Dell Technologies and Nutanix have beefed up their long-standing relationship with a pair of offerings targeted at easing enterprise hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) and data center storage management challenges as well as increasing Broadcom-based uncertainty over the current private cloud space.

The most time-relevant service is the Dell XC Plus offering, which is a packaged HCI-based appliance that combines Dell’s PowerEdge servers with Nutanix’ Cloud Platform software stack. This provides a centralized control plane, automation, integrated Nutanix AHV hypervisor, and a distributed cloud architecture to help enterprises manage their hybrid cloud deployments.

The package also includes artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to help optimize resource planning.

Drew Schulke, VP of product management at Dell, explained the XC Plus service builds on Dell’s legacy XC Core, but with a validated and test Nutanix Cloud Platform stack optimized to work on the Dell stack and Dell handling support.

“We get great feedback from our partner community and channel partners about that, and that life is easier for them if they can just have a single point of transaction as opposed to having to go to two different entities,” Schulke said.

Ketan Shah, VP of product management at Nutanix, added that the XC Plus integration is targeted at helping to scale data center workloads and in support of use cases like nonvolatile memory express (NVMe), GPU density, and software security.

As for a target market, Schulke said the XC Plus combination “is broadly applicable in the marketplace. I don't think it’s limited by size or scale, and Nutanix can scale down to a very low, small footprint for those sort of edge or I'll call them remote office use cases.”

Storage support on deck

The two are also combining external storage support and integration between Nutanix’s Cloud Platform with its AHV hypervisor and Dell’s PowerFlex storage platform. This combo is being targeted at enterprises that want to independently manage and scale compute and storage resources in their hybrid cloud environments.

Shah explained that this collaboration will run the Nutanix Acropolis hypervisor running as software to support SDN and some data services like disaster recovery, with PowerFlex running on the bottom half.

“Many large customers and prospects were demanding this, and they were demanding PowerFlex, and basically had a situation where they had a stack, where they had a hypervisor and storage running PowerFlex and looking at the alternatives on the hypervisor side, but they really wanted to preserve and value what they had in the storage side,” Shah said of the combination’s geneses.

Schulke added that this option will begin to hit the market early next year. Once it does, existing PowerFlex will be able to use their storage nodes, with the only addition needing to be the addition of a new compute node to work with the new modified stack. “It's not a forklift, it's not a greenfield only kind of conversation,” Schulke said.

The combination is, however, targeted at “larger accounts, which have larger infrastructure footprints,” Schulke said. “That’s just a byproduct of its design.”

“I would say the interest amongst our existing PowerFlex customers and this solution is what really drove us to it,” Schulke added. “We want to have a competitive offering and one that's meeting their needs. I think we'll see in the early days that most of the adoption is coming from that, but I think what we're bringing here together in terms of this ecosystem flexibility will resonate broadly. It will open up acquisition opportunities as we as we get this in the market as well.”

There’s gotta be a Broadcom/VMware angle, right?

Those acquisition opportunities will come from a market rife with uncertainty tied to Broadcom’s ongoing integration and restructuring of its VMware acquisition, which is opening up opportunities for enterprises to reevaluate their data center and cloud plans.

Naveen Chhabra, principal analyst at Forrester Research, recently helmed a report that found one VMware customer was experiencing a 500% price increase tied to Broadcom’s licensing and service changes.

Chhabra told SDxCentral that these pricing changes were not unexpected and that he and his team had predicted 20% of the world’s largest enterprises “will start to exit – read these words very carefully – will start to exit the VMware stack.”

“They will not do a full replacement overnight, but in parts, they will start to move away,” Chhabra said. “I clearly see that happening right now and I don’t need to go another five months to claim that that prediction was true. It is happening.”

Nutanix’s management has repeatedly touted opportunities in the market tied to Broadcom’s changes to VMware, but more recently has noted a greater willingness by Broadcom to negotiate pricing with its larger clients.

“We’ve seen Broadcom display a lot of flexibility with respect to their pricing, their packaging changes, especially when they are faced with the probability of losing some of their larger customers or responding to push back from the market and from the customer base,” Nutanix CEO Rajiv Ramaswami said during the vendor’s most recent earnings call.

Ramaswami further explained that this pushback has also involved Broadcom being very active over the past several months in adjusting to the change their decisions are having in the market.

“They’ve tried a bunch of things,” Ramaswami said. “They’re stepping back on some of the things they’ve tried, so the competitive situation is quite dynamic on that front.”

Dell, for its part, continues to have a close relationship with its former VMware subsidiary.

Dell earlier this year terminated a distribution agreement with VMware following Broadcom’s acquisition. That “outstanding commercial framework” was tied to how Dell and VMware distributed and collaborated on the resale of VMware software.

However, more recently it was added as a distribution support channel for VMware’s Cloud Foundation (VCF) platform sales channels. A Dell spokesperson explained that this new deal replaces a legacy OEM and embedded OEM agreements, “which covered software bundled and sold with Dell hardware.”

“Through this agreement, Dell and Broadcom will continue to offer solutions that meet the needs of VMware deployments spanning edge to core to cloud,” Gil Shneorson, SVP for solutions platforms at Dell, wrote in a statement on the new agreement.

Tracy Woo, a principal analyst at Forrester Research, previously explained to SDxCentral that these broad moves by Broadcom to VMware have resulted in the analyst firm speaking more directly with enterprises about potential alternatives.

“That's in part why we're out here talking about it so far in advance,” Schulke said. “We know there's a lot of interest in this sort of flexibility right here and so we want to make sure we're setting the stage with the market of our intention so that we can at least remove some ambiguity around what might be potentially coming.”