The long-awaited Nutanix IPO has arrived, and the $200 million offering shows us just how much it's cost to become a big shot in hyperconverged infrastructure.

To be sure, Nutanix has grown tremendously. Revenues of $241 million for the year ended July 2015 were up from $127 million the previous year and way up from $6.6 million in fiscal 2012, according to the prospectus filed today.

But the San Jose, Calif.-based company has tallied up a $312 million deficit since being founded in 2009, including losses of $126 million for the year that ended in July.

The losses come from Nutanix's aggressive growth. The company's sales and marketing team, for example, grew 105 percent during the year ended July 2015, according to the prospectus.

Another way to look at that growth: The company had 2,144 customers as of Oct. 31, up from 1,799 in July and 782 in July 2014.

Founded in 2009, Nutanix offers an operating system that handles storage in virtualized environments. At first that meant VMware environments, but the business has broadened to include Amazon Web Services (AWS) and environments based on the Hyper-V and KVM hypervisors.

Nutanix sells standalone software and also offers converged appliances. In both cases, the operations behind servers, storage, and virtualization all run on one set of commodity servers. Webscale operators such as Facebook and Google are big on that kind of convergence, because it can keep the size of the data center in check and can make it easier to deploy new applications.

Nutanix has been biding its time before going public. Last year, it gathered up a $140 million Series E round that brought its valuation to $2 billion and its funding total to $312 million.

At the time, founder and CEO Dheeraj Pandey wrote the company was gearing up for war against big companies such as storage networking giant EMC. That war was going to require fortifying Nutanix's sales and marketing prowess, he wrote.

Competition for Nutanix includes EMC subsidiary VMware, with its EVO:SDDC hyperconverged platform, and Simplivity — which, like Nutanix, is in the unicorn club of startups with valuations exceeding $1 billion.

Nutanix also has an OEM deal with Dell, which could get interesting if Dell pulls off the $67 billion acquisition of EMC (and, consequently, of VMware).

The potential rise of composable infrastructure could also be a threat. It's a more fluid form of converged infrastructure being pitched by Cisco and HP.

Nutanix's largest shareholders are Lightspeed Venture Partners and Khosla Ventures, which respectively own 23 and 10.9 percent of the company. Pandey is the largest employee shareholder, with 9.2 percent.

As of October, Nutanix had 1,368 employees and held cash and equivalents of $136 million.

The company plans to trade under the stock symbol NTNX.