News

Research Cites Nutanix in Market Shift Away from VMware

• By David Ramel
• 10/14/2024

Research firm Gartner predicts an enterprise trend "to replace their VMware-based deployments and embrace hybrid cloud infrastructure delivery," with Nutanix often chosen as the alternative.

The prediction comes in a new report, "Magic Quadrant for Distributed Hybrid Infrastructure," which was published last week. DHI typically combines on-premises datacenters with public/private cloud-based and edge resources to create a flexible and scalable IT environment.

A strategic planning assumption for the report is: "By 2026, 50% of enterprises will initiate proofs of concept for alternative distributed hybrid infrastructure (DHI) products to replace their VMware-based deployments and embrace hybrid cloud infrastructure delivery, up from 10% in 2024."

The assumption needs some context, though, as VMware, famously acquired by Broadcom, sells DHI wares itself and is in fact named a "Leader" in the report, along with Microsoft, AWS, Nutanix and Oracle.

While Gartner doesn't explicitly define what it means by "VMware-based deployments" and how they differ from DHI, the firm might be referring to the traditional virtualization technology that VMware is famous for -- often used on-premises -- as opposed to the more modern, distributed, cloud-native hybrid infrastructure that might come from many sources and providers and work across on-premises and a variety of clouds, edges and so forth.

As far as the inclusion of Broadcom (VMware) as a leader, the research firm says the report is focused on its DHI offering, VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), described as "a competitive offering for hybrid infrastructure management, edge computing and container deployment use cases."

However, Gartner said Broadcom's shift from perpetual licenses to subscriptions, along with some product restructuring, reportedly raised costs among many existing users of VMware solutions. "This is causing numerous Gartner clients to create longer-term plans to avoid VCF or move away from it," the report said.

So while VCF is in play as an alternative to the company's own, other offerings, Gartner indicated Nutanix is helping lead that move. "Many customers are considering Nutanix tactically to shift away from VMware," Gartner said.

In fact, Nutanix has published "Why Nutanix is a Strong Alternative to VMware Cloud" (along with similar published opinions coming from many other vendors).

However, the citation of Nutanix came amid "cautions" for the vendor's offerings regarding public cloud deployment, rather than a "strength" because Gartner said Nutanix isn't a public cloud-native offering and thus might not appeal to some organizations.

Cloud-native tech is a key factor in Gartner's description of the market:

Gartner defines distributed hybrid infrastructure as offerings that deliver cloud-native attributes, which can be deployed and operated where the customer prefers. This is a key distinction to public cloud IaaS, which is based on a centralized approach. Offerings are software and/or integrated hardware with a unified control plane.

Distributed hybrid infrastructure provides the foundation for the deployment of applications in a distributed manner that retains a cloud or cloud-inspired approach. In doing so, it improves agility and flexibility for the workloads outside of public cloud infrastructure.

Mandatory features of vendors in the market include integrated vendor-engineered solution comprising virtual compute, storage and networking services, along with vendor-developed infrastructure resource management control plane. Common but non-mandatory features, meanwhile, include:

• Management portal that provides a secure, automated full stack solution for operating and supporting the distributed infrastructure.
• Ability to deploy the infrastructure in multiple locations that must include on-premises customer data center and a public cloud.
• Complete programmable API access enabling "infrastructure as code."
• Ability to deliver the distributed hybrid infrastructure solution as a service.
• Vendor supplied facilities or other deployment options like colocation, edge and remote locations.
• Integrated hardware (either supported by the same vendor that offers the software; or certified for the integrated software, but managed by the enterprise, the vendor that provides the software or a third-party partner).
• Additional platform services (e.g., as-a-service add-on offerings like DBaaS, DRaaS).
• Product integration with traditional enterprise infrastructure systems (e.g., Directory Services, ITSM, etc.).
• Metered consumption based services where the customer is charged only for what they consume.
• Scalable and elastic where the offering will provision and deprovision resources to fit the customer continuous requirements (e.g., bursting to the public cloud or dynamic preemptive ordering).
• Ability to orchestrate bare metal servers.
• Ability to orchestrate containers or integrate with third-party kubernetes distribution.

The report's market overview, meanwhile, says: "In this evolving market scenario, organizations are strategically recalibrating their approach, considering a diverse range of options at their disposal. Cloud-inspired on-premises solutions, championed by providers like VMware and Nutanix, offer a compelling distributed hybrid infrastructure avenue."

While most Gartner reports are only for paying clients, the Magic Quadrant reports are typically made available in licensed-for-distribution editions from covered vendors, discoverable with a quick web search.