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Video interview with Dartmouth College Director of IT Infrastructure Services Ty Peavey, who tells how his team chose the Nutanix Cloud Platform for managing virtual machines and container orchestration to support the university’s growing need for AI capabilities.

Find more enterprise cloud news, features stories and profiles at The Forecast.

Ty Peavey: Some people have the thought process that AI may replace what they do every day, and then there's others that look at it to elevate what we do every day. And I kind of am in that camp. I really believe in treating AI as a tool. It's a way to do things easier, faster, better, but at the end of the day, the human really matters.

Jason Lopez: The 2025 Enterprise Cloud Index Report found that AI applications are driving productivity, automation, and efficiency across industries. At Dartmouth College, an Ivy League Research University in Hanover, New Hampshire, that trend is playing out in real time. Ty Peavey Dartmouth's, director of Infrastructure Services, explains how his team uses Nutanix software to modernize IT operations and support researchers who increasingly rely on AI in fields such as medicine, neuroscience, and environmental science.

[Related: Orthogonal Advantages of Cloud Native Technologies]

Ty Peavey: We have some of the best faculty in the world that really have some challenging needs. They all want access to some sort of ai. Some of 'em have small budgets, some of 'em have large budgets, and it's really been a challenge to try to help them adopt LLMs into their research these days. And so as we look at tools like Nutanix and what we're seeing there, we're hoping to see that simplified somewhat and maybe commoditize and get access to LLMs on-prem early. It does take a lot of effort to help translate what they're looking for and really appreciating the kind of resources both from people and hardware of how to deliver that. There's also a lot of need to access AI with our vendors like Azure and with AWS. And so we try to facilitate those conversations as best as possible. We have a research group that also does infrastructure, and they're kind of the pioneers. They're the early adopters. They really paved the way for more of the generalists, like my team, to learn about AI.

[Related: Public Sector Adopting AI, But Serious Gaps Remain]

One of the things that we've done recently as more of a team building is we've worked with them to use some of the hardware that they've gotten under research to build our own infrastructure LLM. Really the goal is to try to understand the vocabulary, understand the platform and the architecture. What are the layers that go in to bringing in your own LLM? And really training it is the other thing. We have this fun approach that we want to take all of the documentation, all of the tickets we've processed over the years and train our LLM so that we can ask it all kinds of questions that we do every day. So it's a lot of fun. We'll do it for a while and we'll take it down and then we'll move on to the next thing.

[Related: Legacy Health Turns from Broadcom VMware to Nutanix]

We've traditionally had really siloed roles dedicated to storage, Linux, windows, all of these job descriptions that were very unique. And so when we got away from three-tier technology and moved into hyperconverge, we were able to break those walls down. I'm very proud of that, and I think my team has adopted it quite well. We no longer have a Windows sys(tem) admin. You may be on my team and work on Kubernetes in the morning and Nutanix in the afternoon. We brought in Kubernetes about a decade ago, really kind of some niche places that we could roll out containers. Today we have over 400 containers, over four Kubernetes clusters. Two being in Nutanix with NKP and two being in EKS. We find the adoption is great. I think we'll always have a fair amount of full VMs, but we anticipate as our application location start supporting more and more containers. We'll see that number grow as well. And I think what we've found in that is really good job satisfaction. People like what they're doing. It is challenging at times a good challenge. And Nutanix has really helped facilitate that for us. I mean, we've dodged the Broadcom bullet a bit and we're in a really good place and we're really happy about that decision.

[Related: Search for VMware Alternatives That Meet Existing and Future Needs]

A number of things have shaken up the market and shaken up the technology. Definitely the acquisition of VMware from Broadcom is a first for me in my 30 years. Supporting infrastructure, adapting to that and trying to come out from the other side with an equal or better technology stack for our users has been really important. At the time, Nutanix and I think still does, you can buy it with AHV or you can buy it with VMware. And we literally took a vote in my staff like, okay, you've, you've seen VxRail, you've seen Cisco's product, you've seen HP's product, now you see Nutanix. What are we going to do? And we unanimously said, yeah, let's go Nutanix and let's go AHV. Let's go all in. And it was a bit of a shock. I didn't expect it, but it was unanimous. And the transformation had, I don't want to say easy, but it wasn't bad. There was a lot of similarity to concepts that we already knew. A lot of the fears were just in our head. So I would say it was an easy adoption, if you would. My team will probably hate that I said that, but it is. I think we were better for it, and I think Dartmouth is better for it.

