Nutanix Strikes Product Deals With Nvidia, Pure Storage, Cisco In Latest VMware Salvo

‘What I’ll point out is the destabilization that’s happened at customers is not limited to customers. It’s actually in the partner community, whether those partners are a technology partner or reseller partner. And so we have a whole influx of partner interest because they’re worried that Broadcom could share- shift the wallet,’ says Lee Caswell, Nutanix’s senior vice president of product and solutions marketing.

Nutanix unveiled new partnerships in storage, cloud and AI as technology industry titans including Nvidia, Pure Storage, Cisco Systems and Citrix become the latest heavyweights to integrate the VMware alternative into their products.

Nutanix is hosting its NEXT 2025 conference in Washington, D.C., this week, and attendance on the show floor is booming with 85 sponsors this year compared with 55 last year.

“The number of partners working with Nutanix has just surged,” Lee Caswell, the company’s senior vice president of product and solutions marketing, said at a media prebriefing ahead of this week’s show.

“What I’ll point out is the destabilization that’s happened at customers is not limited to customers. It’s actually in the partner community, whether those partners are a technology partner or reseller partner. And so we have a whole influx of partner interest because they’re worried that Broadcom could share-shift the wallet,” said Caswell.

In contrast, he said partners look at Nutanix as a way to “derisk” infrastructure environments while introducing modern capabilities around storage, container management and AI. Infrastructure leaders Dell and Lenovo recently introduced stand-alone storage products that run Nutanix HCI as the backbone of a new hybrid approach to designing hybrid information systems.

Caswell said that after the company debuted its storage collaboration with Dell around external storage in its PowerFlex offering last year, this year it is partnering with Pure Storage.

Caswell said there is tremendous business value in bringing the capabilities of HCI to customers with large storage estates, and it represents a shift in how the company viewed the technology in the past.

“This is a material change, and I think a maturing of the Nutanix vision,” he said. “Storage is going to be around for a long time to come, just like virtual machines are going to be around for a long time to come. And so how do we extend the value there?”

Caswell said with Nutanix’s hypervisor-agnostic architecture underpinning the management of the storage, users have flexibility around backing up and optimizing those deployments.

Caswell said Nutanix is leaning into containerization as the go-forward modern, agile application development platform. While virtual machines provide infrastructure resiliency, Kubernetes gives engineers the flexibility to develop applications more quickly, he said during the call.

“Three years ago, this started as a project. Project Beacon was the idea that you could run any application anywhere,” he said. “We’ll be showing how cloud-native AOS, this is containerized AOS—AOS [Acropolis Operating System] is our storage stack—this aggregates, protects, snapshots the data, and this was always architected independent of any hypervisor.”

He said 22 percent of Nutanix customers run vSphere on Nutanix’s AOS stack, giving those users the freedom to work inside their choice of hypervisor––and also the option to containerize that data.

“And so that’s the element of containerized AOS—[it] means now you can start extending deeper into the public cloud and further into the edge,” Caswell said.

Here are five major announcements happening this week at Nutanix NEXT 2025.

Nutanix Enterprise AI

The Agentic AI arms race is well underway, with some of the biggest names in the AI world betting that by the end of this year agents will be running on systems in nearly every organization of note.

The most recent iteration of Nutanix Enterprise AI is designed to help them get there faster. It adds deeper integrations with Nvidia AI Enterprise, Nvidia NIM microservices and its Nvidia NeMo framework.

Caswell said Nvidia is offering its NeMo reasoning agents to Nutanix customers through Nutanix Enterprise AI. He said it gives users the choice of LLMs through its Nvidia AI Enterprise, and access to Nvidia models to “tune the results for a production-grade environment.”

“And together what we’re offering is an integrated workflow where our Nutanix Enterprise AI offering has an endpoint that can be pointed to any one of those models you select,” he said during the prebriefing. “With Nvidia’s help and support, now you can go and deploy those optimized for performance for Nvidia GPUs. So I think to the extent that Nvidia is intent on getting GPUs deployed across the enterprise, we can be a fast path to accelerating those models to basically help with new AI applications and give you the choices that you really care about.”

Nutanix wants to simplify the processes for customers to build, run and securely manage models and inferencing services across all digital estates: the edge, the data center and on any Cloud Native Computing Foundation-certified Kubernetes environment.

