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Nutanix platform may benefit from VMware customer unrest
Nutanix's Next 2025 conference attendees are jumping ship to the platform after Broadcom's VMware buy, as Nutanix executives plan enterprise-driven evolutions for the platform.
WASHINGTON -- Nutanix's push into enterprise data centers could find a receptive response from IT buyers who feel jilted after Broadcom's purchase of VMware.
The vendor could help its cause with the addition of more privacy and security capabilities to its platform, shown this week at the Nutanix Next 2025 conference.
Price instability and severed vendor partnerships are just some of the reasons customers at the conference said they're looking to drop VMware and replace their data center platform with Nutanix. Although VMware continues to add features, concerns around VMware are driving customer purchases, according to conference attendees.
Consistent performance and stable pricing are key to IT professionals' peace of mind, said Matt Kimball, an analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy. Adoption of new technologies and practices, while a good way to prep for the future, is secondary to keeping mission-critical workloads running.
"[Enterprise IT] are a very conservative bunch," Kimball said. "We're measured in uptime and fired in downtime."
Enterprise updates
The platform updates that Nutanix unveiled at Next focus on security and on-premises operations disconnected from the cloud, according to the vendor at the May 8 keynote and in follow-up media interviews.
Updates available now for the platform include security updates for Flow Virtual Networking and Nutanix Multicloud Snapshot Technology (MST) in Nutanix Unified Storage for air-gapped recovery options.
Later updates to the platform, detailed by Nutanix spokespeople during keynotes Wednesday and Thursday, will include in-place migrations for the platform, automated migration of firewall policies and an on-premises version of the Data Lens management console.
These additions are just the start of Nutanix's data center improvements, said Rajiv Ramaswami, president and CEO of Nutanix in an interview with Informa TechTarget.
The platform will eventually support third-party storage without the need for specific engineering, which Nutanix needed for the Dell Technologies and Pure Storage compatibility announced at this year's show, Ramaswami said.
He specifically cited VMware's Virtual Volumes as a service comparison, as it enables third-party storage to operate on VMware's platform.
"I'd love for us to get to a point where we have a third-party self-certification program," Ramaswami said. "We want to take a more standardized approach beyond Pure Storage."
Customer perspectives
As Nutanix races to add capabilities, customers appear willing to switch from other virtualization platforms, primarily as a way to exit VMware.
The Nutanix platform is making inroads globally, particularly with adoption in Asia and Australia.
Yew Wei KeeMSIG Asia, an insurance company with headquarters in Singapore, originally used a Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure with the VMware hypervisor on top of the system, according to Yew Wei Kee, assistant vice president of infrastructure and operations.
Despite starting with a small footprint in 2017, MSIG Asia moved 2,000 virtual machines entirely to the Nutanix platform in the last month.
"The trigger point was because of the Broadcom acquisitions," he said. "We found that Nutanix was a very stable platform and compared to VMware, there's not much difference in terms of features. [Our Broadcom] licensing cost increased immensely, and this sped up the process for us to move."
Golding Contractors, an Australian civil engineering firm with offices across the country, originally used the VMware platform offering on AWS, said Dom Johnston, an IT manager at Golding.
The public separation and later make up between VMware and AWS made Johnston lose confidence in VMware's future on AWS.
"The public breakup between AWS and VMware was a pretty key moment for us," he said. "We made the decision to essentially replace that platform."
Golding moved its VMware on AWS infrastructure over to Nutanix Cloud Clusters, the vendor's cloud compute offering, Johnston said. His team is also using MST DR, the Nutanix disaster recovery service for AWS, to spin individual VMs up and down for recovery as needed.
"We're even more public cloud adjacent than we were with VMware on AWS," he said. "Our ultimate goal is to get into EC2 [Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute] native; we didn't have enough time to complete that goal with [VMware on AWS]."
Some customers originally turned to the Nutanix platform for virtualization as part of a software refresh, divorced from the ongoing VMware discussion.
Mike Taylor, who serves as the Hospital Ship Joint Task Director for Military Sealift Command and the U.S. Navy on the USNS Mercy, wanted to replace some aging virtualization infrastructure almost a decade ago.
The Mercy is a 1,000-bed hospital ship tending to both US sailors and civilians worldwide on humanitarian missions, often operating under extreme weather conditions in the open ocean or when docked.
Taylor said he was impressed when Nutanix's initial sales pitch showed the Nutanix NX hardware nodes on one of the ship's lunch carts. The hardware and software have withstood significant waterlogging over the years, enabling failover to other notes and operating even when disconnected from the wider internet, he said.
"We can't miss a beat. We had the fortunate and unfortunate ability to test Nutanix under a ton of situations," Taylor said. "We have to keep the hospital running at all times. Sailors' lives are going to depend on it."
Tim McCarthy is a news writer for Informa TechTarget covering cloud and data storage.
