Despite doom-and-gloom forecasts of the impending death of their partnership, Dell Technologies Inc. is still Nutanix Inc.’s biggest original equipment manufacturer, and the relationship seems to be growing stronger as Dell supports Nutanix’ move into cloud-native services.

“We’re going to be the best hardware infrastructure solution for the Nutanix stack,” stated Dan McConnell (pictured), vice president of server and infrastructure solutions at Dell EMC.

McConnell spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host Joep Piscaer (@jpiscaer), technical pathfinder, cloud and infrastructure, at Jumbo Supermarkten and blogger at VirtualLifestyle.nl, during the .NEXT Conference in London. They discussed the partnership between Dell’s open hyper-converged infrastructure solutions and the evolving Nutanix product stack.  (* Disclosure below.)

XC Core allows licensing flexibility

The information technology industry as a whole is moving toward a “less-is-more” attitude, with “one click” and “ease of use” buzzwords to indicate how infrastructure is expected to work behind the scenes. “As IT becomes an innovation engine for customers, they need that focus more towards the business, less towards the bits and bytes of the infrastructure. All of what we do is focus to enable that,” McConnell said.

A commitment to staying BFF’s with Nutanix means keeping up with the company’s fast-paced evolution. New products, such as Nutanix Buckets software-defined object storage solution, require best-fit hardware, and Dell is rising to the challenge.

“I won’t pre-announce any of my PowerEdge brethren platforms, but we have some hardware platforms that are focused much more around storage density. So, obviously, a great fit for something like Buckets,” McConnell said.

At the heart of the Dell-Nutanix partnership are Dell EMC’s XC family of web-scale hyperconverged appliances, which are powered by Nutanix software. “It literally is one click from the [Nutanix] Prism user interface to update all of the server firmware as well, and it’s cluster-aware,” McConnell stated. “So we know how to evacuate; we know how to flash stuff and repatriate the data. So it’s something we have that no one else has,” he added, emphasizing once more that he believes Dell to be “the best hardware platform, best infrastructure to fit into the Nutanix stack.”

XC Core is the newest addition to the Dell XC Family, and it has all the expected ease of use with a new twist: licensing flexibility. An option allows customers to buy Nutanix software licenses and add them to XC Core systems built by Dell EMC, enabling license portability and separating the management and support of the hardware and software life cycles.

“We work tightly with Nutanix on how to integrate [upcoming technologies] into the stack,” McConnell stated. “Technology never sits still. The partnership between Nutanix and Dell helps us keep on the edge.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the .NEXT Conference. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the .NEXT Conference. Neither Nutanix Inc., the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE