Nutanix: We're staying true to open source

HCI vendor promises to support CNCF projects 'across all environments'

Nutanix is not an open source company, but it’s moving in that direction.

As it has morphed from a producer of converged infrastructure hardware and software to something like "middleware for the cloud" this makes a lot of sense.

While its core elements like the AHV hypervisor and other elements of the Nutanix Cloud Platform are proprietary, there was much talk of "embracing anything that's CNCF compliant," at the .Next event in Barcelona this week, CNCF being the Cloud Native Computing Foundation which manages the Kubernetes ecosystem.

Thomas Cornely, SVP of product management, said the overriding objective is to help customers to deploy new, "modern applications" faster. There are two angles Nutanix is taking, he said during a media briefing.

"One is staying true to open source. Now we know open source by itself is complicated, so that's where we can help. We'll give you the right versions and the right core components that should get you in a stack that you can not only run applications on but also maintain, secure and operate them."

The second is to embrace CNCF projects "across all environments". There's no point in being middleware or "a management control pane" for hybrid and multicloud if you're operating a walled garden, after all.

Not only is the company embracing CNCF projects, but it has also taken in one of the organisation's more mature companies D2iQ, formerly Mesosphere, a Kubernetes management platform, which it acquired in January. D2iQ CEO Tobi Knaup, now Nutanix senior director, general manager of cloud native, described the acquisition as "a perfect match," with Nutanix adding much-needed support for data, historically a Kubernetes afterthought.

"Nutanix has a very deep, strong data portfolio. Being able to offer our customers not just a great Kubernetes platform but also all the data capabilities that go with it was a very strong combination," he told Computing. "And so that's, that's why that made it made a ton of sense to us."

Nutanix recently unveiled the fruit of this acquisition, Nutanix Data Services for Kubernetes (NDK), which has just reached general availability, version 1.0. Built on 30 open source components, NDK is aimed firmly at platform engineers, teams in large organisations that curate a set of common tools and services used by multiple teams and make them available on a self-service basis.

Handily, this focus differentiates it from Red Hat OpenShift, with which Nutanix has a close working relationship.

"OpenShift is a very important partner of ours, on Nutanix infrastructure as well. And, and yeah, our data services work with OpenShift as well," Knaup said.

"But really OpenShift has a lot more capabilities around the developer, it's really platform-as-a-service. So they're really different products. We want to make sure that whatever our customers choose we're the best platform to run those workloads and provide the data services for them."

Another differentiator from OpenShift, which Nutanix CTO Manosiz Bhattacharyya likened to a walled garden, is portability, another favourite word of Nutanix. NDK operates across multiple platforms including EKS, GKE, AKS, OpenShift and on premises.

"You can manage your entire fleet of clusters within your organisation, whether they're running on prem, on a public cloud, on the edge, wherever, from a single management plane," said Knaup "A single pane of glass to manage all your apps and your data anywhere."

As for competition, Knaup mentioned VMware Tanzu, which eases enterprise adoption of Kubernetes and cloud native technologies. Tanzu is partially open source, being built on projects like Kubernetes and Cloud Foundry, although it features proprietary elements too.

Since Broadcom's takeover, the future of some VMware services is in doubt. But given its centrality to VMware's cloud native strategy, it seems highly likely that parent Broadcom will maintain VMware Tanzu in its portfolio.

See also University IT chief: 'We count ourselves lucky we're not on VMware'

Steve McDowell, principal analyst at Nand Research, said that "the cloud native guys, the new installs, the greenfield sites" will become an increasing focus of giants like HPE and IBM too, particularly in view of changes at VMware. "They're the low-hanging fruit," he said.

Meanwhile, large organisations with VMware embedded deep in their datacentres will take years to change, if indeed they do at all. Broadcom's price increases may just be the cost of doing business.

"VMware's going nowhere", McDowell predicted during an analyst session at .Next. Customers will be hoping that's true in only one sense of the phrase.