Thanks for your comments, you’ve made some good points. Given the context in which the session was presented (VMworld Europe) I felt it was better to keep the focus on Nutanix in virtualisation terms.

The changes and disruption that you mention are definitely there in my opinion, and would make for a great discussion sometime. I’m also thinking about writing a bigger discourse on it all in the future. Personally I want to consider the whole picture and all of the storage “startups” as their approaches vary.

Exciting times!

For example, what would this blog look like if EMC had announced at VMworld this year that customers could now run App’s directly on a VNXe.
Remember: All the vendors run their storage arrays on industry standard Intel architecture and EMC has already hinted that it has plans to move the external appliances (aka: vRPA) into VM’s on the array.
In this example, EMC would then support adjacent processor support for App and Storage access using VFCache and FAST. Meaning that my App would read and WRITE blocks of data in PCIe NAND at upto 1.5GBs @0.026ms latency before being heat optimised to the most cost appropriate storage tier.
And, that you could now scale your EMC platform transparently from a VNXe to a VMAX with both linear performance and capacity. While providing both data and Application redundancy.
Finally and most importantly that the software controlling smarts seem “logically” hyper-visor and function independent.
I would think that we had witnessing a seed change in the storage industry!

I think that what is MOST interesting about Nutanix in market terms, is their disruptive influence on the likes of EMC & NetApp and the inevitable knock on effects that this has on the tenuous Cisco relationship.