Nutanix, a San Jose-based provider of software-defined storage appliances, has achieved an annualized run rate of over $80 million. The company boasts of reaching this milestone a mere six quarters after shipping its first box in late 2011.

Nutanix’s flagship Virtual Computing Platform is a converged infrastructure solution that leverages hyperscale technologies pioneered by Facebook and Google to eliminate the need for network-based storage architectures such as storage area network (SAN) and network-attached storage (NAS). Each U2 appliance serves as a single cloud module so the users can start out small and gradually scale their environments based on their needs.

According to the company, the increased demand for its platform enabled it to double the size of its headquarters and add “significant” headcount over the past year. Nutanix also expanded its overseas presence as a part of efforts to lure in more international customers.

“Nutanix is at the intersection of converged infrastructure and scale-out distributed architectures,” says Wikibon Senior Analyst Stu Miniman, “Companies are looking for simplified, modern architectures that follow the lead of the hyperscale players; Nutanix is a trailblazer for bringing this solution type to enterprise IT.”

Last August, Nutanix raised $33 million in Series C funding from Battery Ventures, Goldman Sachs Lightspeed Venture Partners and Khosla Ventures. Less than a week later, co-founder and CEO Dheeraj Pandey stopped by theCube for an in-depth discussion about his company’s product.

Pandey said that software is the driving force behind data infrastructure. He stated that decoupling function from hardware is the key to generating instant value for the end user, and stressed the importance of having enterprise features such as snapshots, fault tolerance, cloning and backup in Big Data solutions.