The virtualization landscape has changed significantly following Broadcom's acquisition of VMware, prompting many organizations to reassess their long-term infrastructure and cloud strategies. As businesses pursue modernization initiatives, they are evaluating platforms that can deliver operational consistency, scalability, and economic efficiency while minimizing disruption to existing workloads. Whether driven by licensing changes, cost optimization objectives, datacenter transformation initiatives, or the need for greater hybrid-cloud flexibility, organizations are increasingly seeking solutions that simplify migration and provide a sustainable path forward for their virtualized environments.

Nutanix Cloud Platform (NCP) provides a consistent hybrid multicloud operating model, enabling organizations to run applications and data across on-premises environments and public clouds while maintaining common management, operations, and governance. By leveraging the Nutanix software-defined architecture, customers can seamlessly extend workloads across environments, simplify infrastructure management, and reduce operational complexity.

A common challenge in virtualization environments is balancing compute and storage requirements. Traditional architectures often require organizations to scale compute resources simply to obtain additional storage capacity, resulting in increased infrastructure costs. Storage-intensive workloads frequently require additional capacity and performance rather than additional CPU and memory resources.

This is where the integration of NetApp ONTAP storage with Nutanix Cloud Platform delivers significant value. ONTAP provides enterprise-grade storage capabilities, including high performance, efficiency, data protection, security, and scalability, while allowing storage capacity and performance to be scaled independently from the Nutanix compute infrastructure.

Consider the following scenario: a customer requires infrastructure resources equivalent to eight nodes to satisfy application compute requirements (vCPU and memory). However, due to rapid data growth and storage-intensive applications, the organization requires storage capacity that would traditionally necessitate deploying additional nodes. This increases overall total cost of ownership (TCO) because the customer must purchase additional compute resources merely to satisfy storage requirements. With ONTAP integrated into Nutanix environments, organizations provide a truly disaggregated architecture that can scale storage independently, providing the required capacity and storage performance without unnecessary compute expansion.

This capability is valuable for a broad range of enterprise application deployments, including business-critical databases, ERP platforms, Microsoft applications, virtual desktop infrastructures (VDI), analytics workloads, AI/ML environments, file services, and modern containerized applications. It also supports key infrastructure initiatives such as workload migrations, disaster recovery, development and test environments, data protection, and cyber resilience. By enabling independent scaling of compute and storage resources, organizations can optimize infrastructure investments, sharing a common pool of dense storage across compute clusters, while meeting the performance, availability, and capacity requirements of both traditional and modern applications.

This solution describes the steps required to provision and integrate ONTAP storage with Nutanix Cloud Platform, enabling the use of NFS-based storage for virtualized workloads while optimizing cost, scalability, and performance.