Note: This is my very last “vendorwag”. I know, wipe a tear from your eye! I’d like to take this opportunity to thank ALL the vendors over the last two or so years for taking the time out to engage with me…
This weeks vendorwag
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is with Nutanix. How to describe in a nutshell what they do?
Well, they provide servers and storage in highly dense 2U packages that have VMware
ESX pre-installed. The physical box contains both FusionIO, SSD and HDD storage for
blistering performance, and the storage is provided by a virtual appliance. The interesting
thing that sets them apart from their competitors is their file system. Now of course, this
file system isn’t presented directly to ESX (it only supports FC, iSCSI, and NFS) but is used
in the background. It’s based around the principals of MapReduce that can be found in modern
scale-out clustering solutions like Hadoop, that are intended to address petabytes of storage,
and be able the tolerate the loss of a server with ease. Sporting an impressive engineer
background (Google, Oracle EXADATA, and Aster Data) as well as folks from the likes of NetApp,
VMware, DataDomain and XenSource, I think what they are doing is pretty cool. I
especially like the kind of modular approach where you can add individual 2U units (which
contain 4 servers) in the chassis as you go along – offering an interesting contrast to the
approach that, say vBlock, FlexPod and vStart offer.
Now all I have to do is see if I can persuade them to ship me an unit sometime!
I was lucky enough to speak to co-founder and CEO Dheerjai Pandey for the “Elevator Pitch” portion the session.
The Elevator Pitch:
Dheeraj is a co-founder and CEO of Nutanix. He brings over 13 years of experience working at
high growth enterprise software companies. Prior to founding Nutanix, Dheeraj was the VP of
Engineering at Aster Data (now Teradata), where he helped build the product and its engineering
team ground up. At Oracle, he managed the storage engine group for Oracle Database/Exadata, and
co-authored numerous patents in the area of distributed databases. Dheeraj is a Ph.D. dropout from
University of Texas (Austin), where he was a Graduate Fellow of CS. He has a BS in CS from the
Indian Institute of Technology (IIT, Kanpur), where he was adjudged the “Best All-Rounder Student
Among All Graduating Students in All Disciplines.”
The Production Low Down:
In this video we go a bit more tech. With me is Lionel Marks, who is the Director of Product Marketing.
Lionel Marks is the Director of Product Marketing at Nutanix. He brings over 12 years of experience working at high growth enterprise software companies. Prior to joining Nutanix, Lionel spent 6 years at VMware as a Staff Sales Engieerinng professional where he championed datacenter efficiency and evangelized the virtues of a virtualized Datacenter. Prior to VMware, Lionel was at SUSE Linux where he headed the marketing efforts of the U.S. division. Lionel holds a Bachelors in Mechanical Engineering from University of Michigan, and spends his free time Hang-gliding between the clouds.
The Techknowledge Demo:
In this video we get an insight in what’s like to manage and monitor an Nutanix system. With me is Laura Jordana, Systems Reliability Engineer at Nutanix. Laura has over 5 years of experience in the IT industry and has spent the last 3 years in various support roles, supporting enterprise customers in the virtualization and networking space. She holds a Bachelor’s of Science in Computer Science from San Jose State University and is VCP5 certified. In her free time she enjoys learning about technology, spending time with family and friends, and hiking. You can find her on LinkedIn @ http://www.linkedin.com/in/laurajordana
This was first published in July 2012
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