Their core product is very comparable to VMware vSphere -- a system for managing virtual machines on a cluster of on-prem hardware. Nutanix was one of the first

Their core product is very comparable to VMware vSphere -- a system for managing virtual machines on a cluster of on-prem hardware. Nutanix was one of the first to do storage virtualisation, whereby each node provides some local storage that is shared across the whole pool. I believe they were one of the first (if not the first) to offer this as a turnkey product. The initial version was just an add-on to vSphere, but they now have their own hypervisor as well to make it a more complete offering. These days you can achieve the same thing with VMware vSAN or Hyper-V on a Windows cluster using Storage Spaces Direct. The latter is practically free for organisations that use mostly Windows Server workloads, because those orgs typically license Windows Server Data Center Edition for every physical host anyway. In my experience Storage Spaces Direct was also much faster, especially when used with SSD disks. The protocols used by Nutanix were very inefficient compared to the RDMA and Infiniband capabilities in SMB3. Think millions of IOPS instead of tens of thousands. In some sense, the cloud provides a similarly abstract view of storage. You ask for a 1 TB disk, you get a 1 TB disk. You don't have to worry about formatting a disk array or securing a fibre channel fabric. There's no "maintenance" tasks to be performed on cloud storage. It's just... there. All the time, with zero effort. This is why I think Nutanix is in trouble. They provide a partial but good solution to a problem that the public cloud providers eliminated entirely.