Nutanix .NEXT 2025 | Lee Caswell, Nutanix & Anthony Cinelli, Dell Technologies

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Lee Caswell

SVP, Product & Solutions Marketing

Nutanix

Anthony Cinelli

Global Sales

Dell Technologies

Dell and Nutanix reimagine modern IT to simplify the stack

Enterprise IT operations are entering a new era of streamlined IT, where simplicity and efficiency take precedence over complexity. That same philosophy is now shaping how technology vendors develop and deliver new capabilities to meet evolving business needs.Dell Technologies Inc. and Nutanix Inc. are at the forefront of this shift, rewriting the traditional playbook with solutions designed to produce powerful outcomes—without overwhelming customers in technical detail.Dell’s Anthony Cinelli and Nutanix’s Lee Caswell talk with theCUBE about how their partnership delivers streamlined IT infrastructure

play_circle_outline Maximizing Growth Through Platform Approach and Scalable Infrastructure Choices

play_circle_outline Dell and Nutanix joint technologies and integrations

play_circle_outline Enhancing Operations Through AI, Analytics, and Collaboration With Data Teams for Outcome-Driven Solutions

play_circle_outline Maximizing LLM Selection with GPUs, NEMO Models, Accessibility for Joint Customers, Appreciation from Dell, and Ecosystem Updates

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Lee Caswell, Nutanix & Anthony Cinelli, Dell Technologies

Lee Caswell

SVP, Product & Solutions Marketing Nutanix

Anthony Cinelli

Global Sales Dell Technologies

Lee Caswell, senior vice president of product and solutions marketing at Nutanix, and Anthony Cinelli, senior director for global PowerFlex sales at Dell Technologies, join theCUBE’s John Furrier and Bob Laliberte at Nutanix .NEXT to discuss the power of partnership in modern IT infrastructure. The conversation explores how Nutanix and Dell are collaborating to deliver flexible, software-defined platforms that scale with customer needs.

Caswell highlights Nutanix’s investment in platform enhancements and its alignment with Dell’s PowerFlex to offer g... Read more

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What is the significance of the platform approach in terms of server-based, software-defined architectures and the expanding ecosystem for Nutanix? add

What is Dell's position on partnering with Nutanix in the hypervisor world to provide customers with more flexibility and choice in their stack? add

What is the current trend in customer interaction and expectation in the technology industry, specifically in terms of providing outcomes rather than just products? add

What are the topics discussed at a recent meeting or event involving GPUs and new models in the tech industry? add

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Lee Caswell, Nutanix & Anthony Cinelli, Dell Technologies

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>> Welcome back, everyone. Live here in Washington DC with Nutanix NEXT 2025. I'm John Furrier host of theCUBE, with Bob Laliberte, Paul Nashawaty out getting briefings. CUBE analyst at theCUBE Research. Lee Caswell is here, senior vice president, CUBE alumni, also SVP of products and solutions at Nutanix. Anthony Cinelli, or AC as he's known, senior director of global sales at Dell Technologies. Gentlemen, thank you for coming on theCUBE. Lee, great to see you as always.

>> As always. - Handsome, smiling, full of knowledge.

>> AC, great to have you on.

Anthony Cinelli

>> Absolutely. Pumped to be here.

Lee Caswell

>> Maybe next time I'll get the handsome compliment.

>> We're just getting to know you. We'll see how you do here. Well, Dell Tech World's going to be pretty phenomenal. I'm looking forward to your event. Your event here is flying, even day one the buzz is strong, the vibes are great. The platform story is not new, but it is definitely flying high right now. So, congratulations to you and Rajiv and the team. Great job. So, awesome stuff. Now, let's get into it.

Lee Caswell

>> Yeah, let's go. - This joint engineering ecosystem I call

>> it, is developing where it's not yesterday's ecosystem. There's a lot more to the platforms than just having some support, some support for the product. There's a lot of integrations. AI's built in, platform's got features. Talk about the modern era we're in. You're seeing massive growth here in your ecosystem. What does it mean? Take us through and how does Nutanix leverage this? Was it by design? Was there a specific plan? What's it all about?

Lee Caswell

>> The platform approach is really something really, when you think about it. The idea that you give choice, that's what a platform is about, and that you're moving towards server-based, software- defined architectures. We've been talking about that for years. But the opportunity to make it real, to use the power of server-based as an underlying hardware architecture. And now, going forward, the ecosystem for Nutanix is exploding. I was saying two years ago we had basically 30 companies, then we moved to 55 companies, now 85 sponsors here. And of course, with Dell, we've been working over a decade now bringing joint technologies, the latest of which is Dell with PowerFlex, right?

