The Enterprise AI Cloud Platform Powered by Nutanix Unified Storage

At AI Field Day 7, Alex Almeida from Nutanix presented the company’s vision for enabling enterprise AI initiatives through a robust, cloud-native infrastructure built on Nutanix Unified Storage. He began by highlighting a critical industry insight: while interest in AI is surging, a reported 95% of enterprise generative AI pilots are failing to reach production. This widespread issue, he explained, is not due to deficiencies in the AI applications themselves but rather due to the lack of a strong, scalable data infrastructure that can support AI at the enterprise level. As companies attempt to scale pilots into production, the complexity of integrating data from edge, core, and cloud environments—along with difficulties in orchestrating networking, compute, and storage—presents a considerable barrier to adoption.

To address this challenge, Nutanix is focused on delivering a seamless platform that simplifies the infrastructure required for AI. Their solution is the Nutanix Cloud Platform, built on a modern server-based architecture with a focus on scalability, manageability, and consistency across compute, networking, and especially storage. This shift from traditional three-tier architectures to cloud-native technologies supports containerized applications and Kubernetes workflows. Nutanix sees its evolution from hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) into a robust cloud-native platform as a foundational change that sets the stage for the next decade of enterprise computing, particularly for AI and PaaS environments. With components like Nutanix Kubernetes Platform (NKP) and Nutanix Cloud Clusters, organizations can run applications consistently across on-prem, cloud, and edge environments.

A central piece of this AI-ready infrastructure is Nutanix’s Unified Storage offering, which provides file, block, and object storage all integrated into a single platform. Almeida emphasized their data management capabilities through Nutanix Data Lens, which adds analytics and cybersecurity features such as ransomware detection. He also pointed to Nutanix’s strategic partnership with NVIDIA, underscoring their certified support for NVIDIA’s GPU Direct Storage and active involvement in NVIDIA’s Enterprise AI Factory. These collaborations ensure that Nutanix’s solutions are aligned with the latest AI data platform innovations. Overall, Nutanix aims to empower enterprises to overcome infrastructure hurdles and realize real ROI from their AI initiatives by providing a modern, unified data foundation.