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back to article Server-storage halfblood newbie Nutanix: We're taking on big dog VCE

It’s not the size of the dog in the fight that matters, it’s the size of the fight in the dog - which brings us to converged server/storage system vendor rivals Nutanix and VCE. VCE is a bulging giant backed by Cisco, EMC and VMware, with annual revenues running at more than $1bn and more than 1,750 systems sold to more than …

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  1. ToddR

    Nutanix doesn't have any Fibrechannel

    Isn't that the response of a dinosaur, sorry Fibre Channel storage architect?

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    1. Archaon
      Reply Icon

      Re: Nutanix doesn't have any Fibrechannel

      Given that Nutanix nodes use internal storage, rather than the EMC SANs used by VCE, the lack of fibre channel is largely irrelevant.

      At a basic level Nutanix is SuperMicro hardware running a spiffy software layer, so technically you probably could put FC cards in the servers. Really though, if you're using an external SAN then chances are Nutanix isn't a good fit in the first place and you should be looking at something else.

      Nutanix and VCE are both 'converged solutions' (part of me dies whenever I use that term) but they're different shaped pegs for different shaped holes.

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  2. Etherealmind

    "And when it comes to VCE's Fibre Channel, it could easily point out that Nutanix does not have any."

    Nutanix doesn't require FibreChannel, design is different. Not that it matters in converged infrastructure, who gives a toss about how the storage works so long as it works. And they both do.

    VCE uses whatever EMC says they are allowed to use. And that's FibreChannel legacy kit in the VNX. Which is dfine.

    Nutanix uses newer technology in IP/Ethernet and that's fine too.

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  3. M. B.

    Having...

    ...or not having Fibre Channel is irrelevant.

    It doesn't matter how you connect to the storage platform, so long as the "how" meets the latency and bandwidth requirements of the customer and is supported across the stack. FlexPods, for example, use NFS over 10GbE for storage connectivity. They are plenty fast. The baby vBlock systems use iSCSI for connectivity. They easily meet the needs for the workloads they are intended to support.

    The Nutanix strength is also its weakness, it scales in fixed increments. If those increments are generally in line with the business needs, then it makes a lot of sense. If you are supporting multiple applications which scale in different ways, it does not. When you deploy a data warehousing application on your converged infrastructure and you quickly need to scale up storage capacity, it's easy to do on a traditional converged system. Not so easy on hyper-converged, especially if you do not require the additional cluster capacity from a CPU and RAM perspective.

    I'm in love with the idea of Nutanix for other types of applications which scale more linearly like VDI. The easier something can be, the better. For more flexibility (supporting multiple widely varying applications), I would tend to prefer more traditional converged platforms which allow for more granular scalability.

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