Nutanix Xpress SX-1065 Pricing for Small and Medium Businesses

Excerpt and images from a terrific enterprise IT blogger JoseLuisGomez.com Nutanix Xpress, the new HCI product line for SMB

Nutanix announced on Tuesday its new Xpress cloud platform, priced and architected for small and midsize businesses.

Nutanix Xpress is a pre-assembled private cloud stack, available only through the VAR channel, that bundles storage, compute and a hypervisor along with management software. Prebuilt Cloud Connect integrations allow for data backup to public cloud services, including AWS and Microsoft Azure.

Nutanix Xpress – Built for Small and Medium Sized Businesses

For small and medium-sized businesses, purchasing, installing, and managing IT infrastructure poses significant challenges. Existing solutions may be too complicated and require specialized skills that overstretch IT budgets. The Nutanix Xpress family addresses the IT needs of smaller organizations through ease of management, lower TCO, and simple, risk-free deployment, with world-class support for the entire infrastructure stack just a phone call or email away.

Nutanix is targeting the “Global 200,000” small and medium sized businesses, defined as follows:

nutanix-smb_chart

Nutanix SX1065 Offering Overview

Nutanix Xpress is a complete hyperconverged offering that natively integrates server,
storage and virtualization in a single, space-saving platform and radically simplifies the
infrastructure stack.

Plug and Play: All software factory pre-installed and ready to run nearly any virtualized application for small and medium businesses
Built-in virtualization: Built-in Nutanix AHV hypervisor and powerful VM management eliminates expensive virtualization licensing costs – no additional software components to install and manage
Future-proof: Easy data backup to public cloud services, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, to deliver a practical cloud strategy
Support: Award-winning support from Nutanix technical teams and the Nutanix NEXT community of IT experts designed for SMBs

Accessible to All

Nutanix Xpress makes on-premises infrastructure as simple to consume as public cloud
services. The infrastructure can be installed, configured, and ready to run virtualized
applications in 60 minutes or less.

• Eliminate the need for specialized skills. Xpress greatly simplifies the entire IT environment, including storage and virtualization
• Reduce purchasing costs. Total cost of ownership is up to 60% less than comparable traditional infrastructure.
• Consolidate all applications. Everything runs on a single system—with no specialized or dedicated hardware
• Streamline management. With consumer-grade design, Nutanix Prism makes it easy to keep infrastructure up and running

What’s the difference between Xpress and Xtreme?

As expected, to achieve a reduction in cost, Nutanix had to cut the costs somewhere. The easy way is reduce hardware resources, but it’s not enough to be cost-attractive. Many vendors achieve to be competitive because they release different editions of their software with different features on each one. The picture below shows Xpress vs. Extreme (Enterprise) product lines:

nutanix-differences

Nutanix Express SX-1065 Specifications

There are a variety of SX-1065 configurations available. Here are 3 basic models from Small to Large.

nutanix-bundles-768x217

* Source: Nutanix

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Best Hyper Converged Solutions Roundup

The field of all-in-on hyper-converged platforms has certainly grown over the past 24 months. While some smaller startups (Nimboxx?) could not gain enough traction early, others have been delivering robust, time-tested gear for several years. Here’s a run-down of a few of the top names.

Scale Computing

Scale Computing enters the best hyper converged solutions category by differentiating its HC3 and HC3x hyperconverged platforms with ease of use and simplicity. The company chose to standardize on KVM as a single hypervisor and built its own management layer, creating high functionality without the need for a virtual storage appliance, coupled with object-based storage with direct access to the hypervisor. Reliance on KVM also eliminates licensing fees for commercial hypervisors, making the product attractive to smaller organizations. Scale Computing recently added integrated disaster recovery capabilities into its HC3 platform.

Pivot3

Pivot3 is hardly a newbie, founded in 2002 with a focus on converging virtual servers, storage and networks. The company says it launched its best hyper converged appliance in 2008, when a casino asked for a secure and cost-effective way to store video streams (at the time, Pivot3 called it “serverless computing.”).”

Using Scalar Erasure Coding, Pivot3 developed vSTAC OS, which the company says “allows any program running on one appliance within the cluster to access resources across all the appliances in the cluster.” Pivot3 focuses on the video surveillance and virtual desktop markets and counts more than 1,300 customers worldwide. Recently, Pivot3 acquired NexGen Storage to flush out it’s all-flash offerings.

