Nutanix, the company driving VMware crazy, just made a brilliant acquisition

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

Nutanix: Yup, OK, we gobbled PernixData, Calm.io. What you gonna do about it?

At long last #Nutanix has come clean and revealed it is buying #PernixData ( #VMware 's hypervisor memory caching software biz), and confirmed it also slurped devops software company #CalmIO. No prices have been disclosed but we understand the Calm.io deal was the one referred to in a Nutanix S1 amended filing, which involved 528,517 shares and $1.2m in cash. Nutanix has categorically denied that its $75m Goldman Sachs loan was anything to do with buying PernixData. So we have no idea what Nutanix is paying for PernixData, beyond understanding from a well-placed source that it is not a good outcome for PernixData investors. With these acquisitions Nutanix thinks it can deliver a hyper-converged enterprise system with the control, security and attractive long-term economics of on-premises infrastructure, combined with the agility, automation and consumer-grade simplicity of the public cloud. Nutanix made this statement about why it is buying PernixData and Calm.io: “These additions will enable Nutanix to pioneer new software stacks for storage-class memory systems, enhance its Application Mobility Fabric (AMF) with cross-cloud workload migration and bring rich, cloud-inspired orchestration and workflow automation to its Prism management software.” PernixData brings in IP and engineering talent relevant to the storage-class memory systems idea. It and Nutanix share, we’re told, a view that applications and data need to be as close together as possible. Combined, the two will “develop an advanced data stack to replace traditional storage silos and high-latency networks with newer storage-class memory and advanced interconnects.” There are “planned strategic investments in new server and storage technologies [which] will provide customers with a re-imagined data fabric for a post-flash era of enterprise computing.” Think XPoint-class non-volatile memory, servers with XPoint-class DIMMs, and, we daresay, #NVME over fabrics. PernixData fail Nutanix is buying excellent technology but we think this is a poor outcome for PernixData, and its investors, which could not go it alone and have not had a rewarding buyout. We understand employee shareholders, who bought stock with their own cash, get nothing. Why did PernixData fail? Blogger/user Antony Spiteri writes; “I can say from experience that FVP and Architect are expensive. I’ve been involved in trying to justify spend on FVP internally and I can tell you that it was/is a hard sell.” “Based on some internal workings, breaking it down the cost of FVP over three years could equate to the cost of 2 or 3 New Generation Flash Based Arrays or legacy SAN systems. That’s a hard pill to swallow and it comes down the crux of why I think FVP was priced too expensively for it to gain the market penetration that might have meant this sale to Nutanix could have been avoided.” I feel that the pricing model forced people to see FVP as a purely band-aid only solution that was used only in times of desperation…it didn’t deserve that reputation, but it was widely known as truth both inside and outside of PernixData. With Nutanix now in charge of selling and pricing FVP, and Architect, we might expect a more realistic pricing regime. Calm.io The combination of Nutanix and Calm.io software should enable customers to select the right private or public cloud for an application. Nutanix’ software stack will get cloud automation and management capabilities to “ deliver application and service orchestration, runtime lifecycle management, policy-based governance, comprehensive reporting and auditing services to support all application environments, including virtual machines, containers and micro-services.” Aaditya Sood, Calm.io CEO and founder, has a canned quote: “Data centre infrastructure must be fully automated, simple to deploy and easy-to-use. We are excited to join the Nutanix team to work together to eliminate the daunting complexity of legacy data centres by taking a radical, application-centric view of IT infrastructure.” Reg Comment With these two acquisitions Nutanix is getting excellent technology will will broaden its software stack and speed its development of storage-class memory systems with greatly accelerated application and server performance. It also gains greater relevance to the DevOps world of cloud-native applications and containerised micro-services. Its hyper-converged system infrastructure ( #HCI ) competitors face a formidably stronger #Nutanix with a forward vision that should appeal to existing and future customers. It should, for example, be better able to handle the heat of #Dell / #EMC / #Vmware competition more effectively, avoiding being fastened to the Vx torture Rack, and comfortably respond to #Cisco, #HPE, #IBM and #Lenovo competition. Its acquisition twosome gives a stronger hand when meeting #SimpliVity ’s HW-accelerated competition as well. Will this acquisition two-step cause repercussions in the HCI vendor club as Nutanix’s competitors see a need to strengthen their own offerings? There is clear potential for this. Also, if Nutanix is going for an IPO in the next few months, then this pair of acquisitions make it more appealing to investors. It’s a great foundation for an IPO roadshow to build on. Ballsy moves Nutanix. You might just have an IPO triumph ahead of you. ®

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/08/29/nutanix_nabs_pernixdata_and_calmio/

Sales staff exodus at PernixData as Nutanix gobbles up caching biz

Analysis Amid mounting evidence that #Nutanix has bought #PernixData, both companies are still keeping their lips firmly and officially sealed. Pernix insiders and several well-placed industry sources have now confirmed the acquisition privately to The Register. Separately, Dan Edson – senior director of marketing operations, automation and demand generation at PernixData – updated his LinkedIn page to read, at one point, "PernixData (Acquired by Nutanix)." That admission has since been scrubbed from his profile. Edson is still at Pernix. Meanwhile, ex-Pernix CTO Frank Denneman told us Nutanix has bought the company. We have also learned Denneman was not the only leaver. Here's what we know of the PernixData sales and marketing staff exodus:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/08/04/nutanix_pernixdata_acquisition_nocomment_descends_into_farce/

Sources: Nutanix poised to gobble PernixData

Four independent sources say hyper-converged poster child @Nutanix is buying hypervisor flash-cacher @PernixData, thus gaining crucial technology to speed up its appliances. #Nutanix spokesman Declan Waters told us: "No comment." A #PernixData spokesperson added: "We are not commenting at this time." A PernixData insider told The Register: "Everything is in a state of flux right now." That's the scoop. Here's the background information. PernixData was founded by CEO Poojan Kumar and CTO Satyam Vaghani in 2012. It received a $7 million A‑round that year, $20 million in a 2013 B‑round, and $35 million in a C‑round in 2014, giving it $62 million in total. The main product is FVP, with a recent Architect product providing infrastructure analytics in virtual environments. The company has had some employee attrition, and here is a 2015 round-up of some of that. Kirk Arrowood, director of northeast sales until November when he left and went to Zerto as regional sales manager, northeast. Michael Foy, ex-channel sales manager who left in August to be director of partner sales at DataCore and is now channel account manager at Silver Peak. Brian Gagnon, ex-channel and technology evangelist who left in August to join HGST as a principal engineer. James White, ex-A/C exec who left in October to join Sentieo as head of enterprise growth. Cory Barnard, currently in sales at Interana, who left his director of corporate sales post at PernixData in September. David Schneider, now systems engineering manager at Veeam, who left a systems engineer post at PernixData in October. Taka Yamada, who left his regional sales manager position in October and is now a regional director at Silver Peak. Jeff Germscheid, middle Atlantic regional sales manager who left in May and is now sales director at DataCore. Rob Bergin, system engineer, who left in October and is now at Springpath. Kiet Duong, currently director of customer success at Netskope, who left his post as director of support in November. Todd Mace, FVP product manager, now tech evangelist at DataCore.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/07/01/hyperconverged_nutanix_could_be_buying_vmcare_cacher_pernixdata/