Cisco, Nutanix Unveil First Combined Hyperconverged Offer, Expanding Opportunities For Partners

The two companies have launched Cisco Compute Hyperconverged with Nutanix as Cisco leans on its recently forged partnership with Nutanix to power hybrid multi-cloud computing after announcing the end-of-life of HyperFlex.

Cisco Systems and Nutanix are making good on their promise to offer an integrated hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) product line following the end-of-life of Cisco’s own HyperFlex offer.

The two companies on Monday introduced Cisco Compute Hyperconverged with Nutanix, an offering aimed at giving customers a simplified, flexible and scalable HCI answer to address hybrid and multi-cloud realities, according to Cisco.

Cisco Compute Hyperconverged with Nutanix is now generally available, the two companies said.

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Cisco, for its part, is leaning on its newly forged partnership with Nutanix to power hybrid multi-cloud computing.

The new Cisco Compute Hyperconverged with Nutanix solution expands opportunities for partners, Nick Holden, Cisco’s vice president of global and strategic partners and co-sell, told CRN in an email.

“[The offering provides partners] with a differentiated solution for hybrid IT, featuring a combination of winning technologies already in demand. It provides partners more opportunities for HCI design, migration, and installation services,” he said. “Customers will benefit from a fully integrated and validated solution offering flexible deployment options with support for both Cisco’s rack and modular server lines.”

Cisco and Nutanix in August revealed that they would be coming together to offer a combined HCI portfolio that would use Cisco’s SaaS-managed compute and networking infrastructure — Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) with Cisco Intersight — and the Nutanix Cloud Platform, which includes Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure, Nutanix Cloud Manager, Nutanix Unified Storage and Nutanix Desktop Services. The two companies said that the offerings will be sold by Cisco and its partner community.

“What’s different about this solution is that it combines the strength of Cisco’s networking and SaaS-managed compute portfolio with hybrid multi-cloud software from Nutanix, based on its market-leading HCI foundation. The result is the industry’s most complete hyperconverged solution, fully integrated and validated with flexible deployment options and support across Cisco UCS servers,” Jeremy Foster, Cisco’s senior vice president and general manager of Cisco Compute, said in a blog post on the new offering.

Businesses using the new offering will gain reduced complexity via a cloud operating model and more resilience by keeping hyperconverged systems running and protected with an augmented joint solution support model. These customers can also accelerate their own IT transformations by addressing modern apps and use cases via a hyperconverged offering and flexible deployment options, as well as the most updated hardware and software from Cisco and Nutanix, Foster said.

“This new platform will give more businesses access to a consistent cloud operating model characterized by its simplicity, choice, and unparalleled flexibility. It features support for file, block and object storage, a built-in hypervisor to run both virtual machines and containerized workloads, integrated network and security, as well as snapshots, replication and disaster recovery. In addition, this solution benefits from Nutanix portable licensing, enabling seamless application and workload deployment across hardware and locations, whether it be on-premises or in the public cloud … We continue to expand our technology integration partner ecosystem to help businesses accelerate their hybrid multi-cloud journey with a rigorously tested, validated, and certified infrastructure,” Tarkan Maner, Nutanix’s chief commercial officer, said in his own blog post on the latest offering.

Cisco in May issued an end-of-life announcement and then, later in September, end-of-sale dates for its Hyperflex hyperconverged portfolio. HyperFlex, which combined Cisco UCS compute and networking technology with its own HCI software and storage nodes as an integrated package, had been competing with leading technologies from Nutanix and VMware. However, partners at the time told CRN that they weren’t seeing strong adoption of Cisco Hyperflex among customers. Rather, many clients have requested a combination of Cisco and Nutanix for their hyperconverged needs, Lane Irvine, network business solutions director for Cisco and Nutanix partner Long View Systems, said last month.

The last day to order Cisco’s various HyperFlex Hardware Components will be March 12, 2024. The company said that customers with active service contracts will continue to receive support from the Cisco Technical Assistance Center (TAC) via the terms of their service contracts.

Foster in his Monday blog post said that ensuring business continuity for customers is Cisco’s top priority. That includes migration support via Cisco partners and supporting multiple paths for migration, including the new offering with Nutanix.