Nutanix

Hyperconvergence pioneer Nutanix launched its first product in 2011 and initially focused on a message of “ban the SAN.” Today, the company’s Virtual Computing Platform provides integrated compute and storage through servers running a standard hypervisor and the Nutanix OS. According to Gartner’s report on integrated systems, Nutanix’s technology is unique in that “the storage and compute elements are natively converged to create a much tighter level of integration”; a node-based approach that “enables theoretically limitless additions of new compute or storage bandwidth in very small increments.”

Nutanix, which released what it claims was the industry’s first all-flash hyperconverged array last year, has raised $317 million in funding, filed 43 patents, and touts an annualized sales run rate of $300 million. Last year, the company inked an OEM deal with Dell to offer converged appliances built with Nutanix software running on Dell PowerEdge servers.

Gridstore

Gridstore offers best hyper converged solution purpose-built for Microsoft Hyper-V. The startup’s hyperconverged appliances come in both all-flash and hybrid versions. Unlike other scale-out storage products, which use standard storage protocols such as SMB or iSCSI, Gridstore places much of the work of managing the scale-out cluster into the client as a virtual controller. Gridstore may have an advantage in the market if it can capitalize on its position as the first Hyper-V optimized storage system.

Dell’s Nutanix-Based XC Series

Dell’s first Nutanix based hyper converged solution is the XC730xd, which is based on Dell’s PowerEdge R730xd rack-mount server platform. The XC730xd, based on Intel Xeon E5 2600 v3 processors, fits up to 32 TB of storage capacity in a 2U enclosure, or about 60 percent more capacity than the previous model based on the PowerEdge R720xd servers. The second model, the XC630, is based on Dell’s 1U PowerEdge R630 platform, and can be configured with up to 9.6 TB of storage capacity.

EMC VSPEX BLUE

The EMC VSPEX BLUE best hyper-converged infrastructure appliance delivers compute, storage, networking and management through VMware EVO: RAIL and EMC software. EMC claims the solution goes from power on to provisioning virtual machines in less than 15 minutes.

Included with the appliance is VSPEX BLUE Manager, which provides access to electronic services and automated patch and software update notifications; VSPEX BLUE Market, which gives access to pre-validated solutions; and EMC Secure Remote Support for monitoring of the appliance.

Hewlett-Packard HPE

Hewlett-Packard in December entered the best hyper-converged infrastructure market with its HP ConvergedSystem 200-HC StoreVirtual. Based on the company’s StoreVirtual virtualized storage solution, it provides advanced data services, disaster recovery, and heterogeneous interoperability across physical and virtual application domains. HP ConvergedSystem 200-HC StoreVirtual includes the converged management of HP OneView for VMware vCenter, as well as robust VMware vSphere integration. A version running the HP Helion cloud was released recently.

HP also recently unveiled its HP ConvergedSystem 200-HC EVO: RAIL, a new hyper-converge appliance based on the VMware EVO: RAIL platform. This combines HP ProLiant SL servers with the VMware suite including VMware vSphere, vCenter Server and VMware Virtual SAN.

Riverbed SteelFusion

The SteelFusion 4.0 from San Francisco-based Riverbed Technology targets the simplification of branch-office IT support by virtualizing and consolidating 100 percent of data and servers from remote sites into data centers to centralize data security and IT management. SteelFusion does this with a series of hyper-converged appliances that are deployed in a remote office to run applications over a WAN using data stored in a central data center.

New with SteelFusion is FusionSync, which provides seamless branch continuity by ensuring all branch data is accessible across private and hybrid cloud environments. This, according to Riverbed, gives remote offices the ability to withstand and recover from data center failures with zero downtime.

SimpliVity

Another pioneer in the hyperconvergence space, SimpliVity came out of stealth mode in 2012. The startup’s OmniCube platform combines compute, hypervisor, storage services and network switching on x86 server hardware with centralized management. OmniCube goes further than other integrated systems by incorporating features such as built-in VM backup, in-line data deduplication, compression and optimization at the source, according to Gartner.

Tintri

Tintri VMstore best hyper-converged appliance consists of a fully redundant box containing flash and spinning storage, designed to simplify the task of providing storage for VMs while adding performance.

