In the 1980s, there was a commercial for Reese’s Peanut Butter cups that described the product with the following lines: “You got your chocolate in my peanut butter.  You got your peanut butter in my chocolate.”

This describes  hyperconverged infrastructure and the Cisco UCS converged platform.

By combining storage and compute into the same nodes, a hyperconverged infrastructure offers many features for customers.  These include highly performant storage, simplified management, and a reduced footprint in the datacenter.  But networking has remained an island unto it’s own, and its still it’s own silo in data centers with hyperconverged infrastructure.

Cisco’s UCS provides similar benefits by converging compute and network – simplified policy-based management combined with high performance compute and networking.

So what happens when you combine them?

You get a best of breed platform that brings the fully-converged stack to life.  Network, storage, and compute are unified with a Nutanix-powered hyperconverged platform running with policy-based hardware management through UCSM.

Today, Nutanix announced support for UCS C-series rackmount servers.  Unlike the previous platform expansions, Nutanix on Cisco UCS will not be an OEM partnership.  It will be a meet-in-the-channel approach where customers would buy Cisco UCS and Nutanix licensing separately, and the integration would take place when the system is installed at the customer site.

Nutanix has certified some Cisco UCS C-series platforms, and they provide the certified Bill of Materials to simplify ordering with your preferred channel partner.  Nutanix is not supporting Cisco B-series blades.

The combination of Nutanix and UCS brings yet another powerful combination to customers who want to utilize the best-of-breed technologies in their data centers.