Nutanix expanding operations into Asia Pacific

Reported from The Star : By SUSANNA KHOO
http://www.techcentral.my/news/story.aspx?file=/2013/1/22/it_news/20130122132750&sec=it_news
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KUALA LUMPUR: Nutanix Inc - a US-based company that sells all-in-one compute and storage infrastructure for virtualised datacentres - is setting up a customer support centre in Malaysia this year.

The move is in line with the company's plans to rapidly expand operations into the Asia Pacific market. It expects to derive at least 30% to 35% of its revenue from the region by its financial year 2014-2015.

"South-East Asia is going to be a significant source of business for Nutanix because there are a lot of cloud computing and virtualisation growth happening in these countries, particularly in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand," said Sudheesh Nair, vice-president of worldwide sales at Nutanix Inc.

He was speaking to Bytz on the fringes of the Interactive VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) Design workshop in Kuala Lumpur, that was organised by Datapath Networks Sdn Bhd, an authorised solutions partner for Nutanix in this country.

Sudheesh described Nutanix's products as being software defined and said that these merged server and storage functions into a single piece of hardware.

He said this kind of infrastructure would greatly benefit enterprises because it meant that they would no longer have to maintain a physical storage area network (SAN), typically the most complex and costly part of datacentre architecture.

Ken Too, technical director at Datapath Networks, said the solutions help customers eliminate expensive network storage. "This will result in an immediate 40% to 60% reduction in capital expenditure while providing highly advanced shared-storage capabilities," he said.

Aside from the cost savings, Sudheesh said, another advantage of using an all-in-one solution was that companies could easily scale the size of their operations up or down at any given time without impacting the overall network performance.

"These factors make us a perfect fit for hybrid cloud infrastructure," he said, referring to systems that possess a combination of both public and private cloud-computing features. Sudheesh said Nutanix would begin offering its products to companies in the financial, manufacturing, and oil and gas sectors first. It would later extend its services to the healthcare and technology sectors as well.

Both Nutanix and Datapath Networks anticipate the emergence of new datacentre architectural trends within the region this year as a result of the entry of Nutanix's products into the market.

"We foresee the trend of converged compute and storage into datacentre building blocks continuing to grow in this region. This architecture will allow end users to start with what they need now and to add additional blocks as their needs grows in order to scale out a single system," Too said.

Nutanix Complete Cluster products are priced at US$160,000 (RM480,000) and upwards. For more information, go to www.nutanix.com.

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