Unlike traditional networked storage systems, even those that also integrate flash and spinning disks, there are no LUNs, volumes or tiers, which Tintri says present barriers to virtualization because they have no intrinsic meaning at the VM level. Instead, each I/O request maps to the particular virtual disk on which it occurs, the system accesses the vCenter Server API to monitor and control I/O performance at virtual disk level, and you manage in terms of virtual disks and VMs.

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Nutanix vs. Tintri cost comparison

Nutanix vs. Tintri (pricing only comparison)

This is a brief excerpt from the original article at ZDNet.

“The race, therefore, is on to virtualise storage to make it a better fit for the software-defined datacentre as well as more affordable and easier to manage. All the big names are busy doing something — including virtualisation leader VMware, which recently released its own Virtual SAN technology (VSAN) built into the kernel of its ESX hypervisor. But there are other solutions, and for this feature we opted to examine two quite different approaches to the problem: one from Nutanix, the other from Tintri.”

….

Nutanix Comparision Cost vs. Tintri

Nutanix NX

Nutanix Price
From $74,250 (£43,963) for a 3-node appliance

Tintri VMStore

Tintri Price
From $74,000 (£44,246) for the VMstore T620

For a great article highlighting both solutions, check out Nutanix vs. Tintri at ZDNet.

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Nutanix Pricing for the Virtual Compute Platform NX1000 and NX6000

….Nutanix cost for new models….

Like the NX-3000, the NX-1000 starts with four nodes in a 2U system. NX-6000 systems start with two nodes.

The NX-1050 includes 12 CPU cores, 4 TB of hard drive capacity and 400 GB of solid-state storage per node, with up to four nodes in a 2U rack. That makes for 48 cores, 16 TB of hard drives and 1.6 TB of flash in a four-node system, compared to 64 cores, 15 TB of hard drive storage and 3.2 TB of solid-state drives in the largest of Nutanix’s flagship NX-3000 model.

Pricing for a four-node NX-1050 is $90,000 versus $144,000 for an NX-3000.

A 2U NX-6000 includes 32 cores, 32 TB of hard drive capacity and either 1.6 TB (NX-6050) or 3.2 TB (NX-6070) of flash. The NX-6050 costs $120,000 for two nodes, while the NX-6070 is priced at $180,000 for two nodes.

We’re still waiting Maxta pricing, or any indication of Maxta cost….anyone got it?

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Nutanix NX-3000 pricing estimate

Excerpt from original article at InfoWorld

Nutanix NX3000 base price

The Nutanix NX-3000 series of products provide a unique solution for virtualization deployments. Measuring this product against any other competition would be problematic as there really isn’t anything like it. It’s even tougher if you evaluate strictly on cost, which at a base price of $144,000 per appliance is significant. But the benefits — high availability, high performance, all the advantages of centralized storage without the overhead — are compelling. At the end of the day it’s an ideal solution for high-end data centers looking to pack as much virtualization capacity into the least amount of space possible.

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Nutanix tops V3 Technology Awards


No Nutanix pricing in this article.

Nutanix, the leading provider of hyper-efficient, massively scalable and elegantly simple datacentre infrastructure solutions, has been awarded for its continuing innovation in optimising datacentre infrastructure at the V3 Technology Awards 2013. During a ceremony at the Waldorf Hilton Hotel, the company was awarded Best Virtualisation product, beating a host of well respected and larger, more established organisations in the virtualisation market.

V3.co.uk is a leading source of news and analysis for technology professionals, written by a team of expert IT journalists in the UK and Silicon Valley. The awards were hotly contested this year, with more than 450 entries from 150 companies.

“It’s great to see a new company like Nutanix being recognised at the V3 Technology Awards, among the industry giants. It wasn’t an easy task whittling down the hundreds of entries to create the shortlist, and then V3 readers voted in their thousands for their favourites, making this a significant achievement and a well-deserved win. Well done Nutanix!” said Madeline Bennett, Editor, V3 and The INQUIRER.

Alan Campbell, Regional Director of Western Europe at Nutanix, commented on the success: “Nutanix is a company that is constantly innovating and striving to provide the best platform for its customers, so this recognition by a highly respected publication is a testament to the hard work of our team. Virtualisation is a rapidly evolving technology which we are proud to be at the forefront of and to receive an award in the UK, a key market for us, is an honour.”

