The last breakout session of Day at 1 at Nutanix .Next 2025 was Jeffrey ‘Gregor’ and Maroane Boutayeb (a fellow NTC!) from OVHcloud showing us the power of running the Nutanix we know from on-prem in their ‘Optimize IT. Remove Complexity. Control Costs.’ session.
OVHcloud is one of Europe’s best kept secrets, a hyperscaler competitor you might not have heard of that offers a huge range of services from virtual servers, dedicated servers, private cloud and an array of ‘as a service’ options such as load balancers, object storage, databases and a whole lot more. (https://us.ovhcloud.com/ for the US or https://ovhcloud.com in Europe)
Founded in 1999, OVH have a network presence across the world with an innovative offering known as ‘vRack‘ – a solution that allows a customer to connect services in the same, or different OVHcloud datacentres together in a private configuration much like a VLAN or internal network would be.
This private connection could be across the world, simplifying network operations and massively reducing complexity for applications and Disaster Recovery scenarios. https://us.ovhcloud.com/network/vrack/
Maroane spoke of OVHcloud in that they build their own servers from the ground up, even speaking about bending metal and building unique cooling solutions to maximise efficiencies. These OVH servers are certified through Nutanix as an authorised vendor similar to their own NX or other OEM vendor hardware so you can be assured of the same experience you’re used to.
Ordering a Nutanix cluster on OVHcloud can be completed directly through the website, a swipe of a credit card and in a couple of hours you will have your own very own Nutanix cluster in whichever datacentre you chose. Architecturally you can then use OVH Connect (the equivalent of Azure ExpressRoute or AWS Direct Connect) or a traditional VPN to connect to your own infrastructure securely.
OVHcloud’s messaging is very much of a ‘you enjoy Nutanix on-prem, you can enjoy it off-prem too, without being in a traditional Hyperscaler where cost fluctuations make OpEx harder to predict’.
Scaling out and in can be completed via the OVH control panel and completed quickly and efficiently controlling cost whilst allowing for expansion and contraction as required by business requirements – unlike traditional CapEx models of having to order hardware and install it.
Connecting multiple Nutanix on OVHcloud clusters together using vRack very quickly can build a geographically separated, highly available solution without the traditional challenges of maintaining networking as that’s all in OVH’s SLA.
Maroane and Gregor spoke of reference customers they have within their offering that does exactly this and even integrates with Hycu, a well known backup and recovery solution that supports Nutanix and OVH’s S3 object storage for an ‘integrated’ offering.
A lot of folks will be thinking, with Nutanix supporting NC2 on Azure, AWS, and ‘soon’ GCP what’s unique about OVHcloud?
Choice is key in making decisions, and OVH has lots of choice around the node configurations available, believes they have better flexibility in cost control and being ‘simpler’ to consume makes the barrier of entry lower for customers.
I’m going to tap up Maroane for a trial cluster to play with and see how it works on the ground.