Men’s life expectancy in the U.S. is falling behind men in other developed countries. As a result, the burden of men’s health is felt across the community and economy, costing the U.S. $420 billion from just the top five causes of premature death—many of which are preventable.

In this episode, authors of Movember’s “Real Face of Men’s Health” report, Peter Fisher and Derek Griffith, explore the reasons behind that staggering price tag and the “perception gap” that keeps men from seeking the help and support they need. Tune in as we unpack how the missed opportunities for prevention impact men, as well their families and caregivers.

Guests:

Dr. Peter Fisher | Research Fellow at Movember and co-author of Movember’s new report, “The Real Face of Men’s Health”

Dr. Derek Griffith | Professor and co-author of Movember’s new report, “The Real Face of Men’s Health”

Lack of quality sleep does more than leave you tired. It reshapes the brain, strains the heart, disrupts metabolism, and even weakens the immune system. In this episode, we hear from Professor Russell Foster and Eti Ben Simon, PhD, two experts on the subject of sleep.

Professor Foster explains circadian rhythms, how they are influenced, and how health is impacted by when we eat, exercise, and take medication. Dr. Ben Simon weighs in on how emotions and relationships are affected when we sleep well - and when we don’t.

Tune in for this fascinating discussion, plus key takeaways for employers to help their workforce improve sleep, health outcomes and quality of life.

Guests:

Professor Russell Foster | Professor of Circadian Neuroscience, University of Oxford and author of Life Time: The New Science of the Body Clock, and How It Can Revolutionize Your Sleep and Health

Eti Ben Simon, PhD | Center for Human Sleep Science, Department of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley

In this video, Spark Systems Chief Operating Officer Chaitanya Peddada describes how migrating to a modern IT platform powered by Nutanix’s hyperconverged infrastructure technology boosts the FinTech firm’s high-speed foreign exchange trading capabilities.

Find more enterprise cloud news, features stories and profiles at The Forecast.

Chaitanya Peddada: It's an extremely competitive space, and the FX markets aren't like the stock exchanges which start at a particular time and end at a particular time. It starts up Monday morning and goes throughout the week right up to Saturday. So maintaining that is extremely important. Customers expect to see the best prices exactly in real time, no matter where they're sitting in the world. It's sub-milliseconds, which means it's microseconds.

[Related: AI Ambitions in Financial Services Tempered by IT Infrastructure Challenges]

Jason Lopez: The largest financial market in the world, the FX market, is a global decentralized network where banks, financial institutions, hedge funds, corporations, and traders exchange the world's nearly 180 currencies at negotiated prices. Singapore-based Spark Systems is a financial technology company that creates and runs high-speed, ultra-low-latency FX trading platforms. Chaitanya Padada of Spark talked to The Forkast about its goal to double average daily trader volume.

[Related: The State of IT is Moving to Trusted Vendors]

Chaitanya Peddada: In order to do that, we have to ensure that we have all of our basics right, which means the software services on our side, the customer support on our side, and most importantly the infrastructure, because that's where it takes a lot of lead time in order to set up the infrastructure, which we maintain. And this year we made the transition to move our entire Singapore data center onto the Nutanix stack, which allowed us to not spend money on our SAN storage devices, which would have to be renewed this year. So we used Nutanix Move to move from the legacy system to the new stack, and we also were able to add in a couple of extra servers to have a much larger stack, and we are ready to service clients or add customer servers up till the end of the year.

