5 Reasons Why Nutanix Says VMware Is Terrified Of Its Data Center Momentum

War Of Words Continues

Hyper-converged startup Nutanix held its tongue in early June when VMware storage executive Chuck Hollis published a series of blog posts about why his company's technology is superior. Now, as the heat of summer cranks up, Nutanix is responding with some sizzling claims of its own.

In a June 30 blog post, Lukas Lundell, global director of solutions and performance engineering at Nutanix, outlined several reasons why VMware sees the startup as a serious threat.

A former VMware architect for Accenture's R&D labs, Lundell has an extensive understanding of VMware technology. And based on the logic he uses to back up his arguments, it's now clear that Hollis isn't the only erudite technology expert in the VMware-Nutanix ideological donnybrook.

Following are five points Lundell raised in claiming that Nutanix is very much in VMware's head these days.

1. Nutanix's Tech Works Better With Public Clouds

Lundell claims in the blog post that VMware EMC are "afraid" of Nutanix because its technology is simpler than theirs, and also works better with public clouds.

The big differentiator, according to Lundell, is Nutanix's "distributed management fabric," which was designed for bridging private and public clouds. That's something VMware and EMC don't have, he said.

"Chuck, EMC, and VMware can't retrofit their management stack to meet the demands of this new landscape… it needs a complete re-write," Lundell said in the blog post.

2. VMware's Management Software Is Outdated

VMware vCenter has been "the gold standard" for managing virtual environments, but it hasn't kept up with the times, and has actually grown more complex, according to Lundell. "Now vCenter has been bloated with a set of features that most of their customers pay for but frankly don’t care about or use," he said in the blog post.

Lundell listed 30 different steps he said are necessary to set up a vCenter deployment. But with so many steps involved, VMware can no longer claim that its vCenter setup process is simple, he said. "I feel like I am building my own three tier application from scratch every time I deploy vCenter," said Lundell in the blog post.

Nutanix puts compute and storage in a single appliance that's much easier to set up, according to Lundell.

3. Nutanix Is Tailor-Made For Cloud, VMware Isn't

VMware has been so busy getting into new markets like storage and networking that it hasn't been able to upgrade vCenter from a "single database and server model" to a distributed, cloudlike model, said Lundell.

VMware's attempts to upgrade its vSphere management interface from a client-server model to a web-browser-based model have been similarly unsuccessful, because "the company still hasn't figured out HTML5 yet," according to Lundell.

Nutanix, in contrast, has a distributed virtualization management setup that runs on every node in a system, which mitigates the impact of failures. And it's also got an HTML5 user interface for management that's accessible from any device with a browser, said Lundell.

4. VMware's Storage, Hyper-Converged Plays Aren't Working Out

VMware is in the hyper-converged infrastructure market with its EVO:RAIL reference architecture, and it's also in the storage space with its VSAN virtualization technology. Yet neither product "is getting the market traction they were hoping for," Lundell said in the blog post.

VSAN lacks support for vStorage API for Array Integration (VAAI), compression, deduplication, data locality and one-click upgrades, according to Lundell. All of which explains why VMware's Hollis is making "misleading comparisons" between the price and performance of his company's technology and that of Nutanix, said Lundell in the blog post.

5. VMware And EMC Declined To Waive Benchmarking Restrictions

VMware's Hollis (pictured), in his last blog post in mid-June, claimed EVO:RAIL offers better performance at a lower price than Nutanix's hyper-converged appliance. He also said VMware wanted to publish results of its head-to-head benchmarking comparisons between the two products, but Nutanix changed its EULA to prevent that.

But Lundell, in his blog post, gave a different rendition of how things went down. He said Nutanix offered to waive all legal restrictions on disclosing "test results, benchmarking, customer evaluations, customer testimonials, customer take-outs or account wins," as long as EMC and VMware agreed to do the same.

However, "Chuck and his lawyers declined. Have the courage of your convictions to accurately represent what we offered you," Lundell said in the blog post.