Nutanix have updated their Discovery Hardware (old hardware offered in previous blog) to include the new Intel Haswell CPU and the Discovery Hardware can also be customized to suit your needs.
The Nutanix Discovery Hardware is based on their 1000 Series Xtreme Computing Platform and if you are going to be a brand new customer of Nutanix, then you can purchase two of their NX-1365-G4 Appliances, each appliance consists of 3 nodes, so you would have have a pretty sweet 6 nodes in 4U, providing 64 cores at 2.6GHz, just over 3TB of RAM and just under 30TB of storage (6×1.2TB SSD * 12x6TB HDD), based on the Nutanix RF2 and N+1 for the nodes.
In reality, most will go for the smaller SSD and less RAM per node, but keep the larger HDD for the initial deployment.
With two discovery units, you do have the option to split the appliances and then replicate your VMs on a schedule to your Disaster Recovery site.
The Nutanix Discovery Hardware are a very nice introduction into the Nutanix platform and with the ever maturing Acropolis Hyper-visor (based on KVM), if you are not using all of the VMware features, then having these units in and having a test of the Acropolis capabilities could help reduce v-tax in future expansions.
However, if you are using any of the advanced features that VMware provide, then these units can be configured as traditional VMware hosts, but use the Nutanix magic on the storage fabric layer to provide the performance and resilience that Nutanix provides.
If you are looking at reducing your infrastructure footprint, running costs, complexity or entering the hyper-converged space or just plain fancy something new and interesting, then these Nutanix Discovery units provide a great introduction. Once you have them in play, you and your team only need to concentrate on the really important aspects, supporting your businesses needs and your customers requirements. As Nutanix say, “Invisible Infrastructure”.