Today, Nutanix revealed two additions to its Virtual Computing Platform. The NX-9000 appliance is an all-flash hyper-converged platform — an industry first according to Nutanix — offering scale-out storage for applications that require speedy performance.

Nutanix also introduced Metro Availability, a feature allowing data storage to be spread around multiple sites up to 400 km apart. With that capability, the company claims it is the only hyper-converged infrastructure vendor to provide continual data protection across several data centers.

The release answers customer calls for hyper-converged products that can power any workload with the utmost performance. Previous platforms offered by Nutanix were hybrid models — a mix of solid-state drive (SSD) and hard disk drive (HDD) — but the NX-9000 is completely SSD. Nutanix says it's a good option for highly transactional databases with large active working sets. More generally, it will help customers that "have very stringent requirements around consistent low latency across their entire data set," writes Adam Moreland, product marketing manager at Nutanix, in an email to SDxCentral.

Nutanix's Virtual Computing Platform combines server and storage resources, competing with the traditional three-tiered deployments that use different server and storage vendors. On the SSD front, other all-flash products in the market only have storage components, and often don't come up as an alternative, Moreland writes.

Stuart Miniman, principal research contributor at the Wikibon Project, said storage vendors are well aware that "the world is going converged." Although Nutanix is the first to offer a hyper-converged solution, it is not the only converged option when it comes to the all-flash array market. Other storage companies like Solidfire and EMC have converged offerings, with the latter announcing yesterday its XtremIO as part of a converged infrastructure offering from VCE.

The NX-9000 is shipping now and has already been deployed into production environments, Nutanix says.