Here’s what I learned on the fast track from total newbie to Nutanix master.
Three and a half years ago, when I first joined Alturna-Tech, I knew almost nothing about Nutanix infrastructure. And after many years working with another major tech vendor, I honestly wasn’t sure what to expect.
What I did know: Nutanix was a major Alturna-Tech partner, and I needed to learn everything I could, as fast as I could.
It’s been a whirlwind. Today, I’m a certified Nutanix Master, well on my way to Expert—the company’s highest level of certification. And last fall, I was invited to join Partner Elite, Nutanix’s community for top technical advocates.
Here are some of the most important lessons from my first years as a Nutanix partner:
Simplicity Yields Speed: I knew that one of the top draws of Nutanix’s hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) was its simplicity. But I wasn’t fully prepared for what this would mean in terms of speed of deployment. Within my first two weeks on the job, I was sitting with a customer, helping to stand up their new Nutanix environment. What might have been days of complex configuration work with traditional infrastructure took only hours. I walked away shocked at both the speed and ease of the process.
Customers (Now) Love the Subscription Model: When I began working with Nutanix, the company was still in the process of switching over from perpetual licensing to a subscription model, and I worried how customers would respond. But Nutanix makes the subscription model worth it. For example: Customers previously paid per terabyte of flash storage, forcing them to carefully architect their storage environments to keep costs under control. Under the subscription model, they get access to NVMe drives across their environment—essentially tripling their data access speeds without any additional cost.
Management Matters: Nutanix’s Life Cycle Manager (LCM) tool offers one-click, non-disruptive updates. Contrast this with the experience of one of my customers who is still running infrastructure from another vendor—and who recently spent 12 hours manually updating hosts after a failed update.
Support Sets the Tone: On one 26-node deployment I worked on, the customer received a call from Nutanix while we were still in the process of setting up the new infrastructure. Nutanix had noticed an alert about a bad drive—and had already overnighted a new one. That sort of proactive communication and intervention showed the customer exactly how he was going to be treated as long as he was with Nutanix.
DR Doesn’t Need to Be Complicated: Nutanix’s simplified disaster recovery (DR) capabilities have consistently been a top selling point for my customers. Unlike traditional DR systems, Nutanix allows organizations to automatically recover their environments with minimal manual intervention.
Unified Infrastructure Streamlines Refresh Cycles: When organizations maintain separate systems for their storage, compute, and networking infrastructure, they have to manage three separate refresh cycles. (And often, I’ve found, customers keep only very loose track of these cycles, at best.) With hyperconvergence, everything reaches end-of-life simultaneously. This unified refresh cycle means that organizations can plan, budget, and execute infrastructure updates holistically, rather than juggling three different schedules.
HCI Has Gone from ‘Niche’ to ‘Norm’: Five years ago, when hyperconvergence came up in conversation, people often dismissed it as “just another tech term.” But now, for many organizations, it has become the default. And while scalability used to be a key selling point of HCI, the ability to quickly and seamlessly add new nodes rarely comes up anymore. (Most customers are now growing their cloud environments faster than their on-premises environments, meaning they’re not too concerned with rapidly scaling up their data centers.) Instead, customers are looking at the core characteristics of HCI—including simplicity, integrated management, and synchronized refresh cycles—and deciding that hyperconverged infrastructure is the logical choice for their environments.
Here’s one additional bonus lesson: Nutanix simply doesn’t stop innovating. The technology landscape continues to rapidly evolve, and it’s been exciting to watch the company adapt to developments like the rise of generative AI and the proliferation of cloud-native apps. As a Partner Elite member, I get to take part in some of the conversations about the company’s future offerings, and the truth is, sometimes I can barely keep up.
Even after I attain my Expert certification, I know there’s always going to be more to learn.