Test Drive

Unlocking New Levels of Performance and Scale with Nutanix Cloud Platform and Pure Storage

Download PDF

Nutanix has long led the industry for hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) by leveraging virtualized workloads with distributed enterprise storage across nodes in a cluster.

For storage-intense workloads, today’s enterprise organizations require exceptional flexibility and agility in how they leverage and finance virtualization. Pure Storage and Nutanix have co-engineered a solution that now enables the Nutanix Cloud Platform (NCP) solution, including Nutanix AHV hypervisor, to address these workloads by extending its storage provisioning to Pure Storage FlashArray™. This partnership provides customers with a high-performance and efficient full-stack infrastructure to power their business-critical workloads.

The solution also enables customers to extend their existing Pure Storage FlashArray investments and complement them with the Nutanix Cloud Platform (NCP) solution.

The Nutanix Cloud Platform

Nutanix is a pioneer in HCI and offers an effective value proposition. Traditional three-tiered compute, networking and storage infrastructures, are condensed into a series of software services that also leverage the hypervisor to deliver shared storage across the cluster’s nodes.

This hyperconverged design offers many advantages, including a smaller data center footprint by eliminating a dedicated storage tier, fewer management planes for datacenter operators to work with, and full-stack visibility from the VM all the way down to the specific physical media supporting its associated data.

In the joint Nutanix and Pure Storage solution, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) powers a disaggregated architecture where compute is performed by Nutanix AHV, and storage is delivered by Pure Storage FlashArray via NVMe over TCP. This architecture allows customers to leverage the storage and data services of Pure Storage while benefiting from Nutanix’s robust compute virtualization, security, disaster recovery, and operational simplicity.  Additional benefits include:

  • Effortless operations: Nutanix Prism provides a unified, VM-centric interface that streamlines Day 0 through Day 2 operations. Executives gain faster insights and control with simplified workflows, intelligent automation, and integrated monitoring all from a single pane of glass.
  • Built-in virtualization with AHV: Nutanix AHV hypervisor eliminates the complexity and cost of third-party virtualization. It’s deeply integrated into the platform, delivering enterprise-grade performance, security, and scalability without the licensing overhead.
  • Integrated network security: Nutanix Flow delivers microsegmentation and virtual networking that’s policy-driven and application-aware. This delivers granular control over east-west traffic, helping reduce risk and support compliance requirements without adding operational burden.
  • VM-centric architecture for agility: Nutanix is designed around virtual machines, not legacy infrastructure. This enables fast provisioning, easy scaling, and responsive performance for business-critical applications.

All-flash Storage for Modern, On-Premises Virtual Workloads

FlashArray is designed to address the needs of the modern datacenter with its ease of management, reliability, flexibility, and predictable performance.

  • Purpose-built for performance and resilience: FlashArray is designed from the ground up to natively leverage the performance, density, reliability, and efficiency of flash storage. There are redundant components to provide resilience in the event of a problem.

The hardware, combined with the Pure Storage Purity operating system, delivers maximum performance so you can run different workloads and avoid noisy neighbor issues. With microsecond latency, FlashArray delivers faster, more consistent and more predictable throughput than conventional solid-state drives in legacy storage.  FlashArray is available in a wide range of configurations for different performance needs, with the top-tier //XL models capable of 150μs latency and 45GB/s throughput.

  • Data reduction: Tackle storage footprint with always-on global deduplication and compression plus exceptional storage density and low power consumption. Compared to legacy disk and many all-flash alternatives, Pure Storage delivers up to 85% less energy consumption and 5X greater storage density.
  • Storage resilience: FlashArray hardware promotes reliability, while the Purity operating system protects against concurrent dual-drive failures.  Purity also treats performance variability as a failure and uses parity to work around bottlenecks to deliver consistent latency.
  • Cybersecurity protection: The encrypt everything approach of FlashArray and always-on encryption of Purity provides built-in, enterprise-grade data security without user intervention or complicated key management. SafeMode™ Snapshots for ransomware mitigation and anomaly protection from Pure1® prevent cyberattackers from tampering with or maliciously destroying critical recovery data.
  • Ease of deployment, configuration and administration: Administrators do not need an advanced storage certification and do not face a steep learning curve to perform tasks with FlashArray. Its management interface to the platform’s Purity operating system has been optimized to be simple yet robust. Additionally, DevOps is possible with Pure Storage APIs to administer FlashArray storage using code and scripts.
  • Storage insights with Pure1 AIOps: Pure1 enhances the FlashArray management console by providing AI-enhanced analysis and insight for your array or array fleet. Additionally, it can act as a singular point for array software upgrades, provide insight into intelligent workload placement, and quickly analyze and easily move data where it most cost-effectively meets service level agreements – between both physical and virtual hosts or between on-premises and the cloud – to satisfy your customers.
  • Evergreen® Storage: Deploy it once, and then enjoy a subscription to continuous innovation as you expand and improve performance, capacity, density, and/or features for 10 years or more—all with the performance and reliability you need to keep your business up and running

A High-Level View of Our Integrated Solution

The integration between Pure Storage and Nutanix products is engineered to minimize workflow disruption by bridging internal and external storage resources via the Nutanix compute cluster, which is connected to the FlashArray via NVMe over TCP. Once deployed, system administrators working through the Nutanix Prism management console have the option to deploy new AHV based VM vDisks to the datastore on the FlashArray system.

Figure 1. Pure Storage and Nutanix integration

Figure 1. Pure Storage and Nutanix integration

The Nutanix compute cluster supports industry-standard servers from major server vendors, offering customers the choice to use servers from their preferred vendor. While Nutanix Prism offers deployment tools and full lifecycle management for the Nutanix AHV and AOS software on those servers, customers can continue to use their server vendor tools for administration, including lifecycle management for firmware and BIOS.

Learn More

Contact your Pure Storage or Nutanix account team today to learn more about how Nutanix and Pure Storage are working together to modernize workloads with all-flash enterprise storage.

Additional Resources

©2025 Nutanix, Inc. All rights reserved. Nutanix, the Nutanix logo and all Nutanix product and service names mentioned herein are registered trademarks or trademarks of Nutanix, Inc. in the United States and other countries. Pure Storage, the Pure Storage Logo and all other Pure Storage marks are registered trademarks or trademarks of Pure Storage, Inc. or its affiliates in the U.S. and other countries.All other brand names mentioned herein are for identification purposes only and may be the trademarks of their respective holder(s).This content may contain express and implied forward-looking statements, which are not historical facts and are instead based on our current expectations, estimates, and beliefs. The accuracy of such statements involves risks and uncertainties and depends upon future events, including those that may be beyond our control, and actual results may differ materially and adversely from those anticipated or implied by such statements. Any forward-looking statements included speak only as of the date hereof and, except as required by law, we assume no obligation to update or otherwise revise any such forward-looking statements to reflect subsequent events or circumstances.