Over the years we have been using many great technologies to manage our IT infrastructure and with their evolution they become more advanced, bringing more functionality, more optimization, more openness and freedom. But they also bring a bigger and bigger level of complexity and plentiful moving parts that need care and feeding. Through this evolution some of the biggest companies in Storage, Virtualization and Networking area have slowly become the Big Blue of the 90’s. They add a ton of new products, build on top of the same old core architecture and make the whole thing highly dependent, not so stable and flexible version of Voltron. Don’t get me wrong, Voltron used to be pretty cool back in the old 20th century, but today I would rather have Eve from Wall-E helping me do my datacenter chores than a sword-wielding, lion-handed mega gladiator robot. I agree that some of the improvements bring much greater granularity, but hey, very small portion of the enterprises actually need this. Sometimes together with your main product (ESXi) you get another product (e.g. VSAN), with all of its “features” regardless whether you need it or not, but you can’t remove it because it’s e.g. in the kernel of the main product. People like us spend years to learn the specific of every part of the puzzle and its interoperability with the other parts in order to see the full picture. We all know how much it costs to set up the whole environment and after that maintain its optimal operation. However in 2017 is unacceptable to spend time and resources to make the control and/ or management plane of specific solutions highly available, to wait the vendor to bring new version of its firmware/ software in order to work with e.g. the latest OS or with others dependent components, to spend hours during upgrade (together with the teams, responsible for each moving part) and more unnecessary tasks that drive the total cost of your IT infrastructure up.

Unless you are cloud provider or have a very mature DevOps operation you may get to some point where “keeping the lights on” has taken a significant resource of your company. But now you have choice, by using solutions as those provided by Nutanix that are designed from scratch with the idea to simply run resilient and secure environment of any scale and give you more time for your business. Deploying a modern, advanced infrastructure solution that has simplicity in it’s DNA and is purpose built to just work and provide a core set of features will have you spend less time on care and feeding and allow you to have more time on being creative. Nutanix are not the only provider that has a proposition in this market space. We do however feel that today they have the strongest and most mature  product. Feel free to review this detailed article that provides an overview of this market segment by datacenterknowledge.