As the fastest growing enterprise infrastructure company of the past decade, Nutanix is rapidly being recognised for delivering the industry’s first software-driven converged datacentre platform that uniquely combines storage and compute resources in a single scalable appliance that runs multiple hypervisors, including VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V and KVM.

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Nutanix Pricing, NX-1000, NX-6000 cost

Nutanix, a leading provider of hyper-efficient, massively scalable and elegantly simple datacenter infrastructure solutions, today announced two new platforms that meet the cost, performance and scale requirements to run nearly any enterprise application. Nutanix’s expanded portfolio of Virtual Computing Platforms enables IT teams to tailor and seamlessly grow their compute and storage environment to fit their individual requirements, whether for an enterprise branch office with limited on-site IT resources or core datacenters tasked with supporting an increasingly diverse and demanding set of workloads.

The NX-1000 series puts converged infrastructure within reach of small to mid-sized corporations, enterprise branch offices or retail stores at an attractive price point while also significantly streamlining IT management. The NX-6000 series allows enterprises to scale their Nutanix cluster by adding storage capacity as needed for applications with large data sets such as big data projects, high-end databases or demanding virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI).

Converged Infrastructure for the Mid-Market – the NX-1000 Series

Small to mid-sized corporations, enterprise branch offices and retail stores typically lack the specialized IT resources needed to manage traditional infrastructure built with separate servers, storage arrays and networking. Unlike other converged infrastructure solutions, which offer little more than legacy products packaged into a single chassis or cabinet, the Nutanix NX-1000 Series, like other Nutanix platforms, features a flatter datacenter architecture that eliminates the need for centralized SAN/NAS storage, thereby dramatically reducing IT complexity and simplifying management.

This new platform includes all of the functionality offered in every Nutanix Virtual Computing Platform, including software-based storage controller technology and advanced information lifecycle management (ILM) capabilities, such as flash-enabled data tiering and performance-optimized data compression. The NX-1000 also requires up to 80 percent less space and power than alternative approaches, providing a single platform to power branch office services, including local applications, virtual desktop deployments, file and print services, DHCP and DNS services, WAN optimization controllers and security-focused virtual appliances.

Features and benefits include:

Easy-to-deploy converged infrastructure in a single 2U appliance to run virtual workloads common in mid-sized corporations, enterprise branch offices and retail stores
Flexibility to use existing network infrastructure (1 Gbps or 10 Gbps Ethernet) to reduce deployment costs and accelerate deployment
Pre-installed replication and back-up software automatically protects VM-specific data
Affordable pricing beginning at just $22,500 per node (server and storage included)

For a limited time, Nutanix is offering a pricing promotion on the NX-1000 series platform. Contact your local Nutanix sales representative or authorized partner for more details.

The First Elastic Storage Offering in Converged Infrastructure – the NX-6000 Series

Although many converged infrastructure solutions enable a simpler, building block-based approach to the enterprise datacenter, they often lack the ability to ideally match infrastructure capabilities with the demands of specific enterprise applications or services.

The Nutanix NX-6000 Virtual Computing Platform is the first converged datacenter platform to independently scale storage resources in a single converged infrastructure. Existing buyers of converged infrastructure have typically been forced to deploy products that only offer fixed, vendor-selected ratios of storage capacity and compute performance. Because most enterprises need to run multiple applications within the same environment, each with their own unique resource demands, IT is now in need of infrastructure that can be uniquely tailored to each environment. The Nutanix NX-6000 platform makes it simple and affordable for enterprises to design and scale their datacenters one appliance at a time with the ability to add just the right amount of storage and compute resources for any workload.

Features and benefits include:

Allows IT to choose, provision and expand storage capacity based on need, avoiding costly purchases of underutilized or unneeded resources
Allows new platforms to be seamlessly added to existing Nutanix clusters, enabling customers to mix and match platforms within a single environment for running multiple business applications simultaneously
Delivers 3X more raw storage capacity than earlier Nutanix platforms to support the most data intensive applications, such as SQL databases, Hadoop-driven data analytics or large-scale VDI rollouts. Doubles the amount of server-attached flash capacity for accommodating very large working sets, accelerating I/O intensive applications
Includes in-line and post-process data compression to deliver 35 TB to 70 TB of usable storage in a space-efficient 2U platform
Pricing beginning at $60,000 per node

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