We are in a very tightly regulated space, so there are not just regulatory requirements but also requirements imposed by our clients, especially the banking clients, right? They have tight requirements, and these are not just security requirements but even data storage requirements. And that's the reason why we host our own hardware. We don't host customer data in the cloud. And because we have to maintain our own hardware stack, it's very important that we, apart from our own software, which is Java-based technology, we partner with the right partners right from the OS level to the VM level, as well as the entire infrastructure stack.

[Related: How Ivy League Dartmouth College Moved to a Future-Ready IT Platform]

We host our own software in data centers, which are maintained by us for the customer, which means as soon as the client signs up, within days, if not weeks, they want to start up and start trading right away, right? So, having the right platforms in place, being at the right locations, which are the FX hubs around the world, is extremely important. Apart from that, latency plays a very key factor. We need to be in the sub-millisecond space, right? And those are the sort of benchmarks we use while testing any third-party product. So, whether it's the OS or whether it's the VM solution that Nutanix provides, these are some of the basic test cases that we run through, apart from load testing and other FX parameters.

[Related: AI’s Rising Tide Confounds IT Decision Makers]

We also consume a lot of data, and per day, there's an immense amount of market data that's going through our systems, as well as the client's proprietary trading data, orders and trade data. All of this data has huge potential in order to leverage for building TCA systems or AI-enabled TCA systems, right? What we are looking at doing at the moment is to use this data in order to give our customers trading signals before time. We also have a library of algorithms which have predictive capabilities. Now, when we get into the predictive space, it's very important for vendors like us to be able to assist our clients in order to provide new strategies for them, because in terms of predictive AI or algos, we need to really partner with the right customers. The traders are the people who come up with the ideas, but we need to be ready to implement those ideas as soon as possible. So this also allows us to leverage on the cloud technology, which we haven't done so far, but even over there, I think Nutanix is probably the right partner for us to have on-prem services as well as cloud services using the same technology stack.

[Related: Legacy Health Turns from Broadcom VMware to Nutanix]

This was the year we transitioned onto Nutanix in a big way, right? We had initially started off in 2022, experimenting in our London data center, which is a smaller footprint compared to Singapore and Tokyo for us. And this year, we took the decision to transform the entire Singapore data center onto a Nutanix HCI stack. The most interesting thing about this transformation was, as I told you, we have only a small window to do a migration per week. So it's one and a half days per week. And over a period of six weekends, our team managed to transform the entire stack onto a Nutanix HCI stack. We've gone issue-free so far, which is a first, probably in my career. We haven't had any migration issues because there was also a lot of support from not just from Nutanix, but also from Nutanix partners to practice and prep for this migration process.

Each year, more than 20 million people worldwide are diagnosed with cancer—an already high number that is expected to increase to 35 million by 2050.

In this episode, Anu Agrawal of the American Cancer Society discusses the soaring incidence of cancer globally, particularly in low and middle-income countries and shares how cultural factors, stigma, and financial burdens can complicate the treatment journey. Tune-in to hear why education and navigation are crucial to global cancer care, along with ideas on how employers can support employees during treatment.

Guest: Anu Agrawal | Vice President, Global Cancer Support at American Cancer Society

In this Tech Barometer podcast, former Nutanix engineers Mike Cui and Greg Smith describe the genesis of the Nutanix AHV hypervisor and the confluence of industry changes feeding its growing success.

Find more enterprise cloud news, features stories and profiles at The Forecast.

Mike Cui: Well, this is where we have to go into the story.

Greg Smith: Maybe Mike, since you were there before me, you can provide some of the context and the lead up for what happened.

Mike Cui: I came up with an idea and I convinced a whole bunch of people we should do this. Not that we should do this, but we could actually do this. It's possible.

Greg Smith: As I remember it, when I joined, I thought I was joining the Stargate team to work on storage and performance tuning, and Mike pulled me aside and said, well, we need this one change in Stargate, but then you should really go and work on making KVM a product.

Jason Lopez: Even in IT, life happens. Innovations often emerge when you don't plan them, and that's what happened to Mike Cui and Greg Smith. Today, Mike is a principle engineer at Annapurna Labs and Greg works at Foxglove Technologies. In 2013, they were at Nutanix and back then the market wasn't expecting another hypervisor.