>> Yeah. And Dell, you guys play, obviously, horizontally. Huge customer install base. Customers aren't giving up their gear, they're building on top of it and around it and new stuff coming in. Your relationships have to scan. AI factory, big part of it. They're like an operating model in the factory too. We had Kevin Deierling on earlier with NVIDIA, with Tark and Maynard. Nutanix looking like they're going to break out in a big way. What's your position on this? How are you guys flexing in here?

Anthony Cinelli

>> Yeah, so a few things. And first, when we think about the software-defined vision, and by the way, Lee and I are OGs of the software-defined vision. I think we've both been in this world since, I don't know, the mid-20-teens. And at its core it was always about enabling a tremendous amount of flexibility for customers. And one of the things we've always leaned into very heavily with our PowerFlex platform is it provides all that flexibility with a tremendous open ecosystem, just providing customers enormous amounts of choice. And let's face it, recently, customers have really been leaning into the idea of wanting choice more than ever in parts of the stack where they maybe haven't thought about choice before. And the reality is that part of the stack today is the hypervisor. And I think credit to Nutanix and Dell for saying, "Hey, how can we maybe work together to bring some of our capabilities together to just help meet the market where it is? " Which is customers looking for more choice and flexibility than ever before. And Nutanix had some fabulous foresight to really do some things in the hypervisor world that introduced simplicity of operations and automation at scale on a very proven hypervisor platform. And the ability to partner that now with PowerFlex allows us to unlock a tremendous amount of capability in a part of the market that really didn't have access to that before.

>> Yeah, and it also provides a great opportunity

Bob Laliberte

>> to modernize as well. So, it's not only just hypervisor to hypervisor, but also, that future path as well to be able to modernize those apps and move on to a Kubernetes platform as well.

>> Yeah, the idea that we're trying

Lee Caswell

>> to get the infrastructure out of the way, so developers can actually get to work. And the fact that containers we see as being complementary to VMs. I think one of the things that really caught people a little bit by surprise was Nutanix working with external storage. They're like, "Wait a minute, how does that work? " For years we've been replacing external storage was the idea. I think it's just a real maturity of the vision from Nutanix is that, hey, now we're moving past HCI, which is... Not past it, but from the sense that market adoption is happening at double-digit rates. But we're watching that customers at large scale want to go and manage both external storage and HCI together. And that's really a maturity and it's in part driven by the disruption happening in the virtualization space. The largest customers are coming saying, "Hey, how can I get access to Nutanix value more quickly? " And we're looking and saying, "Hey, partnering with Dell on PowerFlex is one way to make that happen."

>> Yeah, and the hyperscale showed up in the cloud. The on-prem growth of AI factories is one trend. You guys are OGs of software-defined. I have to ask the question because now the capabilities of infrastructure demand is up. What is different now in the environment? Because I won't say software- defined hasn't grown up fully. Maybe the timing was an issue. What's it about this culture now that software- defined's working and scaling? Is it the fact that the infrastructure has blown up in terms of capabilities? Has it been like the new architecture? Is there a reason why now, more than ever, software- defined's rising fast, super fast? It's been around, but-

Lee Caswell

>> Well, here's two things I'll offer up and then hand it over to AC here. So, one is we're taking advantage of the fact that, by my calculations, there's over 27,000 servers sold a day. So, new hardware is coming to new servers. Customers upgrade servers more quickly. And it turns out, you get new servers faster than you get storage systems. So, storage systems and HCI built on servers gives you access to the latest CPUs, GPUs, the latest NVMe devices. That's one thing. The other one is that there are not enough specialists out there to run a different AI stack for a data lake and a different AI stack for data ingest as well as processing, as well as archiving. You're running out of people, so you have to basically consolidate. We have a long history of consolidating. We started with storage and compute. Now, we're taking Kubernetes as well as VMs and the hybrid multi-cloud world. All of that means you can get a lot of leverage from your existing teams.

Anthony Cinelli

>> Yeah, absolutely. I think maybe to add on to that, data. It's the first slide in every presentation, "Data's growing by X amount every year. " And that's a reality and especially when we think about where this new partnership between PowerFlex and Nutanix is most incremental to the market, it's really around helping address those at-scale, larger customers who when they think about their storage environment, they need scale-out architecture because the reality of trying to solve for that with a scale-up traditional array, they need to manage tens, dozens in some cases several hundred of these arrays. That's just not feasible. So, the superpower that PowerFlex brings to the table is introducing that true scale-out architecture that enables massive amounts of simplicity and consolidation and increased utilization, which drives down cost. And now, it also provides that flexibility to say, "Hey, I'm running one hypervisor today, but now with no disruption whatsoever, with no new infrastructure, hardware investment, I can now just go deploy a modern hypervisor with tremendous amounts of automation and simplicity that, oh, by the way, also gives me an on- ramp to container orchestration as well. " So, there's so much about this that is all about meeting customers with where they are and what they're asking for, that's why there's just so much excitement around the service.

