Hello from Nutanix .NEXT Copenhagen

 This most recent edition of Nutanix .NEXT in Copenhagen, from October 8-10 drew more than 4,000 attendees. We were proud to be there as a .NEXT sponsor (and Nutanix has already committed to sponsor SUSCON in Dublin in March 2020)

Nutanix is, of course, a fast growing software company that works with many of the same Independent Hardware Vendors (IHVs) as SUSE to deliver solutions in the Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) space. Nutanix pioneered the HCI market and they position themselves as a key element to making it easier than ever before to design, build, and manage datacenter IT. They were originally a single source for turnkey HCI infrastructure, leveraging a close partnership with SuperMicro. They’ve since branched out become more hardware agnostic, supporting a variety of specialized HCI hardware from other vendors, including IBM, Lenovo, Dell, HPE, and Fujitsu.

Nutanix talks about the “Nutanix Enterprise Cloud”, and positions it as helping customers better achieve business objectives in three ways – through Agile Infrastructure, Intelligent Operations, and Financial Flexibility. For more detail, see their “what-we-do” page

Our Participation in .NEXT

SUSE was well represented at this .NEXT. A contingent from our technology partner team including yours truly, and local sales including Erik Redso and Vesko Nedeltchev, had lots of good conversations and gave out lots of little green chameleons. Masood Noori delivered an excellent overview of SUSE’s relevant offerings at the Nutanix theater and we talked about the work we’re doing with Nutanix to deliver complementary solutions that support each other’s offerings. These include:

• SLES – fully certified and supported on Nutanix’ AHV (KVM-based hypervisor)
• SLES for SAP Applications – also specifically supported by SUSE and SAP on AHV
• SLES with Expanded Support – multi-distro enterprise support now available to Nutanix customers, including for RHEL (not supported on AHV by RH), and CentOS
• SUSE Manager –robust, multi-distro management for Linux on/with Nutanix

Many Nutanix customers were thrilled to learn they could receive full enterprise support for their RHEL and CentOS deployments on Nutanix AHV while migrating over to SLES. This has actually been available from SUSE for some time as SLES with Expanded Support, but is now fully endorsed by Nutanix, having been jointly certified on the AHV virtualization platform.

We talked to a number of customers that were also intrigued to learn about our long-standing relationship with SAP, and that SAP HANA and other Classic (NetWeaver-based) deployments are now certified and available on SLES for SAP Applications running on Nutanix AHV – offering performance and availability for application, reporting, and database servers, and remaining simple to deploy, manage, and scale.

In addition to multi-distro enterprise Linux support on Nutanix, and mutual support for SAP, Nutanix and SUSE have agreed to work together to make SUSE CaaS Platform and SUSE Cloud Application Platform (SUSE’s containerized implementation of Cloud Foundry) available on Nutanix AHV.

Stay tuned for more details on SUSE’s partnership with Nutanix. Make your arrangements now to see us at SUSECON in Dublin, March 23-27, 2020, where Nutanix will be a sponsoring partner.

For more information on SUSE and Nutanix, contact me at scanova@suse.com, or Massod Noori at masood.noori@suse.com, on the Technology Partner team here at SUSE

Steve