Nutanix Acquisitions Fuel Cloud Platform Ambitions

As part of an effort to transform hyperconvergence platforms into a foundation for building private clouds, Nutanix today announced it has acquired both Calm.io and PernixData.

Nutanix CEO Dheeraj Pandey says now that the company has established itself as a pioneer of hyperconvergence, the next logical step is to help further drive the rise of “invisible infrastructure.”

“We need to move up the value chain,” says Pandey.

Calm.io adds a DevOps framework to a Nutanix portfolio capable of running across VMware, Hyper-V and an implementation of a Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) that Nutanix uses as the foundation of its Application Mobility Fabric. PernixData, meanwhile, provides analytics tools designed to help IT organizations optimize storage and compute resources to dynamically meet the I/O requirements of any given application.

By acquiring Calm.io, Nutanix plans to add cloud automation and management capabilities to its existing platform to deliver application and service orchestration, runtime lifecycle management, policy-based governance, comprehensive reporting and auditing services across virtual machines and containers running in both legacy and emerging microservices environments.

Pandey says PernixData complements that effort by helping Nutanix to create a new stack to replace traditional storage silos and high-latency networks with a new memory and advanced interconnect storage architecture based on Flash and other forms of emerging non-volatile memory such as 3D XPoint being developed by Intel and Micron.

In both cases, Nutanix is positioning itself to be a leading provider of private cloud computing platforms that can be deployed on-premise or in the cloud. Nutanix has already provided IT organizations with the ability to deploy its core software on its own hardware, other servers, or in the cloud. These latest acquisitions accelerate those efforts in a way that not only continues to blur the line between compute and storage, but portends the melding of IT management across hybrid cloud computing scenarios.

Naturally, it remains to be seen just how Nutanix will turn that vision of the future of enterprise IT into an everyday reality. But what is clear at this point is that the isolated silos that once defined enterprise IT architecture are quickly becoming a thing of the past.