My first Magazine Nutanix Flash Forward | Page 10

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Enterprise Cloud For Dummies, Nutanix Special Edition
These days, you find all sorts of storage arrays that look
practically identical to servers, and there’s a good reason
for that: They are servers. Rather than build a bunch of custom
hardware and spend all their time on hardware engineering,
resource‐specific siloes — storage and networking — are
increasingly turning to off‐the‐shelf servers and components to
power their solutions. In essence, many of today’s fastest growing storage and networking companies are truly software companies. They buy existing hardware that makes sense for their
solution and build their software around it. Because the existing hardware is standards‐based, the storage or networking
company can easily swap components out as necessary, which
helps a great deal with reducing cost and complexity.

Hypervisor commoditization and
the emergence of containers
Back in the early days of virtualization, there was one
company — VMware — to rule it all. Today, although VMware
is still the leader in the hypervisor space overall, other commercial and open source hypervisor offerings are eating away
at VMware’s leadership position.
On a feature‐by‐feature basis, modern hypervisors generally
have all the features that organizations really need in order to
succeed. Sure, some have some extras here and there, but the
capabilities — such as workload migration and high availability mechanisms — that initially drove virtualization adoption
are common across almost any hypervisor choice.
Feature‐rich hypervisors have led to a scenario in which the
hypervisor can be considered a commodity for many organizations. The necessary features are guaranteed to be there, so
switching to different hypervisors — such as Hyper‐V, KVM,
or a variant — becomes feasible.
At the same time, containers are emerging as an alternate
abstraction technology allowing applications to be developed,
tested, and deployed quickly and easily. It’s important for the
infrastructure p latform of the future to support containerized
applications.

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