Competitive Deep Dive Nutanix 9-19-18

NetApp Competitive Intelligence
Nutanix Competitive Deep-Dive
Andy Leverone
September 2018
1 © 2016 NetApp, Inc. All rights reserved. --- NETAPP CONFIDENTIAL ---
Agenda slide
1) Why customers choose Nutanix

2) Nutanix architecture
3) Nutanix strengths and weaknesses
4) Nutanix Sales Claims
5) Position NetApp HCI
Who Nutanix Sells To
Individuals Nutanix targets and positioning
App/Cloud Admins VM Admins C-Level

Control of infrastructure stack without needing to know how, or needing to
Pioneer in hyper-converged
rely on other admins to manage it
Simplicity Low-cost entry point
Public cloud agility with enterprise One throat to choke support for all
Management GUI integration
level security infrastructure
Integration w/most available hyper- Strong support from VM, cloud, and
Public cloud integration
visors (no lock-in) app teams
Hits most of the current buzzwords:
scale-out, inline efficiency, etc.
Success selling NetApp HCI requires that NetApp sales teams stop focusing solely on the customer’s
traditional storage teams and start building alliances with cloud, virtualization, LOB and other non-
traditional IT organizations.
Why Customers Choose Nutanix for HCI
Why Nutanix What Customers Like

• Low entry point, industry standard HW /SW
Perceived ROI
• Eliminates specialized technical resources for every project
• Reduces application deployment time and day to day management tasks
Simplicity/ Single Pane of Glass
• Manage everything from Prism
Acropolis Hypervisor • Gives customers choice of hypervisors and perception of an open architecture
• Cohesive story around cloud services, orchestration and automation, DR to the
Already talking about the cloud
cloud, data mobility, etc.
Nutanix circumvents storage • Nutanix gives non-traditional infrastructure teams control of their own storage and
administrators compute infrastructure which eliminates dependence on other infrastructure teams
• Clean deployment – very few cables
Product maturity
• Additional capabilities (Stretched clusters, GPUs, etc.)
Nutanix Hardware Options
Nutanix is only available on Nutanix or pre-qualified OEM or partner hardware
OEM Vendors 3rd Party Partners

 Nutanix NX and Dell EMC
XC account for nearly all
Nutanix sales
 Node configurations vary
depending on the partner
 Partner handles all support
in partner sales
 Software versions of
Nutanix are not available
to customers
Nutanix Architecture
Subtitle text placeholder
Nutanix Architecture
Tier 1 Workloads Nutanix Controller VM
(running on all nodes) (one per node)
Node 1 Node 2 Node N

VM VM VM CVM VM VM VM CVM VM VM VM CVM
Hypervisor Hypervisor Hypervisor
X86 X86 X86
Distributed Storage Fabric

 Snapshots  Clones  Compression  Deduplication
 Locality  Tiering Erasure Coding  Resilience
Nutanix Architecture: Data Locality
A VM’s primary data must reside on the same NODE as the VM itself
Nutanix Architecture: Storage Only Node in a Nutanix Cluster
The data on the HCI nodes includes all the No VMs run on
VMDKs for the VMs running on those nodes storage only nodes
and RF copies for data on other nodes
HCI Nodes
Capacity utilization being balanced Storage

Data on the storage only node Only Node
perfectly @ 35% per node is HIGHLY
consists of RF copies, cold VMDKs
UNLIKELY. Data locality means a nodes
and other INACTIVE data.
storage utilization is largely dependent on
the sizes of the node’s VMDKs Active VMDKs cannot reside on
storage only nodes because data
locality cannot be maintained
9 NetApp Insight © 2017 NetApp, Inc. All rights reserved. NetApp Confidential – Limited Use Only
Nutanix Strengths and Weaknesses
Perceived Nutanix Product Strengths
Perceived Nutanix Strength NetApp Response
• Prism is a pretty UI but adds little value in VMware environments, daily

management tasks still occur in vCenter
• Prism’s real function is to provide a single UI to keep track of the inevitable
Prism single pane of glass management
Nutanix silos that the customer will need to manage
• NetApp HCI is fully integrated into vCenter and it’s ability to consolidate
mixed workloads eliminates infrastructure silos
Acropolis / Multi-hypervisor support • NetApp HCI provides a partner based Red Hat KVM hypervisor option
Cleaner deployment (fewer cables, • Leverage the NetApp HCI white glove PS program which provides improved
faster, etc.) HCI deployment and free Mellanox switch pairs
• Positioned like it is an active/active datacenter like Metrocluster but it’s not

