Maxta CMO On Hyper-Converged Advantage Over Nutanix

Maxta Chief Marketing Office Barry Phillips says the hyper-converged software specialist has a leg up over competitor Nutanix through its pre-configured systems, support of mixed applications on the same cluster and its overall software business model.

"We're really the only vendor out there -- whether its technology or even organizationally -- where a customer can go in [and] download the software, put it into production, buy pre-configured systems, put those into production, and put everything together," said Phillips in an interview with CRN.

Maxta's hyperconvergence software supports every major server brand -- including Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Dell EMC and Cisco -- as well as multiple hypervisors and containers. Maxta customers can choose software only or have the software pre-installed on existing server platforms.

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Another key market differentiator for the Santa Clara, Calif.-based vendor is that Maxta does not have a software refresh tax. "There's no refresh tax which means you own that software license for life," Phillips said. "With an appliance model you have to essentially repurchase that software license every time you refresh. With Maxta you can refresh as many times as you want."

Phillips said Maxta's software can reduce capital and operating costs by up to 70 percent and free businesses from the refresh and upgrade cycles of traditional storage vendors.

The company has also been diving deeper into the channel community this year. This month, Maxta joined forces with distributor Arrow Electronics to offer hyper-converged bundled, pre-configured systems on servers from Dell, Intel, Lenovo and Supermicro that solution providers can sell.

"From a channel partner side, now you can lead with a pre-configured system on any number of server brands and buy that from Arrow," said Phillips.