Lenovo and Nutanix Announced Partnership to Enter Data Center Market

Lenovo recently announced its strategic partnership with Nutanix, an enterprise virtualization company. Their partnership will develop a hyperconverged applicances for agile and scalable cloud computing. It will be a great benefit for Lenovo who just purchased IBM Intel server division last year.

On Wednesday's announcement, as reported by Market Watch, Lenovo and Nutanix will together develop, market and sell a new family of Lenovo hyperconverged appliances powered by Nutanix software. Both Lenovo and Nutanix are committed to deliver HCI (Hyperconverged infrastructure) to the market. HCI is a technology that combines computing, storage, and networking into an easy to manage and simple appliance. It enables IT organization to focus on the applications and services that power and bring greater agility. The technology itself is a combination between a high performance reliable server platform and state-of-the art software to build private cloud data center.

Private cloud is a cloud computing architecture that differs from public cloud. Although delivering similar advantage to public cloud, private cloud uses a proprietary architecture and dedicated to one organization only. Private cloud requires significant resources including capital expenses to deploy. However, it provides a sense of security and ownership for the organization, because they manage their own cloud infrastructure. It is completely different from using cloud service provider infrastructure, which they have to share the infrastructure with other subscribers. In a simple term, a private cloud is an infrastructure with a single tenant, while public cloud such as Amazon or Google Cloud is a multi tenants one.

Forbes said that the partnership is a smart move for both companies. Lenovo will now have a strongly credible hyper-converged offering into its hardware. Nutanix is also win big, as they get access to another global route to market, just like their partnership with Dell that began last year. Lenovo and its very big market in China provides great opportunity for Nutanix.

This partnership is a great business deal for Lenovo as well. The appliances built with this partnership will be sold through Lenovo's channel and sales organization. According to ZDNet, Lenovo and Nutanix will also plan "substantial investments in platform engineering and development." Lutanix virtualization software and technology will help Lenovo to create a new family of converged appliances that prepare them to enter new maket in data center.

Lenovo is a giant electronic company, that acquired IBM personal computer division in 2005. Lenovo is the owner of legendary ThinkPad series of laptop computer. Nutanix is a San Jose based startup company focused in storage virtualization. With this strategic partnership, Lenovo who also own IBM System X and IBM BladeCenter Server series will move toward a bigger market in cloud data center.