CRN breaks down the six biggest statements made by Nutanix CEO Rajiv Ramaswami during his keynote address at Nutanix Next 2025—from Cisco and Pure Storage to Google Cloud and AWS.
“If you asked me a few years ago whether Pure and Nutanix would have come together, I could not have even imagined that,” said Nutanix CEO Rajiv Ramaswami during his keynote address at Nutanix Next on Wednesday. “But here we are today, Nutanix and Pure Storage coming together to deliver you this world class solution.”
The San Jose, Calif.-based hyperconverged software superstar unveiled a slew of new solutions and vendor partnerships with Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Cisco, Dell Technologies and Pure Storage.
[Related: Toshiba Ditches VMware For Nutanix; Nutanix CEO Explains How Company Is Winning New Customers]
This includes Nutanix’s new FlashStack joint solution.
“We’ve come together with Cisco, Pure and Nutanix to bring a fully validated solution to market that combines Cisco’s UCS servers, Cisco switches, the Nutanix cloud platform on Cisco UCS—combined together with Pure’s flash arrays,” said Ramaswami .
Additionally, the CEO touted Nutanix’s AOS hypervisor is now fully cloud native on Amazon’s Elastic Kubernetes Services (EKS).
CRN breaks down Ramaswami’s six boldest remarks during his keynote in front of thousands of attendees at Nutanix Next 2025.
Nutanix Becomes Available On Google Cloud
We are all about making it easier for you to move applications from your current infrastructure into the Nutanix platform—making it more future-proof, making it ready for a multi-cloud environment.
Talking about multi-cloud, we’ve been working together with the public cloud providers for quite a while. We started with AWS in 2020 by making our solution available on bare metal. We had it for Azure in 2022.
This year, I’m pleased to announce Nutanix availability on Google Cloud.
Early access will be this summer, with generally available later this calendar year.
Again, same operating model, the same full portability of licenses, the same software stack—now you can deploy on all the major cloud hyperscalers. Using it for applications like disaster recovery, like seamless cloud migration, like elastic scaling of your environment—numerous use cases.
We are committed to continuing on this journey to help you build this hybrid cloud environment that operates seamlessly.
‘Pure And Nutanix Are Coming Together’
We’re going to support Pure Storage. I’m sure many of you folks here have Pure Storage deployed. They are leading provider of flash arrays.
I’m thrilled today to announce that Pure and Nutanix are coming together. We’re committed to giving you that choice. We’ve integrating the Nutanix cloud platform, with Pure’s Flash Array.
The solution is going to be in early access very soon, this summer, and we expect it to be generally available later this calendar year.
So for those of you who are interested in becoming early access customers, please let us know. We’ll be happy to work with you all now.
Myself and [Pure Storage CEO] Charles Giancarlo worked together for many years at Cisco. He’s been a colleague, friend and mentor. He was my boss at Cisco for a bit and then we went out different ways.
And I tell you, if you asked me a few years ago whether Pure and Nutanix would have come together, I could not have even imagine that. But here we are today, Nutanix and Pure Storage coming together to deliver you this world-class solution.
Nutanix Unveils New FlashStack With Cisco And Pure Storage
We’ve come together with Cisco, Pure and Nutanix to bring a fully validated solution to market that combines Cisco’s UCS servers, unified computer servers, Cisco switches, the Nutanix cloud platform on Cisco UCS—combined together with Pure Flash arrays.
That solution is called FlashStack with Nutanix.
It’s also going to be available later this year, at the same time that we deliver our Pure solution.
So again, this is a simple, turnkey way for you all to get a solution from three vendors coming together that you can deploy out-of-the-box for a complete solution.
CEO Touts Dell PowerFlex Now GA
Last year we talked about how we could bring the goodness of the Nutanix platform together with external storage. So this year, we’ve delivered.
We now have, in general availability, the Nutanix cloud platform available with Dell PowerFlex.
This is not about a hypervisor connected to external storage, it is about the full Nutanix cloud platform. This includes the hypervisor, our software defined networking, our micro-segmentation security, our automation and operations—all put together and deliver together with Dell PowerFlex.
It’s maintained with the same simplicity and ease of use as you have with your HCI advisor. We’ve been in early access trials with several customers with this solution already.
Cloud Native Nutanix AOS Now On AWS ESK
All these applications that you’re running need storage. They need app-centric storage. They need resilience. They need data protection, which is why we embarked on a journey to make AOS fully cloud native.
What we’re doing is we’ve done with our engineering team, a complete refactoring of AOS to be able to run natively on any underlying Kubernetes infrastructure.
We’re starting out with cloud native AOS now available to run on Amazon’s EKS, elastic compute storage service. That brings the benefits of AOS, that you all known for many years, to native container environments for native container applications.
So you get access to resilience. You can get maximum uptime across multiple availability zones, across multiple regions and even across multiple clouds. You get full portability because that same storage stack is now available everywhere—not just on-prem or on VMs, but it’s now available in public cloud.
Some ‘Silly’ Fun With AI: Ramaswami Turns Into An Action Figure
Generative AI has seen rapid advances, and it’s impacting almost every aspect of our personal lives and our professional lives. It’s even impacting us in kind of silly ways.
In fact, there’s the latest trend out there, where you can actually go into ChatGPT, and with a few prompts, you can create an action figure for yourself.
I was intrigued. Well, why not try this on myself? And here’s what it did. (Shows Ramaswami as an action figure).
I thought this was pretty fun, but then I thought, ‘It’s AI. So why not actually have it do something in terms of trying to make me the action figure feel that I really want be?’
So I tried this again with a few different prompts in terms of what I wanted. Then here’s what it gave me this time. (Picture above).
Now, if only GenAI gave me back my black hair in real life and cloud make me buffer than I really am, that would be even better. But hey, this was an example of how AI can be fun.
