Red Hat and Nutanix team on hybrid cloud offering

Red Hat and Nutanix are partnering to help their customers manage and scale their hybrid cloud. Specifically, Red Hat’s OpenShift is the preferred platform for Kubernetes on Nutanix’s Cloud Platform and Nutanix’s Cloud Platform is the preferred choice for hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) on Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux and Red Hat’s OpenShift.

In addition, Nutanix AVH is a Red Hat-certified hypervisor enabling support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and OpenShift on Nutanix Cloud Platform.

The two companies said that they will also work together on future products through joint engineering efforts, roadmap reviews and product planning.

The collaboration means the two companies are the “preferred” providers for each other, but the deal is not exclusive.  

In a blog post, Nutanix said that the collaboration between the two companies is in response to customers because many organizations want to run Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat OpenShift on Nutanix’s Cloud Platform.

A cost-effective alternative

"The partnership between the two companies is not surprising considering the bad blood between Nutanix and VMware,” says Roy Chua, founder and principal with research firm AvidThink. Chua is referring to the long-standing rivalry between Nutanix and VMware and the recent lawsuit involving Nutanix’s CEO.  In January VMware filed a lawsuit against Nutanix’s CEO Rajiv Ramaswami, who is the former COO of VMware. The lawsuit accuses him of violating his contractual obligations while being wooed by a rival.

RELATED: Nutanix reels in VMware COO Ramaswami as its new CEO and president

However, Chua says that he doesn’t believe the partnership will directly hurt VMware, noting that customers that are already working with VMware won’t necessarily switch to Red Hat because of this agreement. However, if a company is looking for new infrastructure, it might consider Nutanix and Red Hat’s OpenShift because it is a cost-effective alternative.

While this agreement appears to be primarily targeted at enterprises, Chua also said that it may help Nutanix win more telco business. “Nutanix could use the Red Hat partnership to get into the telcos,” he said.