Enterprise infrastructure is entering one of the most consequential transitions in decades.
New workloads are reshaping how applications are built, deployed, and operated. At the same time, organizations are rethinking the underlying platforms that support them. What we’re hearing from customers is consistent: they’re looking for greater flexibility, operational simplicity, and freedom of choice in how their infrastructure evolves.
Cisco and Nutanix have been working on this problem together. Not in theory, but in the concrete reality of how enterprise infrastructure gets deployed, managed, and supported.
“Our collaboration with Cisco is giving customers exactly what they’ve been asking for: the freedom to run any workload anywhere—with consistent performance, security, and simplicity,” says Thomas Cornely, Executive Vice President of Product Management at Nutanix.
“Together, we’re delivering an integrated platform that helps organizations accelerate AI adoption and modernize their operations without added complexity. From empowering high‑performance AI at the edge to supporting mission‑critical applications in the data center or across the cloud, we’re ensuring customers have the flexibility, choice, and confidence to innovate on their terms.”
At .NEXT we’re sharing several milestones that move that work forward.
AI infrastructure needs repeatable architecture
There’s a gap right now between AI proof-of-concepts and AI environments running at scale. Part of that gap is about models. But a lot of it comes down to infrastructure complexity: integrating GPUs, networking, storage, and software stacks into systems that can actually be deployed and operated reliably.
That’s why Cisco AI PODs, the building blocks of Cisco Secure AI Factory with NVIDIA, exist. They provide modular, validated infrastructure that simplifies deploying and scaling AI environments.
We’re now extending those architectures to include the Nutanix Agentic AI solution, encompassing Nutanix Enterprise AI (NAI), Nutanix Kubernetes Platform (NKP), and Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS), as part of Cisco AI PODs. A Cisco Validated Design and a Nutanix reference architecture will be available soon.
The goal is straightforward: give organizations a clear, repeatable blueprint for deploying AI infrastructure that integrates compute, networking, and storage virtualization into a single operational model.
AI is moving closer to where work happens
A lot of the current AI conversation still focuses on data centers. But in practice, many of the most valuable AI workloads are now being deployed across the core and at the edge.
Retail environments detecting inventory gaps. Manufacturing lines identifying quality issues. Healthcare systems analyzing imaging data in real time. Logistics networks optimizing routing as conditions change. These workloads run at the edge.
The challenge isn’t just placing compute in those locations. It’s operating that infrastructure consistently.
Organizations can’t afford to run one virtualization platform in the data center and a completely different operational model across dozens or hundreds of remote sites. That fragmentation slows down deployments and increases operational risk.
That’s why we built Cisco Unified Edge: to extend enterprise infrastructure into distributed environments without introducing new operational silos, enabling you to support all your core and AI workloads at the edge.
And it’s why we’re bringing the Nutanix Cloud Platform to Cisco Unified Edge. With support for Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure and Nutanix Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV), customers will be able to run the same Nutanix operational model they use in the data center at the edge.
Early access begins in April, with general availability planned for June.
Together, Cisco Intersight and the Nutanix Cloud Platform enable organizations to manage across core and edge environments, helping IT teams more easily manage distributed infrastructure at scale, and with far less overhead.
For customers, this means edge deployments become far easier to scale. The same virtualization platform. The same lifecycle management. The same operational tooling, whether workloads are running in a centralized data center or across hundreds of distributed sites.
Enterprises want proven platforms that deliver choice
For more than a decade, FlashStack, developed jointly by Cisco and Everpure (formerly Pure Storage), has provided a validated infrastructure foundation for enterprise workloads, combining Cisco infrastructure with Everpure solutions like FlashArray, FlashBlade and Portworx.
A few months ago, we announced that we’re extending that value by bringing the Nutanix Cloud Platform into the FlashStack architecture. This gives customers a new validated option to run Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure and AHV on Cisco UCS while continuing to leverage Everpure FlashArray for high-performance, independent storage scaling.
Together with Nutanix Prism and Cisco Intersight, organizations gain a unified, VM-centric operational model for end-to-end provisioning, monitoring, and lifecycle management of the full stack.
We’re focused on delivering a modular converged platform that preserves what customers already trust while expanding architectural choice, allowing organizations to modernize their infrastructure without disrupting existing investments or operational models.
Now, we’re extending this model across our ecosystem to platforms like FlexPod, our long-standing joint solution with NetApp, where we see similar opportunities to expand flexibility and choice for customers as their infrastructure strategies evolve.
Following the recent announcement between Nutanix and NetApp, we’re working closely together to enable customers to adopt new virtualization options while continuing to leverage NetApp’s enterprise storage and data services.
The result is a new validated option to run Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure and AHV on Cisco UCS, enabling customers to continue leveraging NetApp for unified storage, rich data services, and scalable, independent storage growth.
Customers need more flexibility in how they buy
There’s another factor that often gets overlooked in infrastructure modernization: how technology is purchased. Complex procurement processes, separate hardware and software agreements, and misaligned contract cycles can slow down infrastructure adoption as much as technical complexity.
That’s why we’re making Nutanix software available through the Cisco Enterprise Agreement (EA) program. This marks the first time Cisco has included a third-party software platform within our EA framework, and it’s the only Nutanix partner to include Nutanix licenses as an EA.
For enterprises, it means infrastructure and software can be aligned under a single lifecycle agreement, simplifying how environments are planned, deployed, and renewed. It also brings more predictability into how these environments are consumed—through consistent pricing, the ability to expand capacity as needs evolve, and the flexibility to adopt additional Nutanix capabilities over time without reworking contracts.
For Nutanix customers, it also provides a new way to adopt the platform through the flexible buying programs many Cisco customers already rely on.
What comes next
Infrastructure is becoming more distributed, more AI-driven, and more software-defined than ever before. Customers need platforms that give them flexibility without complexity and choice without fragmentation.
That’s the focus of our work with Nutanix: delivering infrastructure that runs consistently from the core to the edge to support your entire application portfolio. By providing greater flexibility in buying models, expanded choices for external storage, and improved hardware reusability, we are simplifying how you manage your IT environment.
Because in the end, the goal isn’t to build infrastructure that looks impressive on paper. It’s to build infrastructure that lets the business move faster.
For more details, visit Cisco Compute Hyperconverged with Nutanix and join us at Cisco Live, May 31–June 4, to stay on top of the latest Cisco and Nutanix announcements.
