The biggest drivers for HCI is to be seen from a standpoint of IT agility

Raja Mukhopadhyay, VP, Product Management, Nutanix Inc. and Gaurish Lawande, Director - Systems Engineering, Nutanix India talks about the Hyper-Converged Infrastructure and Nutanix’s play. Excerpts:

Voice&Data: How do you see the transition of a hardware-centric IT infrastructure to software-defined?

Raja: If one looks at the IT infrastructure evolution, the tipping point I consider was the converged systems, which came in first and then we graduated to hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI), that is paving the way for a virtual machine infrastructure. Also, it’s a platform-centric approach that paves the way for all the elements meshing in and enabling the hyper-convergence infrastructure. So, we have taken our platform and ensured that all of those services are natively integrated into the platform. And, that’s one key flank along our software-defined story.

The biggest drivers for HCI is to be seen from a standpoint of IT agility, which has become an essential imperative if a company is not agile in the business processes, then it will adversely impact in bringing out products and services to market quickly – the chances are they will become obsolete very soon.

Voice&Data: Can you give insights on performance efficiency of a softwaredefined infrastructure brings to table?

Gaurish: If I can talk from a Nutanix perspective, we have seen massive performance uptimes, for instance, the infrastructure became so agile that some of the processes what used to take days have been reduced to hours. That’s the power of a software-defined infrastructure.

Voice&Data: What is your GTM strategy, how many customers you have for HCI?

Raja: From an India standpoint, we cannot disclose the actual numbers but what I can say is that our clients are from across the industry spectrum. For instance, from stock exchanges to biggest banks and government organization are our clients.

And, looking at the use cases, our clients are using HCI for mission-critical applications and giving them the right kind of computing infrastructure for these applications to run 24/7. Actually, HCI has taken a pivotal space in our clients IT.

Raja: Just to add to that if I take a global perspective, Nutanix has a huge customer base and I believe HCI from a trend has gone mainstream and we are at the forefront of this revolution by enabling state of the art solutions.

Voice&Data: If you look at the datacenter dynamics right now, how do you see HCI is going to change the personality of data centers as we move forward?

Raja: If you look into the last decade or so, you need to look at technologies like HCI and the fundamental changes that happened in the way IT has been consumed and driven. Today, the public cloud offers more IT leverage than an ‘on-prem’ set up. Clearly, it’s about computing elasticity and HCI will usher in large-scale changes across the IT infrastructure spectrum. Voice&Data: How is HCI jumpstarting 5G? Raja: Gaurish:

Yes 5G definitely need state of the art infrastructure; it’s not possible with traditional infrastructure.

In fact, 5G will actually propel the era of connected devices to a great extent. And, these connected devices will then manifest into the IOT kind of environment and Nutanix is well poised in driving that change with our solutions.