>> The demand is high. - Totally.

Bob Laliberte

>> Yeah, the demand is high.

Lee Caswell

>> I was going to say also the other piece

>> that you were talking about scaling, it's also the fact that organizations have fewer and fewer resources to manage an increasingly large and distributed environment.

Lee Caswell

>> Yeah, that's right. - So, having that platform, having

Bob Laliberte

>> that common storage platform that you can deploy at multiple locations, having the operating system enable you to do it a lot more efficiently. And so, a little bit of principle of least astonishment, you can spin up resources in the cloud, you can spin up resources in the data center or at the edge, and it all has the same common look and feel.

>> Kind of runs back to the theme of the show.

Anthony Cinelli

>> Exactly. - Run anything anywhere, right?

Lee Caswell

>> I mean it couldn't be more simple than that,

Lee Caswell

>> except the actual implementation of that is actually pretty complex.

Anthony Cinelli

>> Correct. - So, making containers work the same as VMs

Lee Caswell

>> and we have a joint vision here. I think that data will be more distributed over time. If you believe that, then all of a sudden this idea of managing at scale, fleet management, whether it's Kubernetes, whether it's VMs, across files, blocks, and objects, man, this becomes a really interesting solve.

>> And the demand for the customers, they're re-architecting for the AI factories, for the new distributed computing environment, that's hybrid cloud. However far we're back, it's now standard. So, hybrid cloud is a done deal. That bet came in.

Anthony Cinelli

>> And there's something Lee called out that I do want to highlight. There's engineering, there's hard work that went into effectively making this invisible and seamless for customers. And I want to be really clear, this isn't just a marketing partnership, a marketing announcement. There is a tremendous amount of engineering integration that went into making the Nutanix experience with PowerFlex effectively seamless and invisible for customers. And for customers that want to learn more about that, certainly reach out, we'd love to talk about it, but there's a tremendous work that was delivered by the teams enabling this.

>> That's a great point, AC, because I was trying to get at my first question about the modern ecosystem. Relationships are more engineering-oriented. Integration's big. You guys have a lot of activity over the past year together. Talk specifically about what you guys are actually delivering here and going forward, because you're going into a market where it's faster build-out, scale up and scale out. Storage is playing a different role. Servers are playing a different role. The combination of chips and the substrate around it, this is where the demand is. All the customers are re-architecting for this. So, what's the relationship? Give us some taste of the activity and accomplishments.

>> Yeah, I think that one of the things I'll maybe make a

Anthony Cinelli

>> claim around is that when it comes to consuming Nutanix solutions and Nutanix platform outcomes, Dell is best positioned to meet the customer wherever they are with whatever they're looking for. And the beauty of this is, yes, we have this very exciting announcement with our new PowerFlex integration that's now available for customers to run and buy, but we also have our XE and XE Plus offerings, which allows us to bring those integrated outcomes directly to customers with that HCI implementation for those customers that feel that's most appropriate for them. And in all those models, we have the full power of Dell's supply chains. So, whether that's different server form factors, different silicon suppliers, diversity. You name it, we have the ability to solve across such a wide spectrum of workloads to enable customers to say, "Hey, we got you. Go focus on your business problem. We'll take care of the infrastructure."

>> Yeah. You're going to appreciate this comment. John Roese, the CTO of Dell and I were chatting the other day at RSA, came by to do a flyby to check out the security industry.

Anthony Cinelli

>> Nice. - And we've been talking about our AI lab we're

>> working on, and he's got the same ethos as Debo who came on earlier, the chief AI officer for Nutanix. In Nutanix, at Nutanix and on Nutanix is their philosophy. In Nutanix, how to make AI work on all three areas? John Roese, the same thing. He was telling me that him and Michael Dell were talking about, I shouldn't say this on live camera, maybe-

Anthony Cinelli

>> I guess I will.

>> I guess I will. - Responsibility for...

Bob Laliberte

>> How about those Celtics?

>> Okay, so what he said was

>> that they're looking at the configurations of servers using AI inside Dell to help customers figure out what they need for a workload with algorithms. That's like a build to workload order. Now, if you remember the Dell history, that was one of the Dell's things. So, this is kind of where it's going. To your point, the configurations for the workload isn't just another platform feature. The platform has to be ready for that. I've kind of tied together the platform with Dell. What does this mean for the customer? Does that make their life easier? What does that mean for you guys on the software side? How do you guys make the partnership... Rationalize that thought because this is a new best practice, actually.