Stretched cluster DR support
• NetApp HCI sync replication provides all the same data protection benefits
Nutanix Weakness: Shared-Core CVMs
Controller VM (CVM) utilization introduces overheads
 Average CVM resource overhead is

10% - 30% per node
 i.e. 1 out of every 7 nodes is dedicated to
CVM overhead
 CVM utilization fluctuates depending

on cluster conditions
 No performance predictability
 CVM overhead and unpredictable

performance means fewer user VMs
per node
Real-World Example of Nutanix CVM’s CPU Consumption
VM’s sorted by CPU consumption (highest to lowest)
Real-World Example of Nutanix CVM’s Memory Consumption
VM’s sorted by memory consumption (highest to lowest)
Nutanix Weakness:
Every Nutanix Data Service Adds to CVM Overhead
Nutanix will make its overhead seem less impactful by not including core capabilities such as inline efficiencies
 Replication factor (RF)

 Deduplication
 Compression
 Prism
 ABS
 AFS
PERFORMANCE CAPACITY MEMORY CPU
Nutanix Weakness:
CVM Overhead Translates to Fewer VMs Per Node
AKA the Shared-Core Tax
When hypervisor
resources are used to
present the storage
there are less
resources available to
host virtual machines
Nutanix Weakness:
Data Locality Limits Performance and Scale Flexibility
 Performance impacts:
 A VM’s performance is limited to the node it resides on and can be impacted by other workloads
on the same node and CVM resource utilization
 The only solution to a resource starved VM is to vMotion it to another host with more available
resources
 Inflexible Scale:
 When the Nutanix workload(s) outgrow all nodes in the cluster, a new LARGER node must be
deployed and the workloads must be migrated from the old node to the new node
 What becomes of the old node? The capacity or compute could wind up idle or underutilized
 Costs to scale to a larger node significantly increases TCO
Nutanix Weakness: Poor Inline Efficiencies
Nutanix inline efficiencies are typically in the 1.5 – 2.5x range
 Nutanix performance best practices advises against using both dedupe and compression
at the same time
 Compression is preferred - lower impact to performance and CVM resources
 Deduplication is global but each node dedupes it’s own data (Data Locality)
 Pulling deduped data that is not local to the VM and not in cache (cold) could have some latency
 Make sure you are comparing apples to apples, Nutanix may try to artificially bolster their
efficiencies by including:
 Erasure code savings
 Clones and snapshots
 Thin Provisioning
Nutanix Sales Claims
Subtitle text placeholder
Nutanix:
Scale storage and compute separately with storage only nodes
Nutanix attempts to position their storage only nodes as an alternative to NetApp HCI
independent scale
 VM workloads cannot run on storage only nodes due to data locality

 Most common uses of storage only nodes
 Cluster disk balancing
 Target for data protection replication factors (RF-2 or RF-3)
 iSCSI target for external workloads
Nutanix: Weakness: Data Locality
The Nutanix Claim:
Ensuring the VM and the VM’s data reside on the same node eliminates
network latency and enables Nutanix to provide better read/write performance
than all other HCI architectures
The Reality
 Nutanix requires data locality for best performance: Nutanix was designed as a tiered
architecture, if a VM had to access data on a Nutanix HDD tier, a network hop would create
unacceptable performance latencies
 Network latency claim is overstated: NetApp HCI’s 10GbE round-trip network latency is measured
in microseconds
 Data locality provides no performance benefit on writes: NetApp HCI and Nutanix clusters accept
and replicate new data writes the exact same way
 Performance gains from data locality are very small and offset by the CVM overheads
Nutanix: The HCI Tax is Much Lower Than Competitors Claim
The HCI Tax is REAL! When Nutanix claims their CVM overheads are overblown
remind them:
Nutanix guidelines call for the following Nutanix guidelines for per-node CPU
CVM requirements Reservation
 CVM RAM sizing is the same for every  NX-1020: 4 vCPU, 7,000 MHz Reservation
supported hypervisor of Nutanix
 NX-1050: 8 vCPU, 10,000 MHz Reservation
 All CVMs in a cluster must have the same
amount of RAM
 Default and minimum is 16GB RAM per CVM
( this number increases with workload sizes,  NX-6035C: 4 vCPU, Reservation not
features enabled, and functionality needed). supported (AHV)
 With Inline dedup use 24GB RAM  NX-7000: 8 vCPU, 10,000 MHz Reservation
 Post dedup use 32GB RAM (requires that  NX-8000: 8 vCPU, 10,000 MHz Reservation
inline dedup is also activated)
Nutanix: Don’t Pay the VMware Luxury Tax
Nutanix tells customers they can save money by switching to Acropolis OS and
move away from VMware
 This tactic has been working in SMB/Mid Market and starting to have traction in Commercial
accounts.
 Make friends with the local VMware sales staff in your area
 VMware is at risk of losing this account
 Talk to local VMware sales staff about competitive pricing against Nutanix Acropolis Hypervisor to get deeper
discounts from VMware.
 Understand the size of the environment (CPU/Memory & Capacity). On average 10 CPU of
VMware require 12 CPU of Nutanix ( HCI tax) same customer workload
 NetApp HCI compute nodes can host 20% more VM workload or more. ( on average)
 Understand Nutanix Acropolis pricing
Acropolis Results in an Acropolis Tax
Acropolis has an MSRP

