Dell, Nutanix Expand Storage Partnership With New PowerStore Offering

‘It was about 10 microseconds after we announced the PowerFlex integration with Nutanix that customers started asking about PowerStore,’ Drew Schulke, vice president of Dell’s Infrastructure Solutions Group, tells CRN.

Dell PowerStore will soon support the Nutanix Cloud Platform, a partnership that is designed to capture pent-up demand for hypervisor options in large storage deployments as customers look for ways to lower the cost of their virtualization environments.

Drew Schulke, vice president of Dell’s Infrastructure Solutions Group, told CRN this collaboration came about after the success of PowerFlex with Nutanix, which was unveiled last year.

“It was about 10 microseconds after we announced the PowerFlex integration with Nutanix that customers started asking about PowerStore,” he said during an interview this week. “And we did prioritize ‘Flex’ first, for a reason. We collectively had some very large customers that were pushing both of us to support this integration. They had tremendous investments that they were trying to rationalize and be strategic about, and so that’s why we led with ‘Flex’ first, but we always knew ‘Store’ was going to be a close second.”

PowerStore is Dell’s flagship enterprise storage product that features a dual controller architecture and fits in with traditional three-tier architectures. It has multiple models to address storage needs between entry level and high end, but it is in prime position to capture the $8 billion annual midrange storage market spend.

PowerStore is also one of Dell’s best-selling and fastest-growing products with six consecutive quarters of double-digit growth, with much of that coming through the channel and Dell’s Partner First For Storage initiative, Schulke said.

“The majority of that growth is coming from the partner community and the efforts that we’ve made around PowerStore Prime,” Schulke told CRN. “So we just see that that’s a continuation of the investment that we’ve made in the partner-led sales motion, not only just for PowerStore but across all of ISG. Certainly, PowerStore is very front and center of that.”

The new PowerStore featuring the Nutanix Cloud Platform is expected to be generally available in spring 2026.

In addition to providing the Nutanix Cloud Platform, the PowerStore 5200Q offers high-capacity performance with QLC flash, flexible scaling over 23 petabytes per cluster and optimized workload placement through integration with existing PowerStore clusters, Dell said during a media briefing. PowerStore 5200Q will be available in October. Buyers will be able to optimize it with Nutanix once that update is available in 2026.

The new PowerStore also features built-in anomaly detection, single sign-on and biometric authentication, HashiCorp key manager support and replication over Fibre Channel. In addition, automated health checks and repairs powered by Smart Support Auto-Heal functionality can cut issue resolution time by 90 percent.

This is Dell’s third foray into storage with Nutanix since the Round Rock, Texas-based hardware provider spun out VMware in 2021. However, Dell and Nutanix launched their first HCI product partnership in 2014. Last year the company brought to market Dell XC Plus, which is a turnkey HCI product that features the Nutanix Cloud Platform. Dell PowerFlex with Nutanix was released this year to a surge of interest among buyers that participated in beta tests. Nutanix CEO Rajiv Ramaswami even called out the surprising levels of demand for the PowerFlex product during the company’s earnings call last month.

Ketan Shah, vice president of product at Nutanix, told CRN this week that the company has won more PowerFlex deals since then.

“I think the first foray with Dell has exceeded our expectations, so that gives a lot of confidence and momentum internally,” Shah told CRN. “And then with this, it is much more of a mass market and much more of a partner-centric, partner-led opportunity. And we have a very strong channel presence. We have a lot of focus on enabling the partner community right now. So bringing the solution with Dell, we’re just super excited that [it] will enable broader go-to-market leverage with our partner community.”

Schulke, who is responsible for product management of Dell’s primary storage portfolio — PowerMax, PowerStore, PowerFlex and PowerVault, — said demand from customers for more hypervisor and container options has only increased in the last year. Dell believes Nutanix will play a significant role in providing that for customers going forward.

“We haven’t seen the customer interest in this particular topic slow down over that period of time,” he said. “If anything, it’s accelerated with customers looking for additional product options and more degrees of choice that they have in this particular space.”