Ask Us Everything: Pure Storage + Nutanix — What the Community Really Wanted to Know
The January Ask Us Everything (AUE) session tackled one of the hottest topics in infrastructure right now: what Pure Storage and Nutanix are doing together—and what that means for our customers. Judging by the volume and depth of questions, it’s clear that many of you are actively evaluating next-generation virtualization options and want real answers, not marketing slides.
With Cody Hosterman (Sr Director Product Management, Pure Storage), Thomas Brown (Field CTO, Nutanix), myself - Joe Houghes (Field Solutions Architect, Pure Storage), and our host Don Poorman (Technical Evangelist, Pure Storage), the conversation went deep into architecture, migration realities, and the practical problems this joint solution is designed to solve.
Here are the biggest takeaways from what attendees asked—and what they learned.
This is joint engineering, not just “interoperability”
One of the most important clarifications came early: this isn’t a case of “here’s a LUN, good luck.” Nutanix has natively integrated Pure Storage FlashArray APIs directly into the Nutanix stack.
That means:
- No plugins to install
- No bolt-on frameworks to manage
- No separate operational silos
In Prism, the Nutanix management plane, Pure Storage behaves like a first-class storage backend. Snapshots, protection, provisioning, and automation are driven from Nutanix, while Pure Storage delivers its strengths—performance, data reduction, SafeMode, and simplicity—under the covers.
NVMe/TCP support is a deliberate, forward-looking choice
Several attendees asked why Fibre Channel or legacy protocols weren’t the focus. The answer: this solution is built for where infrastructure is going, not where it’s been.
By standardizing on NVMe/TCP over Ethernet, Pure and Nutanix:
- Avoid decades of SCSI and FC tech debt
- Enable massive bandwidth scalability (100G, 400G, and beyond)
- Lay the groundwork for modern security features like TLS and in-band authentication
This is a design meant to still make sense 10 years from now.
Object-style vDisks eliminate old datastore limits
A recurring “aha” moment came when attendees learned how vDisks are implemented. Instead of traditional filesystem-based datastores (with all their historical limits), each virtual disk maps directly to a Pure Storage volume.
What that unlocks:
- Petabyte-scale virtual disks (no more 64TB ceilings)
- No datastore gymnastics to scale performance
- No artificial limits inherited from legacy file systems
This felt especially relevant for customers running large databases, analytics platforms, or fast-growing enterprise apps.
HCI isn’t going away—this complements it
A key question from the audience: Does this replace Nutanix HCI? The answer was a clear no.
Nutanix HCI still makes perfect sense for many workloads. But when customers:
- Need to scale storage independently of compute
- Have performance-heavy or capacity-dense workloads
- Want an “apples-to-apples” replacement for traditional VMware + external storage
…Pure Storage + Nutanix provides a clean alternative without forcing architectural compromises.
Migration is real, and the hard parts were addressed honestly
Migration questions dominated the session—and the tone was refreshingly pragmatic.
Attendees learned:
- Nutanix Move is fully supported and preserves Purity’s data reduction–which makes this a zero-cost migration in terms of storage capacity
- VMware NSX rules can be translated into Nutanix Flow during migration
- Backup tools (Veeam, Rubrik, Commvault, Cohesity, etc.) continue to work without re-engineering or changes in backup operations
- Most migration risk doesn’t lie in the hypervisor—it’s overlooked third-party dependencies
The guidance was consistent: plan carefully, take stock of any dependencies, and don’t rush a wholesale cutover just to meet an artificial deadline. No user ever wants to be forced to do that.
Operational simplicity is a major design goal
A subtle but powerful theme emerged: you don’t need to tune this solution.
VMware users often ask about “nerd knobs” and the need to tweak things to get them working right. In this solution, they’re mostly gone—and intentionally so. Best practices for queue depths, multipathing, performance tuning and more are already baked into the platform by the joint engineering teams. Improvements are managed through upgrades, eliminating the need for manual scripting or implementing performance tweaks for a "snowflake" deployment.
The result of this best-of-breed, jointly-engineered solution is consistency, predictability, and easier support—especially during migrations–so that you can focus on the work that makes your business run.
The roadmap is active—and community feedback matters
This solution was not positioned as “done and dusted.” The GA release is the foundation, not the finish line. Capabilities like Kubernetes support, deeper snapshot orchestration, VDI validation, and migration optimizations are all on the roadmap.
And importantly: your use cases drive priorities. And the Pure Storage Community is a great place to drop your feedback for the teams!
Keep the conversation going
This partnership sparked a lot of interest for a reason: it’s not just about changing hypervisors—it’s about modernizing how infrastructure works.
If you missed the live session—or want to dive deeper—join the ongoing discussion in the Pure Storage Community:
👉 https://purecommunity.purestorage.com/discussions/virtualization/ask-us-everything-about-pure-storage--nutanix/3634
You’ll find Pure Storage and Nutanix experts answering follow-ups, clarifying edge cases, and sharing lessons learned from real deployments. While you’re there, be sure to check out past Ask Us Everything events—they’re packed with practical, practitioner-level insights.
