News

Microsoft Adds Nutanix to Cloud Platform System Roster

• By Jeffrey Schwartz
• June 17, 2016

Microsoft solution provider Nutanix has joined Dell and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) in delivering solutions based on Microsoft's Azure Cloud Platform System (CPS).

In a partnership announced Thursday, Nutanix said it will offer the CPS Standard edition beginning next month. Nutanix CPS Standard will enable organizations to run Azure-consistent environments based on the hybrid cloud reference architecture.

The announcement comes just days before the start of the Nutanix Next partner and customer conference in Las Vegas, where Jeffrey Snover, a Technical Fellow and lead architect for the Enterprise Cloud Group at Microsoft, is scheduled to speak.

Similar to the partnerships Microsoft inked last year with Dell and HPE to offer CPS Standard, the Nutanix CPS Standard will be based on a jointly engineered solution. Also like the Dell and HPE offerings, the Nutanix system is based on Windows Server 2012 R2, System Center 2012 R2 and the Windows Azure Pack.

Nutanix hyper-converged systems are best suited for organizations looking to consolidate their applications, workloads and infrastructure management on a common platform. It come with Nutanix's Prism management platform and Acropolis VM, which the company describes as a scale-out data fabric for storage, compute and virtualization.

Like its existing hyper-converged systems, the Nutanix CPS Standard is aimed at running business-critical workloads such as SQL Server, Oracle and SAP. According to Nutanix, 50 percent of all systems it sells run applications or infrastructure from Microsoft, Oracle and Splunk.

While Nutanix is not as well-known as Dell or HPE, the company is a rapidly growing provider of hyper-converged systems composed of integrated storage and compute capabilities for large, scale-out workloads. Nutanix, which has OEM agreements with Dell, Lenovo and others, recently registered an initial public offering.