Nutanix ‘Democratises’ Hyperconverged Computing, Announces Community Beta

This week has seen the software-defined world get a little bit of a ‘community’ spirit, man. First, IBM said that it will now let customers move their IBM software licenses between on-premises, private and public clouds as much as they want, banishing the old system of software locked to certain machines.

Now, on-demand hyperconverged server and storage vendor Nutanix has announced it to release into public beta its “Community Edition software”, which effectively lets anybody with the correct technical know-how to access Nutanix’s software stack, albeit a limited-scale version.

‘No cost’

Nutanix said: “Available at no cost, Nutanix Community Edition breaks down both economic and organisational barriers to adopting the industry’s most advanced enterprise computing platform, offering radical simplicity to IT operations.

“Open access eliminates cost and hardware procurement and compatibility barriers, enabling rapid deployment into existing development/test and staging environments so users can directly experience the benefits of web-scale technologies.”

Nutanix is aiming the Community Edition, which will be officially released to public beta on June 8, right at “IT pros”, “tech enthusiasts”, and “students”.

CEO of Nutanix, ex-Oracle dev Dheeraj Pandey, said that his firm has always been dedicated to open architectures and technologies, which in turn lets Nutanix offer “unprecendented” customer flexibility.

Pandey said: “Community Edition is the next step in democratising hyperconverged infrastructure technology, enabling anyone to experience the transformative benefits of our software. Only by eliminating the requirement for proprietary hardware and embracing off-the-shelf platforms can the next revolution of data centre technologies be fully realised.”

Praise

Nutanix offered up some glowing one-line reviews of its Community Edition, with words like “simple”, “complete”, and “success” being thrown around. TechWeekEurope took to Twitter to see how Joe Public felt about the Community Edition, and found even better adjectives like “secret sauce”, “iiiiiiinteresting” and “stoked”. Indeed, it seems hyperconvergence may be ready for the mainstream.

Interested users can sign up online immediately to be placed on the waitlist. The first 500 registrants will be entered to win a home lab valued at up to $3000, said Nutanix.

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