Kanchan Mirani: It was very much VMware who created that category.

Jason Lopez: Kanchan Murani is senior director of strategic marketing at Nutanix. She said VMware was a pioneer of the hypervisor and grew into an industry leader.

Kanchan Mirani: At some point, VMware was so far ahead. It was really the only hypervisor out there that any enterprise would seriously consider.

Jason Lopez: Until AHV.

[Related: IT Resiliency: Running Two Different Hypervisors]

Mike Cui: I had an idea for something like AHV.

Greg Smith: I guess we were the creators of AHV. Yeah.

Mike Cui: This is where it's not like we had a grand plan. It is tied with the story of how we accidentally got our first customer and what we had to do to solve the problem for this customer, and then eventually evolving into a full-blown product.

Jason Lopez: Before delving into the story of how AHV came to be, let's look at what it is. Nutanix AHV, or the Acropolis Hypervisor, is virtualization software that enables it to run VMs. It's a core component of the Nutanix Cloud platform which is ever evolving. With the latest update, as of mid 2025, AHV is at version 10.0. Here's how Kanchan describes it.

Kanchan Mirani: It's a pretty core infrastructure software piece, which helps IT teams manage all their resources, essentially. Think of an IT team that’s getting requests from all different departments and lines of business who want to run their specific applications and they're trying to manage all their resources. Now, imagine if they had to put in actual boxes for each request that each line of business came to them with, versus having a sort of bank of resources, which they're able to allocate really easily without actually doing physical connections and so on and so forth. So virtualization helps you do that because it makes it software based. You can give somebody a machine, which is a fractional part of a server and say, here, go develop on this, and you can do that all with software through the hypervisor.

[Related: Legacy Health Turns from Broadcom VMware to Nutanix]

Jason Lopez: Back in 2011, AHV didn't exist, but at the time, Mike was on a team pushing to get the company's first version of its Power App out. Power App was designed to provide a simple and efficient way for users to create, deploy and manage virtual machines.

Mike Cui: We shipped it and then throughout 2012 things were mostly chill. Like people can finally relax.

Jason Lopez: A year later, Nutanix decided to expand support beyond VMware to other hypervisors such as Microsoft's, HyperV and kernel based virtual machines or KVMs, the open source virtualization technology for Linux operating systems.

Mike Cui: We installed it. It was our first attempt at making something work in Japan. The customers were asking us, how does this KVM thing work? Where's your user interface? I'm like, we don't have any.

Jason Lopez: Mike thought the customer wanted KVMs because they knew how to use them, but they didn't know anything about them.

Mike Cui: We'll go back and work on it, and I tried to build something during the same trip. The night before I was flying back, we had a Friday all-hands meeting. We just did a deal with a three-letter government agency, and this deal was going to be all KVM and this is me still sitting here in Japan, asking: like what? I just had to explain to our first customer that we have nothing.

[Related: Search for VMware Alternatives That Meet Existing and Future Needs]

Jason Lopez: Mike saw another customer was eager to run Nutanix on KVM and knew it was high time to create that GUI.

Mike Cui: Right about when we closed the deal, they realized they didn't have any money left to buy ESX licenses.

Jason Lopez: The customer in Japan could no longer pay for the VMware hypervisor because they had spent their budget on buying new Nutanix software and new flash memory powered hardware. As Mike recalls, they held Nutanix in such high regard. They believed it was possible to move from ESX to the KVM. They were all in on Mike and his team to get them up and running on the new high hypervisor.

Greg Smith: There's no way that any customer in the modern era would've accepted this as a solution, right? But because they had no experience with virtualization, we got away with a lot, and so this really scrappy, scripted, hacked up solution. How much time do we spend on that? A couple of weeks, right? 

Mike Cui: It was all you. I don’t know (chuckles)

Greg Smith: Yeah, it wasn't more than a couple of weeks. The first week I spent on doing the Stargate code, a snapshot from NFS to SCSI, and then I think it was two or three weeks working on the scripts and then you went on vacation for two weeks.

