Flash player: BEarena & Nutanix

Sydney-based BEarena partnered with Nutanix in 2012, impressed by its vision for the future and its advanced partner program, says Darren Ashley, technical director, BEarena

Nutanix most closely aligned with our vision for the future of the data centre. They bring all the performance benefits of a flash solution, but they also have distinct advantages over pure flash SAN solutions in terms of their architecture being converged, their resiliency, and their linear price and performance scalability. We signed up in August 2012, effectively being the first partner in Australia and New Zealand. Business has been brisk. We’ve bet the house on Nutanix and completely focused our business around it. A lot of work went into getting the message out to customers about the benefits; that work has certainly paid off.

Hyundai is one high-profile deployment. It uses the high-end Nutanix nodes for its server-based business intelligence apps and for VDI. Sanity Music was the first customer in ANZ; they run all their 150 retail stores – 400 desktops – on VDI on Nutanix in two rack units. They were so impressed with Nutanix, they have since retired their IBM SAN, acquired more Nutanix nodes, and now run their private cloud on Nutanix also.

Nutanix really partner: they are extremely advanced in their partner program, considering the age of the company. The people in the company are all very experienced, and continue to drive Nutanix forward in the ANZ market. I go to the US twice a year to keep those relationships strong, and learn first-hand from HQ the latest information. 

We see Nutanix as firstly due to their data locality with convergence; performance is jaw dropping. Space weight power cooling, and in general opex costs, can all be slashed with Nutanix due to this architecture. Then, the linear scalability: 50,000 IOPS up to millions of IOPS, all without ever needing a forklift upgrade, and in small dollar increments. There are so many other reasons, some deep in the DNA of the product, that lead us to believe we will see Nutanix continue to shine for many years to come.