Nutanix HCI On Pure Storage

Nutanix said with this partnership, customers will get high-performance, flexible and efficient full-stack infrastructure delivered on a reliable, scalable all-flash Pure Storage system.

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure, powered by the Nutanix AHV hypervisor along with Nutanix Flow virtual networking and security, will integrate with Pure Storage FlashArray over NVMe/TCP to deliver a customer experience designed for high-demand data workloads, including AI.

“We see it as a major opportunity to engage with some of the largest customers on an accelerated timetable ahead of when they might deploy HCI by itself. … You’re going to have storage systems and HCI and so they’re going to be managed. The opportunity to go and manage those with a common interface, we think that’s an operational solve for a lot of customers,” Caswell said.

He said a typical HCI cluster today might have a series of servers that scale to 32 nodes or smaller estates with six to 16 nodes.

“As we added more value—we added AHV, replication, [disaster recovery] and our [Nutanix] Flow capabilities—one of the interesting things is because AOS was architected modularly outside of the hypervisor it meant that we could have a choice of hypervisor here,” Caswell said. “Certainly, this offering is going to allow customers to move away from vSphere, but it also means that we could then remove AOS and access external storage and this is what engineering teams have done.”

He said doing so gives customers a way to orchestrate storage through Nutanix Prism—its multi-cloud management interface—which brings in more scale and more performance for those storage-centric customers who need more performance in their capacity or have teams that wish to manage that estate independently.

FlashStack With Nutanix

Cisco and Pure Storage are expanding their partnership of more than 60 FlashStack- validated designs in a deal with Nutanix.

To bring the product to market, Caswell said Nutanix worked with Cisco—which runs FlashStack through a partnership with Pure Storage—to deliver an integrated converged product.

“So now we’ve got FlashStack with Nutanix. What that means is you’ll have a meet-in-the- channel model, but jointly supported across all three companies—Cisco, Pure and Nutanix,” Caswell said.

With this collaboration, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure, powered by the Nutanix AHV along with Nutanix Flow virtual networking and security, will integrate with Pure Storage FlashArray over NVMe/TCP to give customers a uniquely designed product for high-demand data workloads, including AI.

“With nearly a decade of joint innovation with Pure Storage, and an expanded partnership and co-development road map with Nutanix, we’re offering a proven platform backed by Cisco-validated designs, a world-class joint support model and deep integration with Cisco Intersight—providing unified visibility across both Pure Storage and Nutanix clusters for a more complete view of the operating environment,” said Jeremy Foster, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco Compute, in a statement.

Cloud Native AOS

Nutanix AOS—its operating system—has always allowed customers to use their choice of hypervisor, whether it is their own Acropolis Hypervisor or the rival vSphere, Caswell said. He said for users that want to move their hypervisor, and AOS, to the public cloud it needed bare-metal nodes available through cloud providers. Not anymore, he said.

“When you move to Cloud Native AOS, now we can run on Kubernetes runtime anywhere,” he said. “And the hypervisor is optional. So in this case, the first one we’re supporting is Amazon EKS. And you’ve got a Kubernetes runtime and then we’re providing all these data services on top of that. So you can go and snapshot, replicate and then restore for blocks right across [availability zones], identically to how you do it on-prem. And so the idea that you can have Kubernetes that runs identically in a cloud-native environment pushes us deeper into the cloud.”

Caswell said at the edge, Nutanix sees that environment being outfitted with smaller, more specific nodes and a “skinning down” of the resource environment to bare-metal Linux.

“We view that you could then run Cloud Native AOS, no hypervisor required, and our Kubernetes platform, and you get these common data services,” he said. “This is important. We’re giving an enterprise experience for Kubernetes, orchestrated containers wherever you run across the hybrid cloud.”

Nutanix’s Bigger Virtual Desktop

Nutanix also announced that VMware Horizon—which was carved out of VMware following the Broadcom acquisition and sold to private equity firm KKR in July—also now supports Nutanix. VMware Horizon now calls itself Omnissa.

“That’s a market signal shift, I think, or signal shift to the market, showing that even an ex-VMware holding now that it’s independent is supporting Nutanix,” Caswell said.

In addition, Caswell said that Omnissa rival Citrix is bringing NetScaler support for Nutanix as well.

“That’s for the largest VDI installations for load-balancing and for security,” he said.