Web-scale hyper-converged infrastructure company Nutanix is entering African markets, owing to the significant potential of its solutions to provide companies and governments with unified and scalable information technology (IT) infrastructure.

Nutanix’s integration layer is an x86-architecture software layer, which can, therefore, be applied to unify existing IT infrastructure. It also enables users to gradually switch to more modern hardware while using its existing equipment, says Nutanix Western Europe regional director Paul Phillips.

“Nutanix’s solutions enable companies to remove their reliance on specific hardware and enable its IT functions to operate across a virtualised infrastructure. This means that control and management of IT functions are also simpler and IT departments can move computing loads or data across its infrastructure footprint.”

Nutanix is known for selling converged compute-storage hardware, but the key demand in Africa will be the software layer to repurpose existing IT assets and equipment. It has sold its solutions in South Africa and Angola and the company reports interest from Kenya and Nigeria.

“Most large companies in Africa are running virtualised environments – this makes our solutions a good fit to provide them with modern data-centre functionality, such as moving workloads and processes to where they can be run most efficiently. We will place more feet on the ground in African countries as demand increases,” he adds.

A key benefit of Nutanix’s solutions is that they enable IT administrators to design bespoke systems to run different processes.

For example, Nutanix’s graphics-processing server has four Nvidia graphics cards to process graphic-intensive operations, such as engineering models or design programs.

Phillips says IT administrators are much more effective, as they can design bespoke systems and then move processes to use different hardware configurations efficiently, further enabling them to “use IT equipment effectively and efficiently and maintain the ability to introduce new technologies in the future.”

Further, Nutanix has partnered with data centre hardware manufacturer EMC, and the subsequent converged solution is available as a hardware function or software layer on EMC’s systems.

The simplicity of the Nutanix integration layer is an important advantage, with rapid deployment in less than a day, as well as ease of administration and management. The system does not rely on hardware and can be deployed to safeguard existing equipment investments while enabling controlled equipment renewal without disruptions to the operational environment.

“The functionality of Nutanix is a key benefit for our customers. More than 90% of CIOs [chief information officers] note that they would have designed their data centres differently if they had a chance to start afresh. This is where our solution provides significant value, providing users with a way of accessing modern data-centre scalability and functionality, similar to the agile Web-scale environments used by search giant Google and online retailer Amazon,” explains Phillips.

The combination of virtualisation and virtualised converged infrastructure, both of which support the increasing use of cloud services, is an effective way for new African companies to implement modern data-centre functionality and for existing companies to reduce future cost increases for in-house IT services, he concludes.