Lee Caswell

>> Yeah, just in terms of how the products integrate first, we'll start there, right? If you initiate a snapshot now, you initiate it from the Prism interface, well, that's new, and it's executed in the data path on PowerFlex. Oh, so now I got basically where you would want that to be executed. So, you got this integration. That was part of the joint engineering that we have between how do these products work together? Also, by the way, we're bringing things like VM- centric replication and DR. That's different than LUN-based. So, all of a sudden I can get not quite to the application, but pretty darn close. So, I started looking at the application and infrastructure folks are starting to think, "Hey, listen, that might be a faster path to make the application users more friendly to this, right? I'll give you a story. My daughter's a data scientist, just really proud of her, but she doesn't know anything about what we do. She just wants to go get the latest application deployed. We are helping now say whether it's AI, databases, analytics, we're going to bring the same enterprise value we've always brought, resiliency, day two operations, security, privacy-

>> Scale. Scale.

>> And scale- - Scale's a killer.

Lee Caswell

>> Now, you can go and basically do that at the speed

>> that the developers need.

>> Yeah, and I think this is the relationship

Lee Caswell

>> of the new ecosystem where it's not a Barney dealer, a marketing dealer or co-sell dealer. Well, those are great too, but the customer wants that abstracted away. They just want faster infrastructure.

Lee Caswell

>> Yeah. - Yeah. And the reality, to your point

Bob Laliberte

>> of earlier, this is hard work. It made me think of the duck analogy. On the surface, it's nice and calm, but underneath, the feet are going like crazy. I mean, it's a lot of work to integrate these solutions to provide something to the users, to the operations teams that's simple and easy to use, right? You're abstracting all that complexity. And then, you're delivering something that is ostensibly much easier, much more efficient for organizations to scale, to deploy, to be more agile with as well.

Anthony Cinelli

>> Yeah, yeah, yeah. - It's one attribute to the modularity

Lee Caswell

>> of the Nutanix architecture also, right? I mean, Nutanix was architected at the time that the hypervisor was already completed, basically, right? So, it was operated and innovated separately, and that gave us a choice of hypervisor up front, big value across our joint customers. And now, we can start looking at, it doesn't even have to have a hypervisor going forward. That's we announced.

>> I love the example of your daughter because one of the things we're seeing on theCUBE is the platform engineering world and the infrastructure world is intersecting with predictive analytics, operational data. They're two different tribes. If you blend them together, you get OpenStack. That's the joke.

>> And about 300 people. - And nothing gets done.

>> No, but there's a synergy,

Lee Caswell

>> it's almost like a DMZ layer between them.

>> Exactly. - So, you're starting to see those cultures,

>> because platform engineers are operating at scale.

Lee Caswell

>> DevOps. Now, you've got data side building up very, very fast. So, this ability to be agile, but yet scale fast, what do you guys view that? Because this is a real customer situation inside the customer base. Who leads the project? Who leads? The scale leads? So, what's enabling what? There's a Venn diagram at some point where analytics meets platform. This is a key intersection.

Anthony Cinelli

>> Maybe, the way I'll frame that is the days of trying to tell a customer about a product are gone. They don't have time for it. To Lee's point, they don't have the people for it. The last thing anyone wants is another product. They want to hear about outcomes. They want to say, "Here's my business challenge. Here's my problem. Here's what I'm trying to achieve. How do you get me there? " And duck analogy, I don't care about the feet, I want to provide... And look, I think that's something we're very, very heavily leaning into in all aspects of our business at Dell. Whether that's the AI factory concept, which is, "Hey, let us deliver that end-to-end AI outcome for you. " Whether that's this idea of providing open ecosystem, modular software-defined infrastructure that, oh, by the way, you deploy this Nutanix platform on it, you spin up a VM, the storage is automatically created a map to it. You don't do anything. You take a snapshot. Done at the hypervisor layer. Nothing to do with storage integration. Yet, you still get that benefit of independent resource scale, independent resource patching, and life-cycling. So, again, it's how do we deliver these true multi- cloud outcomes in the data center without going to the customer and say, "Oh, here's why my widget does a little bit better this or that than someone else's widget. " They just don't care anymore.

>> And the role of storage is changing too,

>> and the configuration of these market architectures. So, it's more relevant if anything than that. So, choice drives everything.

Lee Caswell

>> Yes. And when you get to AI, all of a sudden it gets even bigger. Choice of GPUs. Now, I need a choice of an LLM. How do I get access choice of the new NEM models, right? NEMO models? The agentic cycle? We're working to make sure this is accessible to both of our joint customers.

>> Guys, I really appreciate the time.

>> Congratulations, great relationship with Dell.

>> Great to be here. - .

>> Love the new ecosystem leader, Lee. Great to see you.

Lee Caswell

>> Okay, more CUBE coverage here.

Anthony Cinelli

>> CEO of Nutanix coming up next. We're going to talk to Dr. Rajiv coming up because now we know he's got a PhD.

>> He does. - Ask him about all the cool platforms.

>> Remember, only three things to remember, platform,

Lee Caswell

>> platform, platform.

>> And platform. - Platform.

>> We'll be right back.