Hybrid Futures - Dell & Nutanix

With Nutanix.Next,, Dell Technologies World (DTW) occurring over the last few weeks, it felt prudent to look at the announcements, which could be one of the biggest shifts in the hybrid cloud market since Broadcom bought VMware! The opening of the Nutanix Ecosystem to other storage capabilities via the joint announcement with Dell has provided customers with a unique outcome.

Let us take a quick look at the main announcements from the Nutanix event:

• Nutanix Expands AI Capabilities with GPT-in-a-Box 2.0 They are driving the integration of the latest NIMO models from Nvidia with predefined automation to speed up delivery and operations.
• Nutanix and Dell Technologies Collaborate on New Joint Solutions for Hybrid Multi-cloud More on this in a minute!
• Nutanix Simplifies Kubernetes Operations for Modern Applications Adding the ability to manage clusters running in a non-Nutanix environment and orchestration for the K8's ecosystem (Load Balancers, RBAC, Networking). The integration of the D2IQ acquisition looks to accelerate modern application adoption.
• Nutanix Accelerates Hypervisor Innovation Bringing a more exhaustive hardware support list will enable customers to repurpose investments and unlock more significant choices for deploying Nutanix AHV and its cloud platform.
• Power Monitoring to Help Customers Track Sustainability Progress Streamlined energy consumption reporting via the Nutanix Cloud Platform should help customers assess the impact of innovation on their Sustainability goals

These are the highlight announcements from Nutanix. Our @kyle was at the event and will post a full report soon; look out for this to get all the details.

I wanted to investigate the Dell collaboration announcements and how they relate to other news from Dell Technologies World. Dell and its partners have a very interesting and noteworthy portfolio that aligns nicely with the CDW view of Right Workload | Right Platform and our view of being an independent advisor in the market.

Before we get to that we must look at the separate DTW announcements pertinent to this hybrid platform world.

First, for those remaining on the VMware ecosystem, we have the roadmap for VxRail extending out into the mid-2030s and the impending realignment of the OEM agreement. Together, this shores up the future of VxRail and Dell with VMware.

Second, Dell has announced a new integrated appliance for Microsoft Azure Stack HCI. Think of this in the same light as VxRail but for customers embedded in the Microsoft Ecosystem. Dell has had dedicated reference architectures for Azure Stack HCI for a long time, but this is a new level of integration and collaboration.

Thirdly, we have a similar announcement for the RedHat OpenShift ecosystem, which brings co-engineered solutions, validated architectures, and world-class combined support capabilities.

Fourth but not least, we had the big announcement of a new partnership with Nutanix. This partnership brings the Nutanix software and Dell hardware together in a true turnkey solution with integrated support, Lifecycle management, and procurement options.

?This gives customers a massive choice on how to enable the edge and core (data centre) elements of their hybrid cloud strategy; combined, this all falls under the banner of APEX Cloud Platforms (ACP) for Dell. We provide the common building blocks for an Edge, Core, and Cloud architecture, but as you will notice in the image below, we are missing a couple of components. Firstly, the Public Cloud, and Secondly, how does the software-defined PowerFlex infrastructure platform fit?

These two gaps form this storey's exciting and differentiating part and how everything is tied together with Dell PowerFlex. Dell PowerFlex combines block storage, file storage, and compute in an integrated platform. PowerFlex's software-defined storage can operate on-premises and in the public cloud, offering a consistent, centralised management layer. Bringing consistent enterprise storage features to the multi-cloud world can help organisations with IT operational overheads, data protection, information management and unlocking AI projects with data presented in the right place. Dell calls this the universal storage layer; the concept can be visualised in the image below.

The clever part is that this universal storage layer will be consumable by all four platform plays we discussed above (VMware, RedHat, Microsoft, Nutanix). Customers can consume a single hardware platform on premises for all workloads or hypervisor requirements and have a standard storage layer throughout the entire multi-cloud landscape. Considering the Nutanix announcement, we now have a solution for Enterprise customers who need to scale compute and storage independently by seamlessly extending the universal storage layer to the Nutanix Cloud Platform.

?Dell writes about the following three core benefits of this universal storage layer:

? Simplicity – Operational silos across multiple public cloud and private locations increase complexity, drive up storage and management costs. Reduce costs with streamlined management of multi-cloud storage services.

? Agility—Varying multi-cloud storage services and tools prevent agile workload placement, slowing innovation and reducing flexibility. Enable IT agility with flexible infrastructure, ecosystem choice, and seamless data and application mobility.

? Control—Critical data assets spread across multiple cloud locations increase the chance of data loss and service disruptions. Enforce compliance and establish consistent service levels across multiple cloud locations.

Customer conversations

Over the last month, VMware and Broadcom, Cloud Optimization, and AI have dominated customer conversations over the last month. I don’t see this changing for the rest of 2024 as organisations look to drive efficiencies, remove risk, and understand opportunities for differentiation. Two other things of interest have surfaced over the last few weeks that are worth discussing.

First is a theme around architecture consolidation and looking closely at three key elements. What is missing, what should be removed, and where are the commercial risks? Most of these conversations concern eliminating technical debt and creating a strategic plan to reduce risk. By documenting the existing landscape and benchmarking it against our Platform of the Future, 6-layer model, we can populate the 'missing' and 'remove' categories for customers. This allows them to focus on where to consolidate and where capabilities need to be added or augmented to provide a platform to support future digital aspirations. The Broadcom conversation has sparked the additional question of future commercial risks. Customers are looking closely at all the components in the architecture and asking the following questions: Where is the next banana skin, and how can we mitigate it in advance?

The second uptick area has been customers modernising or building out new Data Strategies. It is important to have good quality, accessible, and secured data. Data quality is a massive challenge for many customers who did not have to consider the level of accuracy and detail before Generative AI appeared. The other big challenge is managing access and security of this data as you look to open access to new teams and projects; speed of execution within the bounds of compliance will be critical.

Our teams have been spending many hours assessing existing data pipelines, warehouses, and lakes to help customers build a future strategy that can underpin all the business's requests for data. This could be a simple reworking of existing tooling onto new performant platforms (think traditional Hadoop moving from Spinning disks to flash to meet new needs). It could also be a more transformative approach, such as a data lakehouse (data warehouse performance at data lake scale) or a data fabric (decentralised data sources). The important message to remember is that you don’t need to move or transform all your data to start extracting value; think of the old 80/20 rule: 80% of the value from 20% of the data!

NetApp Partner Awards

The NetApp Partner Awards took place in London in May. It was fantastic to visit the Tower of London after hours and see all the sights.

What I loved about these awards was that we achieved them because of the dedication of our people. Partner Technical and Partner Salesperson of the Year came to CDW, really highlighting why I love working here: the people. To hear these individuals being spoken about by NetApp was inspiring and really made the evening for me. Of course, we picked up a couple of others for the ride in Commercial and Flash Partner of the Year.

OCTO Content Round-Up

It's been an exciting month for the OCTO roundup. We now have our own site, making it even easier to keep up to date.

You can read all about the entire team here:

https://www.uk.cdw.com/about/octo/

With this new site available and offering the ability to subscribe for updates, I will retire this section of the OCTO retrospective and devise something new for H2 2024.

Photo of the Month

Don’t worry—the photo of the month is not going away. In May, I got a chance to tick off a bucket list photo: Red Fox with reflection and bluebells. As you can imagine, a few things had to align to make this happen, but I was happy with the result.

Stay Safe, and look out for next month's recap. Please reach out if you want to discuss anything in more detail.

Rob Sims

Chief Technologist (Hybrid Platforms)

CDW