Mike Cui: Oh, yeah. I went to try that.

Greg Smith: So I'm brand new at the company. Like here I'm defending this…thing that did not feel like a product at all.

[Related: The State of IT is Moving to Trusted Vendors]

Kanchan Mirani: When Nutanix came along, we essentially created AHV from an open source base to begin. At that point, we were trying to optimize what's possible in the field of software-defined computing. We had the storage piece. We wanted to extend it to computing, which is where the hypervisor came in, and over time we developed it into a pretty world-class hypervisor that was very competitive with what was out there.

Jason Lopez: AHV became a real alternative to VMware. Over time, this evolved with steady but slow adoption, but the latest chapter in the AHV story started when Broadcom acquired VMware.

Kanchan Mirani: We've always supported freedom of choice. So in our platform, we support ESXi, which is VMware's hypervisor as well as our own AHV. And we've seen a steady growth in the percentage of our customers who are using AHV. We've seen a steady growth since the beginning, but it definitely got a bump and continues to grow after the acquisition, so that's an indicator of where the customers are putting their choices now.

Jason Lopez: Between August, 2023 and April, 2025, the adoption of AHV as a percentage of cores grew significantly, which means customers run more of their Nutanix powered IT operations on the AHV hypervisor. Greg said simplicity and optionality are built into the core of AHV.

Greg Smith: Part of what made VMware such a great product to use as an engineer was like all of these nerd knobs that you could just tweak out to the nth degree, but it led to a very complicated experience, especially when you had to consider things like upgrades. So we decided very deliberately to try and sidestep all of that by presenting a very simple interface that we expected never to change. That was a huge part of our philosophy. For a long time, we thought that the surefire win for AHV as a solution was like test and dev. We had made it work for test and dev internally, and we said: Look, we know that this works.

Jason Lopez: Greg and Mike say there was some luck, too. You can have the right philosophy but the wrong timing, and in their story, they didn't think they were building a full-blown marketable product, but a solution for a single customer.

Mike Cui: I did not expect AHV to have that level of success. I just feel like we were building something and we got it to work. That was already a huge accomplishment.

Greg Smith: It just had a knack of being in the right place at the right time with the right things going on all around it, various things from the open source world that we were able to take advantage of.

[Related: How Ivy League Dartmouth College Moved to a Future-Ready IT Platform]

Mike Cui: Oh yeah.

Greg Smith: Like VMware trying to stop us from shipping ESX, if that hadn't happened, we wouldn't be shipping AHV as broadly as we are today. It wouldn't have had as much exposure.

Mike Cui: I think things just happened to align when I went to Japan to set up the first customer. At that time, there was sort of no concept of vSwitch on Linux.

Greg Smith: Oh, yeah.

Mike Cui: You use Linux bonding if you want to bond two interfaces, and then you would apply a VLAN-tag on top of the bond. Then the issue is, well, if you use both bonding and VLAN tagging at the same time, now all your performance is crap for some reason, right? Like that year is when (Nutanix) AOS went mainstream and all of a sudden it worked. We did everything we needed to do. It worked.

Greg Smith: Really well.

Jason Lopez: Greg Smith works for a robotics company, Foxglove Technologies. Greg Cui is a principal engineer at Annapurna Labs, provider of custom chip software and accelerators. This is the Tech Barometer podcast. I'm Jason Lopez. Tech Barometer is a production of The Forecast. Check out The Forecast on Nutanix.com for a more detailed print version of this story, "Birth of a Hypervisor that Unleashed a Hybrid Multicloud Era." Again, at The Forecast by Nutanix.com. And once you're there, check out some other technology stories at The Forecast. Thanks for listening.

In this video interview, Nutanix CEO Rajiv Ramaswami discusses 2025 IT trends, including migration to trusted vendors, the rapid evolution of AI technologies, and mastering the long-term state of hybrid multicloud environments at scale.

