On Monday, #Nutanix officially confirmed that it bought a startup called #PernixData. News of the deal had leaked a few weeks ago when PernixData's outgoing CTO Frank Denneman told The Register's Chris Mellor that the sale was already a done deal. This is a brilliant move by Nutanix and a curious one by PernixData's leadership. It's brilliant for Nutanix for a bunch of reasons. For one, Nutanix has nabbed a key person familiar with the tech of its biggest rival.
Nutanix helped usher in a new computer storage market known as "hyperconverged," which combines storage along with compute power and the special software that manages computers called a hypervisor.
VMware is the biggest maker of hypervisors - that's its flagship, bread-and-butter product -although #Microsoft also has its own, as does #RedHat, #Citrix, others.
Nutanix's products works with VMware's hypervisor, of course, but the company also built its own to take on VMware head on, a hypervisor product known as #Acropolis.
Given Nutanix's enormous popularity with businesses, this was a tricky move on Nutanix's part to unseat the hypervisor king, so much so that VMware has tried to counter-punch and release its own hyperconverged storage product, known as #EVO:RAIL. It didn't sell well and The Reg reported in February that VMware had quietly shelved EVO:RAIL in favor of different storage software.
One of the co-founders of PernixData, Satyam Vaghani, was the early employee of VMware that built some of VMware's key storage technology and then ran VMware's storage business. (Storage giant EMC grew so nervous by these projects, it acquired a controlling interest in 2003 for about $635 million.)
So bringing Vaghani into the Nutanix fold is a big score.
Meanwhile PernixData's other founder, Poojan Kumarwas a key engineer who developed Oracle's compute and storage product, #Exadata, which has become a multi-billion product for #Oracle.
http://www.businessinsider.com/nutanix-just-made-a-brilliant-acquisition-2016-8
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