English, Experience

Greenhorn Egged!

There is a greenhorn walking amongst all these Nutanix experts. He goes by the name of David and has chosen these turbulent times to join the Dutch SE Team. He’ll be posting a blog series sharing his experiences whilst getting to know Nutanix inside out. The previous installment may be found by clicking here.

Nutanix Fade-in X

A deliveryman is putting an envelop delicately on the pavement. Roughly 1 meter away from my front door. He complains whilst doing so and then steps away. A couple of months ago this would have constituted to highly suspicious behaviour. Today I wait when he furthers his distance, thank him and pick up the envelop. What’s this, I wonder by myself. I wasn’t expecting anything. Curious I open the envelop and break out a smile. Sure enough, as I open what seems like an egg carton, foil wrapped chocolate eggs are staring me in my face. I’ve been egged, this Greenhorn got egged, Eastern egged, but still, egged. It was to be expected I guess.

Tony’s Chocolonely Carton of Eastern eggs

On the education front things are starting to become a grind, progress is sluggish. The course material I’m going through has so many references to resources outside of the curriculum that it’s distracting and limiting progress. At least that’s what it feels like, in effect I may have watched a dozen or so Youtube videos, read a handful of support articles and two or so whitepapers. So it all does get digested, the course itself just seems to go page by page. But we’ve been touched on that in the previous installments of this blog. It’s just painfully forking slow and I’ve got to be patient with myself.

I truly did get distracted and seriously side tracked though with the Nutanix Investor Day 2019 material. Although it obviously has a lot of numbers being crunched the thing I really like about that recorded session is the roadmap and the direction we as Nutanix are on. It’s all about the cloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud, enterprise cloud, public cloud, hosted cloud, edge cloud. Don’t you miss the days when you could simply refer to the having your infrastructure connected to the internet and everyone would understand. Being reminiscent within a paragraph about getting distracted, silly me. The message though is a powerful one, Nutanix is no longer a storage solution, it’s a true enterprise grade cloud platform. From HCI (Hyper Converged Infrastructure) to HCP (Hybrid Cloud Platform). Build with an everlasting passion and obsession for simplicity.

Talking about events, last week was the very first true online event Nutanix hosted. To be honest, I think it showed in parts, it clearly has some evolution to go through. Public speaking isn’t easy in the first place but apparently doing so from behind a computer screen takes it up a notch. That said you’ve got to respect the one hundred and eighty degree focus shift for both marketing team and presenters. If you did somehow miss the event or it didn’t click with your schedule, then you may judge Nutanix Now by attending it on demand through this link. That certainly is a perk of an online first event like this, chat aside the experience is as good as similar as to attending live.

Whilst getting the ropes down I have been spending a bit of my internal focus on the Service Provider proposition. Officially known as the X-Powered program. Some interesting developments are taking place there which I can’t really talk about publicly as of yet. If you are really anxious then we might be able to work something out with an NDA or something, feel free to ping me on linkedin. Rest assured Nutanix is extremely well suited to fill the gap for a Hybrid Cloud Platform and add that as a service offering into the Service Provider portfolio. There is an evergrowing demand for public cloud like developer focused abstraction layers. Without the public cloud bill to go with it, but maintain the choice to use so if in need. That is exactly where the platform shines. Brightly I might add.

Nutanix is a software first product, sure it needs hardware to run on and sure we can assist in sizing your configuration, but in the end the hardware part is your choice. As with many of the Nutanix components really. We’re hypervisor agnostic for example. Whether it runs our own native hypervisor AHV, Microsoft Hyper-V or Vmware ESXi, it’s your choice, just as it is with the hardware.

To make sure the Nutanix Lifecycle Management (LCM) is able to maintain the hardware through a single click, close relations are maintained with the OEM manufacturers. Any supported hardware can be maintained with LCM, an unique feature. We’re there to assist the OEM partners help fit and sell to their clientele in return, if needed. As such we had a virtual meet and greet with the Fuijtsu team and our OEM Channel Manager. Very nice to see that we are the only cloud software vendor offering in their portfolio that scales from 1 node to any.

This blog is turning out to be a bit of a shorter one than previous blogs. Let’s blame that on the Eastern bunny. In truth some potential client talks have been going on too, it’s fun to be able to assist with a consultative perspective and mindset. Help first sell later, if ever, making sure the Nutanix Cloud Platform fits business needs is more important.

Take it easy, or as the Aussies say; hooroo,
David

Continue reading the next installment in this series titled Greenhorn Roughed-up.