Find more enterprise cloud news, features stories and profiles at The Forecast.

Rajiv Ramaswami: Now it's time for us to look at the most modern or modern applications, AI. As the year progressed, we saw AI, generative AI evolving at a rapid clip. Here we've expanded from just doing simple inferencing to providing you a full set of age agent frameworks and models.

Jason Lopez: At the .Next 2025 conference in Washington DC, The Forecast caught up with CEO Rajiv Ramaswami after his keynote to briefly chat about technology and market trends.

Rajiv Ramaswami: If you're a customer, I think everybody wants to know about what's going on now? What are the trends? What's Nutanix doing? How can we help these days? Of course, top of mind topics for everybody is what's their future end state when it comes to a vendor that they can partner with for the long haul as they migrate away from their current solutions. So that's a very top of mind topic for everybody. And then we quickly get into a discussion of trends and where things are going for the future and how we can help them. For the longest time, VMware was the established infrastructure vendor for many of these companies. They've had 20-year-plus relationships with them, and I was in Japan, and I think there was a growing awareness two years ago. They weren't particularly concerned. Last year, they started getting concerned.

[Related: Nutanix CEO Stokes Surge in IT Ecosystem Partnerships]

This year they're actually moving. For example, here at the show, we had Toshiba talk about how they're planning the migration away from Vme Nutanix. And you're seeing that, right? I mean, some of this is also from certain cultures. There's a lot of faith and trust built up over the years, and they want to work with somebody they can trust. So we are seeing a lot of that certainly happen over the last year. We've gone even in terms of what we've been able to bring to market and made tremendous progress. And it's still not mature. There's a lot going on every day, and I don't know what it's going to be. It was regular AI, generative AI, then agentic AI, I don't know what's coming next. Reasoning models came in recently. So this is rapidly evolving. I think hybrid cloud is pretty much established at this point.

[Related: Growing a Multibillion Dollar Data Security Company in the AI Era]

Everybody realizes they're going to be operating in a multicloud environment with some workloads running in the data center, some at edges, some in the public cloud. So that model is very well established. And almost every customer I talk to has made these comparisons. They've looked at the cost of running in a public cloud, whether on-prem, they've looked at the security issues, all of those things, and they've decided that they'll figure out some things that were done in the public cloud, some and on-prem. So that's well established at this point. Now it's a matter of more executing on that at scale.

An estimated 70 million people worldwide will struggle with an eating disorder in their lifetime. Many individuals experiencing these disorders can remain vulnerable throughout their lives, making permanent recovery feel elusive. In this episode, author and professor Mallary Tenore Tarpley discusses eating disorder diagnoses and recovery, especially among middle-aged adults. She reframes recovery to emphasize progress over perfection, explores long-term health effects and shares her own experience navigating the “middle place.” The conversation also highlights the role social media can play, demographic disparities, diet culture and the importance of promoting health and well-being in the workplace.

Guest: Mallary Tenore Tarpley, Author, Slip: Life in the Middle of Eating Disorder Recovery, Professor, University of Texas, Austin

As part of our regular PC refresh cycle, we are deploying AI PCs, which are powered by an eXtensible processing unit (XPU) architecture that integrates multiple types of processing units (such as CPUs, GPUs, and NPUs). We chose to begin deploying AI PCs now to prepare for software applications’ ability to run various features on a GPU or NPU, which drains less power from the battery. Our tests indicate that an AI PC’s battery can last up to 3x longer than a non-AI PC during standard office tasks, with virtually no negative impact on performance or user experience.

The way we tell our own story, our narrative identity, influences our mental health and well-being, almost as much as the story itself.

In this episode, Jonathan Adler, a scholar, professor, playwright and expert on storytelling, lifts the curtain on how our experiences and the resulting stories we tell offer purpose and inspire unity in our lives. Tune in to discover why crafting and sharing meaningful narratives can support individual growth, and when embraced by organizations, can strengthen teams and uplift well-being company wide.

Guest: Jonathan Adler, Professor of Psychology, Olin College of Engineering