A lot of people over the years, myself included have often pondered a question – “What if I could consume external storage in Nutanix?”
I liken this to my old days where three-tier was the norm, and often hypervisors would be replaced at a different time to that of the storage and we had this ever iterating hardware refresh. Along comes hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) where the lines were blurred and servers contributed storage at the same time as their compute capabilities.
Anyway… initially, the views were that because Nutanix would be relying on ‘something else’ to perform (i.e. the storage) we wouldn’t see it happen – but here we are, it has happened…!
A hat tip to VMware, they have for a while offered the ability to bring along of your own storage with their VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) HCI-esque product as long as VSAN was used in the main management domain – you were free to use ‘other’ storage in your workload domains.
With AOS 7.1, Nutanix Cloud Platform (NCP) with PowerFlex is a reality and I hope it opens a door to bring in other external storage options.
Check out the Overview and wide range of supported hardware models