of around $12,000* per
node for 3 yrs.
*based on NX-3065-g5
Acropolis licenses cost

more than VMware
Licenses!
Nutanix: Sub $75k Offering Targeting the Global 200,000 SMB
 Look closely at what is missing from the Express Bundle

 There is no way to scale this solution – Customer’s will need to buy new HW!
 Nutanix is selling customer a DEAD END SOLUTION!
Nutanix: NetApp HCI Is Not Really Hyperconverged
The question is what does it really mean to be hyperconverged?
The key attributes are an SDDC stack on top of commoditized

hardware, and the simplicity of operations made possible through the
consolidation of a management stack for virtualized environments.
What are the benefits of sharing cores?

✗ Inflexible scale
✗ Shared core architecture
✗ Reliance on data locality
✗ High TCO
Nutanix: Prism Provides Workload Consolidation
Nutanix claims it provides workload consolidation through Prism’s ability to manage multiple
clusters with a single Prism interface
 That is federated management not consolidation
 Most cluster management within Nutanix occurs in vCenter and each Nutanix cluster
requires it’s own vCenter management instance
 Multiple clusters means multiple things to manage in vCenter
 Without guaranteed QoS multiple workloads within a single cluster run the risk of
unpredictable performance due to noisy neighbor workloads
Positioning NetApp HCI
Have the Right Conversations
 Are you in the right room?

 Have conversations with LoB leaders
 Is there an IT initiative underway?
 Tie the technology to the

business conversation
 Cloud initiatives
 Digital transformation
 Reducing costs
 Focus on flexibility, performance,

consolidation, etc.
Things to Remember to Compete Successfully
 Do not claim that Nutanix cannot scale capacity independently – they can do this with
storage only nodes. Instead discuss the caveats listed in this presentation
 Do not focus solely on the storage team when selling – Recent analyst shows Storage
team least influential with HCI opportunities
 HCI buyers are typically cloud, virtualization, application or even LOB teams
 Do not compete on price alone! HCI is sold on ease of use and the lowest price does not
guarantee a win
Tie Nutanix Architecture Weaknesses to the HCI Taxes
HCI taxes = higher TCO
 Storage controller VM Shared Core Tax

 Easiest tax to associate value to
 As high as 30% overhead
 Scaling compute or storage requires
expansion of all resource pools, leading to
Stranded or Underutilized Resource Tax
 Per socket SW License TAX
 Databases
 Backup and DR
 Various applications
NetApp HCI: Ready for Next
Enterprise-scale hyperconverged infrastructure
Guaranteed Performance Flexibility & Scale Automated Infrastructure

Deliver all your applications with Scale on your Transform and empower
confidence terms your IT operations
MULTI-
NETAPP ® NETAPP CLOUD
ENTERPRISE DATA DATA PUBLIC
IT FABRIC FABRIC CLOUD
How It’s Delivered and the Value it Brings
Guaranteed performance
NetApp HCI Nutanix
Min/max/burst QoS settings ✓ ✗

Dynamic allocation of QoS ✓ ✗
Performance independent of capacity ✓ ✗
Guaranteed
 QoS to guarantee predictable performance to all workloads
Performance
 Multi-tenant mixed workload consolidation
 Eliminate data silos and infrastructure sprawl
 Eliminate stranded capacity and unpredictable performance
 Enable performance-based SLAs for every workload
Flexibility and Scale
NetApp HCI Nutanix
Independent scale of compute and storage ✓ ✗

