Nutanix hunts SMBs with US$25,000 hyperconverged appliance

Hyperconverged infrastructure vendor Nutanix has set its sights on the SMB market with a new product line.

Xpress aims to bring features from Nutanix’s enterprise cloud platform to businesses with 500 seats or less in the form of new hardware and software platforms.

It can power up to 500 virtual machines and comes with Nutanix AHV hypervisor built-in. The platform also integrates with AWS and Azure for public cloud backup.

Nutanix has traditionally focused on selling to enterprise customers through its channel, although it also has some SMB customers in Australia.

Senior product marketing manager Nikita Maheshwari told CRN: “We’ve seen how people use our products and while the core technology is similar, we have the same principals in our product that work for SMBs.

“One of the reasons we did this was for simplicity; to help with the process of deployment and upgrades, making a solution that’s future proof and letting people not get locked into a solution.”

Xpress will be available from all of Nutanix existing resellers and distributors from July. Nutanix is distributed through Avnet and Exclusive Networks in Australia.

“Another important part was to make this product accessible. This is the leading hyper-converged product for SMBs for its feature set and price point starting at US$25,000 for three nodes and three years’ support.”

She added that Nutanix would heavily depend on its channel, and that entering the SMB space for the first time showed where the company was going.

“Going forward, I think having Xpress as an independent product line has a lot of implications for our company. It’s a big indication of what Nutanix sees as its future. An important part is the fact that we have virtualisation service integrated into our product. We have our own hypervisor available at no extra cost.”

Australian reseller BEarena has been at the forefront of pushing Nutanix into the SMB market. Last month, the Sydney-headquartered company offered one cusomter an all-expenses paid trip to Nutanix’s partner conference in Las Vegas.

BEarena managing director Darren Ashley told CRN that while the Nutanix platform typically requires low maintenance, there are opportunities for reseller around consultation work for Xpress.

“The great thing about Nutanix is that it’s zero-touch infrastructure. The product has a number of features for self-management.

“Traditional SMB accounts come to us with a blank canvas looking for the right type of technology to grow their IT environment. With Nutanix, we can give them advice around the storage platform, networking and security.”