Dell Technologies, Nutanix Leverage Go-to-Market Efforts to Target Broadcom’s VMware

“Our partners will now be able to have much more comprehensive conversations with their customers about their hypervisor strategy,” Dell Technologies CEO Drew Schulke told CRN.

Dell Technologies and Nutanix partner on new storage products and a new go-to-market strategy aimed at finding alternatives to VMware solutions in the face of Broadcom price increases.

The new XC Plus is designed for customers who want to use Dell storage in Nutanix HCI environments, while Dell PowerFlex with Nutanix Cloud Platform provides an alternative to vSphere in the form of Nutanix Acropolis on the Dell PowerFlex platform.

“Our partners will now be able to have much more comprehensive conversations with their customers about hypervisor strategy,” Drew Schulke, Dell Technologies vice president, Infrastructure Solutions Group, storage portfolio, told CRN. “Both in terms of the XC Plus offering, if they focus on the HCI operating model. Customers who are looking for something that can better support virtual and non-virtualized workloads with PowerFlex now have Acropolis as a first-class citizen in that conversation.”

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Based in San Jose, California, Nutanix leverages not only Dell’s market-leading storage hardware solutions, but also Dell’s market-leading storage sales teams to drive revenue and service.

“Dell will take over the end-to-end lead for sales, support, transactions and services. It’s a great development for Dell channel partners because now they can deliver the solution from start to finish, through Dell,” said Schulke (pictured above). “That’s on the XC Plus side.”

Josh Lee is CTO of VirtuIT, based in Nanuet, NY, a Dell Platinum partner and also a Nutanix partner. He said Dell’s expanding optionality is a huge win for its customers.

“Dell has a proven track record of selling and supporting purpose-built HCI appliances,” he told CRN. “Dell now has those integrations with Microsoft and Red Hat with Azure Stack HCI, Broadcom with VXRail. That gives our customers at VirtuIT options on how they want to achieve their vision of multi- and hybrid cloud with the best-in-class hardware. We’re meeting with Dell leadership in our sales regions this week to discuss strategy and go-to-market for our mutual customer and prospects.”

And because it’s a storage deal, Schulke said, the XC Plus, as well as the Dell PowerFlex with Nutanix Cloud Foundations that will be released later this year, are eligible for incentives available through Partner First For Storage. That also means Dell’s internal sales reps will be promoting Nutanix offerings to their customers, prospects and the channel.

“Absolutely. 100 percent,” Schulke said. “We started taking orders for that last week. We’re actively working to enable and sell the XC Plus.”

Dell previously generated 40 percent of VMware’s revenue through several relationships under a five-year agreement. However, Dell ended that relationship two years earlier than planned in February of this year, citing Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware as the reason.

Ketan Shah, vice president of products at Nutanix, said Nutanix is ​​excited to reach Dell customers based in Round Rock, Texas.

“Dell obviously has a huge go-to-market resource and a strong channel,” he said. “If I’m holding back my enthusiasm, don’t be fooled. We’re very excited.”

In storage, according to the latest data from tracking firm IDC, Dell ranks first in enterprise external RAID storage with 24.8 percent. It is first in high-end RAID storage with 34.9 percent, mid-range RAID storage, also owned by Dell, with 25 percent. It was number one in storage software with 9.6 percent, first in converged systems with 53.1 percent, first in hyperconverged systems with 33 percent, first in backup appliances with 41.2 percent.

Schulke said that by partnering with PowerFlex, customers can scale compute and storage to meet demand and streamline DevOps with self-service and automation for virtual environments and containerized applications.

“We’re incredibly excited that of all the people Nutanix could partner with on an external storage product, we’ll be the first to do so with PowerFlex,” Shulke said.

Schulke said customers choose PowerFlex because of its scalable performance across all parameters, such as input/output operations per second (IOPs), throughput and latency. PowerFlex gets better as customers grow.

“So if you want more compute power for your application, you add more compute nodes,” Schulke told CRN. “If you want more capacity, you add more storage nodes. It’s very, very efficient. All of this happens in a framework that can provide extremely high levels of performance.”

Shah told CRN that the addition of PowerFlex to the Nutanix cloud platform is a response to demand from some of the largest enterprise customers and prospects who have been pushing for the solution in their environments.

“This is a big deal. This is the first of its kind. This is the first time Nutanix has supported external storage,” Shah said. “Customer choice was one of our key principles. It was anchored by some large customers and prospects who were asking for it.”