Dell and Nutanix have officially delivered on the promise they made back at the September 2025 announcement: Dell PowerStore is now generally available as external storage for the Nutanix Cloud Platform. The integration ships with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) 7.6 and is deployed and managed through Dell Private Cloud, giving customers a fully validated path to running the AHV hypervisor on top of enterprise all-flash storage.
For anyone who has been watching the virtualization market over the last few years, this is a big deal. Organizations evaluating alternatives to their current hypervisor strategy have consistently asked for two things: the operational simplicity that drew them to Nutanix in the first place, and the enterprise storage performance and efficiency they rely on today. With this release, they no longer have to choose.
What Was Announced? PowerStore becomes the second Dell storage platform integrated with Nutanix Cloud Platform, following PowerFlex, which pioneered the external storage model for Nutanix. That makes Dell’s infrastructure portfolio for Nutanix environments the broadest in the industry, spanning turnkey hyperconverged appliances all the way to disaggregated architectures with purpose-built enterprise arrays.
The full Nutanix Cloud Platform stack is supported, including the AHV hypervisor, Prism for management and operations, and Flow for virtual networking and security. PowerStore surfaces through the Prism experience your team already knows, so there are no new tools to learn and no separate storage console to babysit day to day.
Why Disaggregation Matters?: Traditional HCI ties compute and storage together, so growing one means buying the other, whether you need it or not. The PowerStore integration breaks that dependency. Compute nodes and storage capacity scale on completely independent tracks based on what your workloads actually demand.
What PowerStore Brings to AHV? Beyond independent scaling, the integration puts PowerStore’s core strengths to work for Nutanix workloads:
- End-to-end NVMe performance. All-flash NVMe architecture designed for latency-sensitive enterprise applications, databases, and mixed virtualized workloads.
- Guaranteed efficiency. PowerStore’s always-on deduplication and compression are backed by Dell’s 6:1 data reduction guarantee, which translates directly into more workloads per array and a lower effective cost per terabyte.
- Cyber resilience options at every tier. Protection policies are managed from Prism and range from asynchronous replication up to Metro synchronous replication with zero RPO and zero RTO. For longer-term protection, Dell PowerProtect Data Manager adds remote backup with cloud archival and retention locks.
A Partner’s Perspective: Working with customers on modernization projects, the appeal of this combination shows up quickly. Teams get the streamlined, VM-centric management model of Nutanix, while the storage layer delivers the performance, efficiency, and independent scalability that enterprise workloads demand. For organizations rethinking their virtualization strategy, whether that means evaluating hypervisor alternatives, escaping rigid scaling models, or preparing infrastructure for AI, this is one of the most compelling options on the table.
It is also worth noting the momentum behind it. Dell and Nutanix have been partners for 14 years, and the pace has only accelerated: XC Plus appliances, the PowerFlex integration, and now PowerStore, all within a short window.
Getting Started: What You’ll Need: Before you start planning a deployment, it’s worth knowing what the supported configuration looks like. Dell’s technical overview lays out the minimum requirements, and they’re refreshingly reasonable:
- Storage. Any PowerStore Gen 1, Gen 2, or Gen 3 model is supported, with the exception of PowerStore X. As of AOS 7.6, the PowerStore side must be a single-appliance cluster. Connectivity is NVMe/TCP over 10GbE or faster ports, no other transport protocols are supported with Nutanix at this time.
- Compute. You’ll need a minimum of three compute servers. For Dell PowerEdge, check the Nutanix AHV on DPC Support Matrix for validated configurations; for other vendors, the standard Nutanix Hardware Compatibility List applies.
- Networking. Plan for two management switches with a single management VLAN, plus two dedicated storage switches carrying two storage VLANs.
- Environment. DNS and NTP servers are required, and Dell Private Cloud is recommended for the automated deployment and lifecycle experience described above.
- Software minimums. PowerStoreOS 5.0.0.2 or higher, Nutanix AOS 7.6, AHV 11.2, Prism Central 7.6, Foundation Central 2.2, Nutanix Move 6.3.0 for migrations.
- Licensing. This is one of the more pleasant surprises. PowerStore licensing is all-inclusive, so the storage side adds no license cost. On the Nutanix side, either NCI or NCI-Compute (NCI-C) licenses can be applied to the compute-only nodes using external storage. NCI offers the flexibility to repurpose licenses across HCI, external storage, and cloud environments with no core count minimums, while NCI-C fits larger environments built entirely on compute-only nodes with external storage.
Summary: Dell PowerStore is now generally available as external storage for the Nutanix Cloud Platform, shipping with NCI 7.6 and delivered through Dell Private Cloud. PowerStore becomes the second Dell array to integrate with Nutanix (after PowerFlex), and the integration surfaces entirely through Prism. The headline benefit is disaggregation: compute and storage scale independently. Customers also get end-to-end NVMe performance, a 6:1 data reduction guarantee, and replication options from async up to Metro sync with zero RPO/RTO. Dell Private Cloud automates AHV deployment with validated blueprints and handles Day 0 to 2 lifecycle with system-level Dell support. Requirements are modest: any PowerStore Gen 1–3 (except X) as a single-appliance cluster over NVMe/TCP, three or more compute nodes, PowerStoreOS 5.0.0.2+, and AOS/Prism Central 7.6, with no additional storage licensing, and either NCI or NCI-C on the Nutanix side.
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