Datacentre hardware maker Lenovo is to install Nutanix Software in a bid to speed up the process of building the infrastructures that support private clouds.

The new family of hyperconverged appliances will be sold by Lenovo’s sales teams and its global network of partners.

Nutanix makes its own units that converge storage, server and virtualisation services into an integrated ‘scale-out’ appliance, but in this partnership Lenovo will use its own hardware devices to run the Nutanix software. The objective is to simplify data centre building, by pre-engineering most of the integration tasks and make data centre management easier. This, say the manufacturers, will cut down both the building costs and construction time for creating the foundation for a private cloud. It also, claims Nutanix, lowers the cost of ownership by creating modules in which moves and changes are easier to conduct and management is simpler.

By running the jointly created convergence appliances on Lenovo hardware, they can take full advantage of Lenovo’s close ties with Intel and run its latest processor inventions. Lenovo said it is making ‘sizeable investments in a dedicated global sales team to support the new converged appliances for datacentre builders. Lenovo and Nutanix say they are jointly planning more co-development in platform engineering and coding, as well as joint marketing initiatives.

“Lenovo can bring a new perspective to the global enterprise space,” said Lenovo CEO Yang Yuanqing, “Nutanix’s well recognised technology leadership can dramatically reduce complexity in data centres of all sizes.”

The Lenovo OEM partnership with Nutanix goes well beyond typical alliances, said analyst Matt Eastwood, Senior VP for IDC’s Enterprise Infrastructure and Datacenter Group. “This partnership will accelerate the reach of hyperconverged infrastructure,” he said.