At the Nutanix .NEXT Conference in Chicago, Nutanix and NetApp announced a strategic partnership to integrate NetApp Intelligent Data Infrastructure with the Nutanix Cloud Platform (NCP), including support for the Nutanix AHV hypervisor. The integration is expected later this year and targets enterprises looking to align virtualization and data management strategies across on-premises, hybrid cloud, and containerized environments.
The joint approach brings NetApp ONTAP into the Nutanix ecosystem as a primary data layer, combining ONTAP’s mature data services with NCP’s unified operational model. This positions ONTAP as the storage backbone while Nutanix continues to deliver compute, virtualization, and cloud orchestration through AHV and its broader platform stack.
NetApp and Nutanix are streamlining the modernization of virtualized environments by providing secure and efficient solutions, according to Sandeep Singh, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Enterprise Storage at NetApp. Singh emphasized the importance of Intelligent Data Infrastructure as the foundation for transforming virtualization and data operations, highlighting that their collaboration simplifies the operation of virtualized workloads at the enterprise level.
NFS-Based Connectivity
The integration centers on NFS-based connectivity between Nutanix and ONTAP systems. This allows virtual machines to run on Nutanix while leveraging external NetApp storage, enabling a disaggregated architecture where compute and storage scale independently. This model is particularly relevant for organizations seeking to optimize resource utilization or extend existing NetApp investments into Nutanix environments.
Migration is a key focus area. The companies are aligning NetApp Shift and Nutanix Move to enable faster VM migrations to AHV environments. The tooling is designed to enable data-in-place conversions, reducing the need for full data copies and shortening migration timelines to minutes in some scenarios. This approach is intended to minimize operational disruption while accelerating adoption of the Nutanix platform.
Operational simplification is another stated goal. By offloading storage services to ONTAP, organizations can centralize data management functions such as snapshots, replication, and tiering, while Nutanix manages compute and virtualization. The combined environment is expected to offer unified visibility and control, reducing administrative overhead and simplifying troubleshooting across the stack.
VM-Level Granularity
The integration also introduces VM-level granularity for storage operations. Administrators can apply policies for performance, capacity, and data protection at the individual VM level, rather than managing resources at a broader datastore or cluster level. This aligns with enterprise requirements for fine-grained control in multi-tenant or mixed workload environments.
Cyber resilience is addressed through native ONTAP capabilities. The solution is expected to incorporate Autonomous Ransomware Protection with AI and NetApp’s ransomware resilience services, providing real-time detection of anomalies and potential data exfiltration. These features extend Nutanix’s existing security posture with deeper storage-layer intelligence.
NetApp Chief Commercial Officer Dallas Olson emphasized that partnering with Nutanix enhances NetApp’s position as a leader in storage and data management for virtualization. The collaboration aims to provide enterprises with a robust foundation for building an Intelligent Data Infrastructure that offers high performance, resilience, and scalability to support growing virtualization requirements.
Nutanix President and Chief Commercial Officer Tarkan Maner announced that their partnership with NetApp enables customers to modernize their virtualization platforms and leverage Intelligent Data Infrastructure at their own pace, combining modernization with advanced data management capabilities.
Overall, the partnership reflects a shift toward composable infrastructure models, in which best-of-breed compute and storage platforms are integrated via standard protocols and unified management layers.
The two vendors also plan to collaborate on AI initiatives. ONTAP integration with the Nutanix Agentic AI stack is intended to support emerging enterprise AI use cases, focusing on data accessibility, governance, and performance in AI-driven workflows.
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