A number of vendors, including Nutanix, offer hyperconverged solutions running on Cisco UCS C-Series rackmount servers. However, the majority of UCS shipments are B-Series Blade Servers. Nutanix pioneers again and addresses this deficiency by announcing planned support for Cisco UCS blades. Nutanix doesn’t stop there. Nutanix™ is also planning to support additional all-flash and storage-only rackmount server configurations, which will further complement our broad swath of support for UCS.

Solving the UCS B-Series Blade Server Challenge

Today, UCS B200-M4 blades are limited to 3.2TB of all-flash raw storage. The limited flash, in many cases, is inadequate for storage capacity requirements. Cisco® and the other hyperconverged manufacturers have consequently limited their solutions to rackmount servers.

But just as customers drove Nutanix’s initial support of Cisco® C-Series, they also pushed for a hyperconverged option for their more prevalent B-Series Blade Server deployments. Cisco® customers from boutique businesses to Global 500 organizations, from commercial to government, and from Pasadena to Pune have been requesting Nutanix software on both UCS® blade and rackmount servers. Nutanix™ has responded with plans for the only hyperconverged software with integrated blade server support.

“We are excited about deploying the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud PlatformTM solution on our Cisco UCS® servers. This will dramatically simplify running applications in our datacenter. We’ve been more than pleased by the high level of support and cooperation from Nutanix and Cisco and look forward to expanding the use of our new cloud platform to other enterprise applications in the future.”

– Mandar Marulkar, CIO, KPIT

Nutanix™ will solve the storage capacity deficiency of B-Series blades by enabling customers to add storage-only nodes to their B-Series blade clusters. Once released, a pair of all-flash C240-M4SX storage-only nodes can be added to the cluster with up to 24 1.6TB SSDs per node. Nutanix’s unique ability to mix and match nodes with different compute:storage ratios makes this possible.

The storage-only nodes will enable UCS® customers to economically optimize the balance between blades and C240s. It will also enable them to scale storage independent of compute. Rather than requiring a large investment in a new storage array as the older unit reaches capacity, customers can expand their environments incrementally as needed.

Another advantage of this architecture is that, unlike SAN-based architecture, customers benefit from both the continuous enhancements to Nutanix™ software and UCS® hardware. With a single click, UCS® customers will be able to non-disruptively upgrade their blades and rackmounts with the latest Nutanix™ software, realizing any increased performance and additional product capabilities in the process. Similarly, Moore’s Law should enable newer nodes to have a higher density of VMs per node – thereby reducing overall project cost as the UCS® footprint expands.

Since the storage-only nodes run Nutanix™ AHV, no additional monies are required for virtualization software license fees. The AHV storage-only nodes can be mixed with ESXi nodes in the same cluster.

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