Dell Technologies and Nutanix finally made good on long-standing plans to expand their integration of Dell’s storage and Nutanix’s software-defined platform, pushing a new combined offering that furthers the targeting of disgruntled Broadcom-VMware customers.

The new combination ties external storage support and integration between Nutanix’s Cloud Platform with its AHV hypervisor and Dell’s PowerFlex storage platform. The combo is the first external storage integrated with Nutanix’s platform and is being targeted at enterprises that want to independently manage and scale compute and storage resources in their hybrid cloud environments.

The partnership was hinted at last August as part of a broader Dell-Nutanix partnership. The initial push from that deal was 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.

Ketan Shah, VP of product management at Nutanix, explained at that time that the 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.

Drew Schulke, VP of product management at Dell, added that existing PowerFlex users would 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.”

Those acquisition opportunities could be important for Dell’s storage business. CFO Yvonne McGill during the vendor’s latest earnings call said that storage segment revenues did increase 5% year over year, but added that the “overall demand environment is lagging that of traditional servers.”

Nutanix continues partnership moves

The partnership also continues moves by Nutanix to bolster its position in the market. The vendor has put several programs in place with other vendors to help migrate disgruntled VMware customers, including work with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Cisco.

Nutanix CEO Rajiv Ramaswami during a press interview session after it released its most recent earnings said the vendor added “roughly about 700 customers in this quarter,” and that “the vast majority of them are probably VMware customers.” The executive added that these are customers are “largely moving away from those legacy VMware stacks.”

That result builds on the 630 new customers Nutanix added during the previous quarter. Equity research firm William Blair at that time noted in a report that Nutanix was “seeing steady VMware displacements amid high customer dissatisfaction.”

Ramaswami during the most recent earnings call said that the vendor was seeing “early traction” with customers migrating from VMware Cloud on AWS to the AWS-powered Nutanix offering, and from running in an on-premises environment to the public cloud. These migrations are happening “within a matter of months because one of the things that we don’t have to worry about in a cloud-to-cloud migration is the hardware refresh is not an issue anymore,” Ramaswami explained.

Nutanix’s work with Cisco was a “good contributor for us in new logos, especially this quarter, as well as over the last couple of quarters,” Ramaswami said, adding that, “we expect to see that partnership continue to grow and are working very closely with them as we go to market.”

Nutanix did see a “small contribution” during the most recent quarter from some of its reseller work with Dell, with expectations that the more integrated work will start showing up in its next calendar quarter.

Ramaswami did add that many of those potential customers remain on multi-year contracts with VMware, which will delay opportunities for Nutanix. That opportunity could also be delayed as “hardware refreshes are needed in many cases to convert them over.”