manage has customers excited and highly engaged. They are calling Nutanix Complete the world’s first “datacenter in a box.”
Beyond the technology, we have been hugely impressed by the team at Nutanix. We’ve had the privilege of working with them from the earliest days of the company when Lightspeed originally lead the Series A financing more than two and half years ago. The founders came to us with an extremely bold vision to redefine datacenter storage and computing and we’re incredibly excited to see how emphatically the market is now embracing this vision.
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Nutanix launches and a new era for data center computing is born — No SAN or NAS required! August 16, 2011
Posted by ravimhatre in 2011, Cloud Computing, data, database, datacenter, enterprise infrastructure, Infrastructure, platforms, Portfolio Company blogs, startup, startups, Storage, Uncategorized.Tags: data center, datacenter, nas, san, storage, virtualization, vmware
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The Nutanix team (ex-Googlers, VMWare, and Asterdata alums) have been quietly working to create the world’s first high-performance appliance that enables IT to deploy a complete data center environment (compute, storage, network) from a single 2U appliance.
The platform also scales to much larger configurations with zero downtime or admin changes and users can run a broard array of mixed workloads from mail/print/file servers to databases to back-office applications without having to make upfront decisions about where or how to allocate their scare hardware resources.
For the first time an IT administrator in a small or mid-sized company or a branch office can plug in his or her virtual data center and be up/running in a matter of minutes.
Some of the most disruptive elements of Nutanix’s technology which enable the customer to avoid expensive SAN and NAS investments typically required for true data center computing are aptly described on company’s blog – http://www.nutanix.com/blog/.
Take a look. We believe this represents the beginning of the next generation in data center computing.
Top 5 trends for enterprise cloud computing in 2010 January 5, 2010
Posted by ravimhatre in Cloud Computing, datacenter, enterprise infrastructure, Uncategorized, virtualization.Tags: cloud, Cloud Computing, datacenter, enterprise IT, virtualization
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by Ravi Mhatre, Lightspeed Venuter Partners
Lightspeed has invested across multiple enterprise infrastructure areas including database virtualization (Delphix), datacenter and cloud infrastructure (AppDynamics, Mulesoft, Optier) and storage virtualization (Fusion I/O, Pliant, Nimble).
This year we wanted to profile several important trends that we see emerging for Cloud Computing in 2010:
1. Enterprises move beyond experimentation with the cloud. Enterprises will start to deploy production cloud stacks with thousands of simultaneous VMs. They will increasingly be used as a resource for both pre-production and production workloads. CIOs and IT managers will test the benefits of creating and managing internal, elastic virtual datacenters – self-service, automated infrastructure with integrated and variable chargeback and billing capabilities, all built on commodity hardware.
2. Management software to deal with scaled cloud environments moves to the forefront. As infrastructure environments become increasingly dynamic and virtualized, the “virtual datacenter” or VDC will emerge as the new enterprise compute platform. New management platforms must be developed to apply policy and automation across thousands of transient servers, fluid underlying storage and networking resource pools, and variable workloads which often need to be dynamically migrated from one part of the VDC to another. Without new management tools, enterprises will fall short in their ability to achieve true “cloud economics” in their cloud environments.
3. Enterprise policy for dealing with public clouds starts to emerge. To counter the security and financial concerns around internal developers using public cloud providers such as Amazon on an ad hoc basis, CIOs and CFOs will start to craft their enterprises’ public cloud policies and centralize purchasing and procurement. Larger enterprises, due to security or compliance restrictions may initially prioritize internal private cloud development to recognize the benefits of cloud computing without compromising their data.
4. Public Clouds; “Its not just about Amazon”. Other mid and large-sized vendors (i.e. Microsoft, IBM, Rackspace, AT&T, Verizon, and others) continue to gain share in this rapidly growing market and 3’d party software matures which enables tier-2 and tier-3 service providers to get into the game of providing cloud services as a complement to traditional web and server hosting. EC2 becomes the commodity service offering as higher-end providers seek to differentiate their cloud offerings with SLA-based premium services and better management capabilities.
5. VMware has to rethink its business model. As Hyper-V,Xen and KVM continue to commoditize the hypervisor and gain enterprise market share, cloud computing starts to encroach on traditional ESX/vSphere use cases for application and server consolidation. Value continues to move up the stack into integrated management features and scale-out application support. To counter enterprise adoption of other hypervisor and cloud over-lay platforms, VMware will be forced to adjust pricing and licensing models to account for scale-out cloud deployments on top of hundreds or thousands of commodity servers.
Lightspeed Venture Partners Blog 