Lenovo to launch hyperconverged infrastructure line
Connecting state and local government leaders
Nutanix software will power the appliances, which will be available in early 2016.
For several years, the IT infrastructure company Nutanix has been urging government agencies to "hyperconverge" -- to move away from traditional three-tier architecture and embrace systems where servers, switches and storage coexist in a single appliance. Now the California-based firm is partnering with Lenovo to offer customers a whole new line of hyperconverged infrastructure solutions.
The two firms announced their strategic partnership on Nov. 4. The line of Lenovo appliances will be jointly engineered and marketed and will be powered by Nutanix software. According to the announcement, the joint solution will be able to run "nearly all workloads," including big data analytics, virtual desktop systems and enterprise applications. Brian Cox, director of product marketing for Nutanix, told GCN the specific products will be unveiled in early December and available to customers starting in the first quarter of 2016.
Hyperconvergence is a popular idea -- that same basic architecture is used by Google, Facebook and other cloud giants to scale quickly and affordably. Some public sector organizations, however, are wedded to existing ecosystems, limited to certain acquisition vehicles or simply wary of going all-in with a company that is just six years old.
Dave Gwyn, Nutanix's vice president for the federal market, told GCN that "it's long been a big part of Nutanix's plan to partner with global companies like Lenovo. The biggest thing is this gives additional options" to the customer. He added that the firms would work quickly to make the new systems available through the General Services Administration's Schedule 70 and other major acquisition vehicles that already offer Lenovo and Nutanix solutions.
David Tareen, Lenovo's director of product marketing, said his firm sees particular appeal for the state, local and education portions of the public sector market, where budgets and missions both often call for incremental expansion. "With ... some of the challenges they have, the solution offers a number of benefits that gets them toward an agile business," he said. "It's very easy to scale."
Tareen and Gwyn both added that international markets would also be a significant focus for the partnership.
This is not Nutanix's first attempt to extend its hyperconvergence solution beyond the company's own appliances; a similar partnership was struck with Dell last year.
As governments rethink their data centers, Gwyn said, "there's a huge opportunity for replacing all that legacy architecture." So the goal is to team with "world class" partners to reach more of that market quickly.
"There's enough for all of us to get," he said.