Nutanix Reshuffles Product Portfolio Into Bigger Bundles

Nutanix has rearranged its portfolio by placing different tools into newly named bundles and buckets, and creating different tiers for the new products.

If you're a Nutanix customer and don't want to change the way you interact with the company, or pay for its wares, feel free to stop reading now because current arrangements will persist if you want to carry on as you do today.

For the rest of you, Nutanix now offers five different bundles of products:

• Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) – Essentially a private and/or hybrid cloud package, including DR and security tools
• Cloud Manager (NCM) – Cross-cloud policy management, automation, and monitoring across NCI implementations
• Unified Storage (NUS) – Software-defined storage, for blocks, files, and objects, running in the environment of your choice
• Database Service – Nutanix's database management tools including PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL Server, and Oracle Database, with a promise of a database-as-a-service experience
• End User Computing Solutions – VDI and application publishing

Some of the buckets are tiered – Starter, Pro, and Ultimate editions include progressively more products, and attract higher subscription fees. The tiers are also aimed at, and tuned for, different uses. The starter version of NCI only runs on-prem across a dozen nodes, allows 3TB of storage, and can run one Kubernetes cluster per host. The Pro version adds the ability to run unlimited non-prem nodes, plus 16 in AWS, and includes disaster-recovery functionality. The Ultimate package allows multi-site deployment, microsegmentation, verbose monitoring, and more.

Whatever you buy, you're now charged by the core (and the storage package has stopped charging separately for block or object capacity, instead now charging for capacity that can be applied as buyers choose).

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Nutanix product names such as the Prism operations management tools or the Frame VDI offering will persist, but be de-emphasised beneath the new bucket names.

Why the change? "The big purpose here is simplifying and getting more velocity for channels," said Thomas Cornely, Nutanix's senior vice president for product management.

Cornely added that as each bucket includes more product, customers will feel they're getting more value. Which is just what Microsoft argued after hiking the price of Office 365. ®