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.
Control that which you can control, goes the saying, and I certainly am unable to control the COVID-19 virus. Having had pneumonia thrice with as recent as two years ago, in combination with Influenza type A, I’m qualified as a risk. Qualification aside, this last combo resulted in a 7-day forced quarantined stay in the hospital which was anything but a holiday. As a result, and as with so many, I’m currently in self-imposed isolation. This certainly does limit one to get to know his co-workers, but does yield plenty of opportunity to get his training in.
So that’s exactly how I’ve spent my first two weeks at Nutanix, getting accustomed to the application landscape and embarked on my training journey.
Boy do they have applications at Nutanix, it’s almost as if there is an application for every single thing. Coming from an application landscape which consisted of Office 365, Visio, Notepad++ and a mind mapping tool it most certainly is a culture shock. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a nice one. Some real gems are in use, for instance the tool Expensify impressed me. Instead of having to keep tickets, invoices and receipts, this application allows you to simply take a picture and it will scan and submit the expense for you. It also comes with a built-in GPS tracker to allow submitting car mileage.
The training landscape is equally impressing, both geared internally as well as towards partners there is so much material available to dig through. In order to get things going the first thing I focused on was getting the basics out of the way. This program is readily accessible for partners too and goes by the name of Nutanix Certified Sales Representative, Level 1. This constitutes an overview of what different applications Nutanix offers as well as some commercial support on what makes them shine and stand out.
What did I learn so far? Nutanix has evolved from being the disruptor of classic three tier architecture by largely being the inventor of Hyper Converged Infrastructure (HCI) to a full enterprise cloud ready product. Bringing the abstraction layer on top of the virtualization layer which sparked the success of the hyperscalers to the on-premise realm for both SMB and Enterprise alike with full hybrid capabilities. Application developers want to spend their energy towards enhancing their offering on their business end with having to spend as little energy as possible towards having to manage infrastructure. Infrastructure needs to be simple, stable and performing. Cue Nutanix.
In essence Nutanix has three offerings, HCI, VDI and Cloud. The HCI side constitutes integrated server and storage from a hardware point of view, with the choice of hypervisor to provide the virtualization layer. Nutanix is considered “hypervisor agnostic”. It can support AHV our own KVM based hypervisor, VMware ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V or Citrix XenServer. With the Nutanix on IBM Power platform, Nutanix AHV is currently the only supported hypervisor.
Because of its architecture, with having the storage fabric be part of the server instead of available over the network, the Nutanix platform is ideally suited for use as VDI supporting solution. Both Citrix and VMware are supported leaving the choice with you the, potential, customer.
The Nutanix Enterprise Cloud offering is built with 4 pillars in mind, whilst going beyond virtualized infrastructure, it’s an added abstraction layer creating a platform offering. Rapid Time to Market, the solution should make live easy for a developer and allow him to deploy with minimal effort. Cost of consumption should be fractional; clients pay what for what they need and use. All time needed to spend to maintain low-level infrastructure should be eliminated and has been achieved through offering a feature set dubbed One-click Simplicity, full platform upgrades and updates through a single click without interference on production workloads. And last but not least the platform should be under continuous innovation, improving time and time again, just as what our customers are using the Nutanix cloud for with their own line of business and front facing applications.
Yes, indeed, I successfully passed the test and may refer to myself as certified Nutanix Certified Sales Representative, Level 1. It’s a start. Let us see what information the next modules bring; I fully expect to be dragged into the technical details soon. Which in turn I look to be sharing in the next installment of this greenhorn series.
Not exactly the greatest of times to switch jobs, but certainly one of the greatest companies to do it with. I have been enjoying this ride so far. Thank you for reading, and hope you’ll join us for the next installment as I will try to take you along my journey getting to know inside-out of what makes up the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud.
Take it easy, or as they say in Swahili; polepole,
David
Continue reading the next installment in this series titled Greenhorn Showtime!
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