Bare metal cloud servers now cheaper and more readily available than on-prem hardware, says Nutanix CEO

Summary

Virtualization Bare metal cloud servers now cheaper and more readily available than on-prem hardware, says Nutanix CEO Hyperscalers can get hardware before enterprise vendors and buyers don't much care where they land Hyperscalers’ purchasing power means bare metal servers offered by major clouds can now be cheaper and easier to acquire than on-prem servers, according to Nutanix CEO Rajiv Ramaswami.The CEO told The Register hyperscalers’ ability to buy servers and memory in bulk means they can often make infrastructure available faster than enterprise hardware players, and sees some customers who have previously preferred on-premises infrastructure heading for the cloud.Ramaswami said he expects high memory and solid state storage prices will persist into next year and noted the impact of current price rises on the cost of servers. “What that means for customers is they need to plan and budget carefully,” he said. “They pick servers on price and lead time” – and clouds often win on both metrics. At the same time, Ramaswami said customers increasingly favor on-prem AI infrastructure to keep costs predictable. They want that because the CEO thinks AI remains “one of those things where people feel they have to do it” and return on investment is unclear. “People are seeing incremental benefits,” he said, citing document search and summaries as the most common on-prem AI applications. Nutanix, he said, has measured a ten-percent improvement in service response times from using AI, while its developers are delivering new features 50 percent faster than before they used AI helpers.Enterprise virtualization stacks like Nutanix’s products can require several hefty hosts to run. Ramaswami said he’s comfortable the footprint of his company’s products is not an issue for new buyers, but that he is also keenly aware that customers are looking for smaller hosts – and even servers running non-x86 processors.For now, he doesn’t see sufficient appetite for Arm servers that Nutanix w...