Nutanix

Nutanix, Inc. is an American cloud computing company that sells software for datacenters and hybrid multi-cloud deployments. This includes software for virtualization, Kubernetes, database-as-a-service, software-defined networking, security, as well as software-defined storage for file, object, and block storage.[2]

History

Nutanix was founded on September 23, 2009, by Dheeraj Pandey, Mohit Aron and Ajeet Singh. In early 2013 Aron left Nutanix to start Cohesity, a privately held computer data storage company.[3]

Venture capital firms invested $312.2 million over five rounds of funding in Nutanix. The company reached a $1 billion valuation by 2013, which made it known as a "unicorn startup".[4] It raised $140 million in a Series E round of financing in 2014, valuing the company at approximately $2 billion.[5] Nutanix's backers included Lightspeed Venture Partners, Khosla Ventures, and Blumberg Capital.[6]

Nutanix filed for an initial public offering (IPO) in December 2015, reporting a net loss in its fiscal year ending July 2015 of $126 million.[7] In August 2016, Nutanix announced it had acquired PernixData.[8]

The IPO on September 30, 2016, raised about $230 million after selling 14.87 million shares at a price of $16.[9][10] This was the biggest VC-backed IPO of 2016 in the U.S.[11] Analysts expected Nutanix's public offering would be delayed.[12]

In May 2017, Nutanix partnered with IBM to create a series of datacenter hardware appliances using IBM Power Systems for business apps.[13]

In March 2018, Nutanix announced the acquisition of Minjar, based in Bangalore[14] and Netsil,[15] a San Francisco-based cloud application monitoring startup. Later the same year, Nutanix acquired the DaaS startup Frame.[16]

On March 28, 2018, Nutanix partnered with HYCU to develop data protection software built for hyper-converged infrastructure environments.[17]

On June 1, 2019, Nutanix appointed Brian Stevens to its board of directors.[18] In March 2020, Sohaib Abbasi joined the company's board of directors.[19]

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Nutanix announced a furlough impacting about 1,500 employees in April 2020.[20] In June 2020, Nutanix added Virginia Gambale to its board of directors.[21] In December, 2020, Pandey was replaced as Chief Executive by Rajiv Ramaswami, who had been the Chief Operating Officer at VMware.[22] VMware filed a lawsuit, alleging a conflict of interest, but dropped the legal fight a year later.[23]

In 2021, the company transitioned from making hardware appliances to focusing on subscription software.[24][25]

In 2022, MinIO alleged that Nutanix had been violating MinIO's free software license, and had done so for three years; with negotiations over the matter leading to no resolution, MinIO reported having revoked Nutanix's license.[26] According to Adam Armstrong, writing for TechTarget.com, Nutanix "initially... deny[ied] any wrongdoing" but "walked that position back a week later", acknowledging it had "'discovered some inadvertent omissions in Nutanix Objects' open source attribution and notices required under the Apache 2.0 license,' and apologized for the oversight".[27]

Operations

Nutanix combines storage, computing, and virtualization. The company's software product families include Acropolis, Prism, NDB, Frame, and Files.[33][34][35][36] In 2015, Nutanix was reported to have built a Linux KVM based hypervisor, called AHV (Acropolis HyperVisor) in order to make managing computer infrastructure easier.[37]

Nutanix marketed its products as "hyper-converged infrastructure"[38] (HCI). In 2020, the company shifted to a subscription business model.[39] HCI combines compute, storage, virtualization, and networking into a single, unified platform. This foundational layer can be deployed on physical hardware in a data center, within a cloud-managed MSP environment, or directly in public clouds like AWS and Azure.

The Nutanix portfolio is centered around the Nutanix Cloud Platform (NCP), which is designed to provide a consistent cloud operating model for all applications, whether they are on-premises or in public clouds. The platform aims to simplify hybrid multicloud environments, making them more cost-effective and manageable from a single interface.[40]

See also

• Harvester (HCI)

External links