Nutanix Unveils Major Platform Expansions at .NEXT 2025
At its .NEXT 2025 conference this week in Washington, D.C., Nutanix introduced a set of new products and services that carry its “Run Anything Anywhere” corporate banner into some new use cases. Involving next-gen infrastructure, containerized applications, and AI-powered enterprise workflows, these additions to the Nutanix catalog demonstrate the company’s move from a mere hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) provider to a broader platform enabler for distributed, scalable IT operations.
Expanding Modern Infrastructure
Nutanix is formally extending support for external storage systems — marking an evolution from its traditional all-in-one HCI stack. Following a major early-access partnership with Dell PowerFlex last year, Nutanix is now generalizing support and adding a new enterprise alliance with Pure Storage.
This integration, Nutanix SVP Lee Caswell told The New Stack, allows customers with large-scale storage estates to retain their preferred storage architecture — whether Dell’s PowerFlex or Pure’s NVMe-over-TCP arrays — while managing workloads through Nutanix’s Prism interface. It’s a model that appeals directly to organizations with dedicated storage teams and performance-intensive applications, offering high-scale support (up to 128 nodes) while simplifying snapshotting, replication, and VM-level restores, Caswell said.
These partnerships also help Nutanix position itself as a compelling alternative for enterprises looking to reduce dependency on VMware technologies following Broadcom’s acquisition — enabling customers to replace vSphere, SRM, and NSX with Nutanix’s integrated compute, DR, and networking services.
Cloud Native AOS
Another major reveal at the conference is the debut of Cloud Native AOS, the first product release from the long-gestating Project Beacon. This containerized version of Nutanix’s AOS storage stack enables deployment across Kubernetes environments without the need for a hypervisor. It reflects Nutanix’s commitment to supporting modern applications wherever they run — across data centers, public clouds, and edge environments.
“Cloud Native AOS builds on Nutanix’s hypervisor-agnostic architecture, offering enterprise-grade data services (such as snapshots, replication, disaster recovery) within containerized environments like Amazon EKS and Google Cloud,” Caswell said. “Our partnership with Canonical also enables deployment on bare-metal Linux at the edge, reducing infrastructure overhead while preserving full enterprise support and observability.”
This modular architecture not only supports modern DevOps workflows but also gives infrastructure teams the ability to manage containerized environments with the same data resilience, compliance, and recovery capabilities they expect from virtualized stacks, Caswell said.
AI Enablement With NVIDIA
Nutanix is also doubling down on artificial intelligence by announcing an extended partnership with NVIDIA that integrates advanced AI agent models into the enterprise IT workflow. The collaboration introduces capabilities for deploying production-grade large language models (LLMs) with enhanced privacy and control — using NVIDIA’s NeMo framework for guardrails, re-ranking, and embedding.
“This addresses key enterprise concerns around data security, model tuning, and performance optimization,” Caswell said. “By embedding NVIDIA’s AI model components directly into Nutanix’s platform, customers can orchestrate AI workflows that are optimized for GPU infrastructure, resilient across edge and cloud locations, and compliant with organizational policies.”
For many enterprises still navigating the complexities of AI adoption, Nutanix offers a clear starting point: curated model deployment, data protection, and operational guardrails — all managed through a unified, infrastructure-agnostic platform, Caswell said.
De-risking VMware
Nutanix is focusing on customer choice and architectural flexibility with its new offerings. This includes a comprehensive set of updates designed to help customers “de-risk” their exposure to Broadcom’s VMware business by offering alternatives for virtualization, recovery, and networking, Caswell — himself a former VMware exec — told reporters at a press briefing.
The San Jose-based company’s expansion into external storage, containerized platforms, and AI orchestration is further supported by joint go-to-market efforts with Dell, Pure, Cisco, and Canonical — alongside support for major cloud environments including AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure.
“Customers want the freedom to run any application, anywhere — whether that’s traditional VMs, containerized workloads, or advanced AI models. We’re enabling that vision by making infrastructure invisible, intelligent, and adaptable,” Caswell said.
As IT operations grow increasingly decentralized — from hybrid clouds to remote edge deployments — Nutanix is positioning itself as the orchestration and data management layer that can unify the experience. By embracing external storage, Kubernetes-native architectures, and AI workflows, the company is moving well beyond its HCI roots.
The .NEXT 2025 announcements signal a maturing platform that caters not only to IT operators seeking simplification but also to developers, AI engineers, and data scientists seeking performance and portability. As one analyst attending the briefing noted, “This is not just HCI anymore — it’s the connective tissue for the modern enterprise.”
