The past week has been a whirlwind of studying, research, and introductions now that I’ve started at Nutanix! I’m happy to be on the team working on Reference Architectures for Unified Communications.
I’m planning to investigate the major Unified Communications platforms (VoIP, Voice Messaging, IM & Presence, E911) from the top vendors and come up with Best Practices for deployment on Nutanix. This is a hot opportunity because customers are excited about Nutanix and have real need for Unified Communications.
The savings and consolidation that Nutanix can bring to other areas in the data center can also be applied to Unified Communications. Imagine ditching all of your SAN or NAS storage and deploying on a hyper-converged solution that utilizes the on-box storage of every node in the cluster to its full potential. Imagine scaling up the size of your cluster by simply adding new nodes and not worrying about the storage.
With my past Cisco CCIE experience I’ll be tackling these technologies first, but I’m also planning on working on Microsoft Lync and Avaya Aura. To me this seems like the key area of opportunity at Nutanix, proving that any workload can run successfully on our systems.
Cisco has a great resource in the DocWiki pages that identify how to design and deploy Cisco UC in a virtual environment. I’m getting started there and hope to have a Best Practices guide (including sample cluster builds) put together by the end of November. After reading through all of the requirements and restrictions on the Cisco DocWiki site I’m confident Nutanix and Cisco UC will be successful!
What Unified Communications platform is YOUR company using? Is it virtualized? How much of your cost is in the SAN?
I’m looking forward to your comments. Keep an eye on this space and the Nutanix website for releases of our Best Practice documents in the future.
Comments
4 responses to “Nutanix and Unified Communications”
Hi Jason,
I understand that while technically there might not be many obstacles – in order to get this solution supported by Cisco they will need to have their seal of approval on UC on Nutanix. Given they are your direct competitors on compute stage (UCS), do you believe they are likely to officially support Cisco UC on Nutanix?
Regards,
Semyon @Enject
Semyon,
I don’t read the Cisco articles as saying direct approval is required. To me the Cisco DocWiki links lay out all of the requirements that a third party such as Nutanix must meet. Cisco is very careful not to limit the hardware to ONLY UCS. Check out my next blog entry where I cover this in more detail.
I believe Cisco UC already is officially supported on Nutanix. Just like you can run it on HP, IBM, or Dell. I think Nutanix is a better choice ;), but the Cisco DocWiki doesn’t lock you in.
Jason,
Agree – sorry I got confused and completely forgot about Specs based support.
Regards,
Semyon @Enject
Semyon, no worries. That’s why I wanted to write this series of articles… To get the word out there that this really is a viable option on Nutanix!