No sharing of cores or resources ✓ ✗
No dependence on data locality ✓ ✗
Flexibility and
 Scale what you need as you need it
Scale
 Eliminate unexpected and expensive scaling of hardware and software
 Eliminate stranding of capacity and performance
 Ensure all resources are dedicated to end-user applications
 Improve TCO by eliminating HCI Tax scale, license and performance taxes
Automated Infrastructure
NetApp HCI Nutanix
Automated deployment ✓ ✗
Automatic generation of REST-based scripts ✓ ✗
Complete automation through RESTful API ✓ ✗
Automated
Infrastructure
 Simplified, automated deployment with NetApp deployment engine
 Seamless end-to-end automation
 Automated self-healing during drive or node failure
How it’s delivered
Data Fabric Platform
NetApp HCI Nutanix
Replicate to public cloud, object stores, or any other

repository with Amazon S3 integration ✓ ✗
Enterprise reporting and analytics
(OnCommand Insight) ✓ ✗
Industry-leading NAS integration (ONTAP Select) ✓ ✗
Data Fabric
Platform  Seamless mobility of workloads, both on premise and in the cloud
 Leverage current and future infrastructure investments
 Enterprise infrastructure SW integrations such as OnCommand Insight,
NetApp SnapCenter, etc.
 Block and File Solution. SMB 3.0 and NFS is provided by ONTAP Select, a
virtual and software-defined solution for file workloads
Additional Resources
HCI Competitive Portal

 https://fieldportal.netapp.com/collections/213974?ia=true
Presentation: HCI Competitive Landscape

 https://fieldportal.netapp.com/content/511644?assetComponentId=512385
Http://Competitive.netapp.com
Thank You.
Appendix
Nutanix Weakness: Shared-Core CVMs Introduce Overheads
Controller VM (CVM) utilization is very high with Nutanix
 The cVM runs on the hypervisor

along with all the other Virtual
Machines
 A cVM typically requires 4-8
vCPUs and 16-64 Gb of memory
 CVM vCPU’s typically run at
>80% and memory at >90%
utilization
 In contrast most other VM’s have
2-4 vCPUs and 6-8GBs of
memory running at 10-20% CPU
and <80% memory utilization
Nutanix Xi Cloud Services
Subscription based Nutanix cloud services hosted in the public cloud
Future Xi services include:
 All Xi Cloud Services are Nutanix managed  Deeper GCP Integration
services  App cloud bursting
 VDI as-a-service
 Hosted on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) or  Big data
Nutanix Xi data centers (Nutanix hosted  Kubernetes
public cloud)
 Cloud DR will be the first available Xi Service
Xi Cloud Services was originally set to GA in

Fall 2017 but after several delays, GA is now
set for late 2018
Nutanix Calm
Application automation and orchestration across clouds
 Integrated into Prism UI

 Supports AWS, GCP, Azure, AHV
and ESXi
 Deepest integrations will concentrate on
AHV, Xi and other Nutanix solutions
 Marketplace provides self-service

application provisioning
 Licensed separately (1st 25 VMs
included for free)

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NetApp Competitive Intelligence

​Nutanix Competitive Deep-Dive

1) Why customers choose Nutanix

App/Cloud Admins VM Admins C-Level

Why Nutanix What Customers Like

OEM Vendors 3rd Party Partners

Node 1 Node 2 Node N

Hypervisor Hypervisor Hypervisor

X86 X86 X86

Distributed Storage Fabric

Capacity utilization being balanced Storage

Perceived Nutanix Strength NetApp Response

• Prism is a pretty UI but adds little value in VMware environments, daily

• Positioned like it is an active/active datacenter like Metrocluster but it’s not

 Average CVM resource overhead is

 CVM utilization fluctuates depending

 CVM overhead and unpredictable

 Replication factor (RF)

PERFORMANCE CAPACITY MEMORY CPU

 VM workloads cannot run on storage only nodes due to data locality

Acropolis has an MSRP

Acropolis licenses cost

 Look closely at what is missing from the Express Bundle

The key attributes are an SDDC stack on top of commoditized

What are the benefits of sharing cores?

 Are you in the right room?

 Tie the technology to the

 Focus on flexibility, performance,

 Storage controller VM Shared Core Tax

Guaranteed Performance Flexibility & Scale Automated Infrastructure

Min/max/burst QoS settings ✓ ✗

Independent scale of compute and storage ✓ ✗

Replicate to public cloud, object stores, or any other

HCI Competitive Portal

Presentation: HCI Competitive Landscape

 The cVM runs on the hypervisor

Xi Cloud Services was originally set to GA in

 Integrated into Prism UI

 Marketplace provides self-service

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Nutanix Competitive Deep-Dive