HPE and Nutanix go after hybrid cloud service opportunity

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has partnered with Nutanix to provide hybrid cloud as a service.

Through the partnership, HPE said it would offer Nutanix’s Enterprise Cloud OS software, which includes Nutanix’s free AHV hypervisor, delivered through HPE GreenLake, HPE’s as-a-service model for delivering enterprise IT hardware.

HPE’s current Greenlake lineup includes Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Azure Stack as a service. The partnership expands this to organisations looking at Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure, which combines storage and compute on a single appliance.

Significantly, the Nutanix platform provides the AHV hypervisor for free. This means that, through the HPE/Nutanix partnership, HPE can provide its customers with an alternative to VxRail, where Dell-EMC hardware is used to run VMware.

While Nutanix has previously won business by offering a viable alternative to HPE x86 Proliant servers in the datacentre. By providing its own appliance, using Supermicro server hardware, it has also offered its AHV virtualisation platform on a number of leading server platforms, including HPE Proliant servers. Through the partnership, both Nutanix and HPE plan to offer HPE hardware running AHV.

Antonio Neri, president and CEO at HPE, said: “Hundreds of global customers now leverage HPE GreenLake to get the benefits of a cloud experience combined with the security, governance and application performance of an on-premise environment, while paying for the service based on actual consumption.”

The fully managed hybrid cloud service is being positioned as a way to enable enterprises to dramatically lower total cost of ownership and accelerate time to value.

The pair said the Nutanix technology can reduce IT staff hours by 61% for deployment, management and support when compared with traditional infrastructure, allowing HPE GreenLake services to be delivered more quickly and efficiently.

According to HPE, the combination of HPE GreenLake and Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS software will be able to run virtualised tier-1 workloads such as SAP, Oracle and Microsoft, as well as support for virtualised big data applications such as Splunk and Hadoop.