‘Our partners now are going to be able to have a much more comprehensive conversations with their customers on that hypervisor strategy topic,’ Dell Technologies executive Drew Schulke tells CRN.

Dell Technologies and Nutanix are partnering on new storage device products and new go-to-market strategy that is taking dead aim at the market looking for VMware alternatives in the wake of Broadcom’s price hikes.

The new version of XC Plus is for customers who want to use Dell storage for their Nutanix HCI environments while Dell PowerFlex with Nutanix Cloud Platform gives customers a vSphere alternative in the form of Nutanix Acropolis on Dell PowerFlex.

“Our partners now are going to be able to have a much more comprehensive conversation with their customers on that hypervisor strategy topic,” Drew Schulke, Dell Technologies vice president of Infrastructure Solutions Group, primary storage portfolio, told CRN. “Both in terms of the XC Plus offer if they’re focused on HCI operation model. For customers who are looking for something that might be more able to support virtualized and non-virtualized workloads with PowerFlex, now you have Acropolis as a first-class citizen in that discussion as well.”

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For San Jose, Calif.-based Nutanix, not only is it using Dell’s market-leading storage hardware, it is using Dell’s market-leading storage sales teams as well to drive revenue and services.

“Dell is going to take end-to-end lead on sales, support, transactions and services. For Dell channel partners this is a great development because now they can deliver the solution from end to end, transacting it through Dell,” said Schulke (pictured above). “That’s on the XC Plus side.”

Josh Lee is CTO with Nanuet, N.Y.- based VirtuIT, a Dell Platinum partner as well as a Nutanix partner. He said Dell’s expanding optionality is a huge win for their customers.

“Dell has a proven track record selling and supporting purpose-built HCI appliances,” he told CRN. “Dell now has these integrations across Microsoft and Red Hat with Azure Stack HCI, Broadcom with VXRail. This gives our customers at VirtuIT options around how they want to achieve their multi- and hybrid-cloud vision with the best hardware in the market. We are meeting with Dell leadership in our sales territories this week to discuss strategy and go to market for our joint customer and potential customers.”

And because this is a storage deal, Schulke said, the XC Plus as well as the Dell PowerFlex with Nutanix Cloud Foundations, which will be released later this year, are both eligible for the incentives available with Partner First For Storage. This also means Dell’s internal sales reps will be pushing Nutanix offerings to their customers, prospects, and the channel.

“Absolutely. 100 percent,” Schulke said. “We started taking orders for this last week. We are out there actively enabling and selling XC Plus.”

Dell previously drove 40 percent of VMware’s revenue via several relationships in an agreement framework that was drawn up to last five years. However, Dell ended that relationship two years earlier than planned in February of this year citing Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware as the cause.

Ketan Shah, vice president of products at Nutanix, said Nutanix is very excited to have reach into Round Rock, Texas-based Dell’s customers.

“Dell obviously has vast go-to-market resources and a strong channel,” he said. “If I’m containing my excitement, don’t let that deceive you. We are very excited.”

In storage, according to the most recent numbers shared by tracking firm IDC, Dell has the number one position in external RAID enterprise storage with a 24.8 percent share. It is first in high-end RAID storage with 34.9 percent share, mid-range RAID storage also owned by Dell with 25 percent share. It was number one in storage software with a 9.6 percent share, first in converged systems with 53.1 percent of the market, first in hyperconverged systems with 33 percent of the market, first in purpose built back up appliance with 41.2 percent of the market.

Schulke said with the PowerFlex partnership, customers can independently increase compute and storage to meet demand and streamline DevOps with self-service and automation for virtualized environments and containerized applications.

“We’re incredibly excited that of all the folks that Nutanix could work with when supporting an external storage product that we’re going to get be the first ones to do that with PowerFlex,” Shulke said.

Schulke said customers choose PowerFlex for the scalability of performance across all metrics whether its IOPs, throughput, latency, PowerFlex gets better as the customer scales.

“So if you want some more application horsepower, you add some more compute nodes,” Schulke told CRN. “If you want more capacity, you add some more storage nodes. It’s very, very efficient. All of that happens within a framework that can deliver exceptionally high levels of performance.”

Shah told CRN adding PowerFlex to the Nutanix Cloud Platform meets a demand from some of its largest enterprise clients and prospects insisted upon it for their environments.

“This is a big deal. This is the first of its kind. This is the first time Nutanix is supporting external storage,” Shah said. “Customer choice has been one of our key principals. This was anchored by some large customers and prospects demanding this.”