Nutanix – NTNX – has started off with a bang: opening at $16 a share and quickly rising to almost $30. It’s trading at $36 as I write.

Now for the hard part
Everyone is no doubt counting how much they’ve made on that spectacular beginning. But there’s a six month lock-in, meaning insiders have to hold their shares for at least six months.

And a lot can happen in six months.

All it takes is a single quarterly miss and Wall Street will savage the stock. There goes the Ferrari!

So buckle down and don’t screw up!

The StorageMojo take
Nutanix was co-founded by one of the Google File System engineers.
As I wrote about GFS over 10 years ago:

Looking at the whole gestalt, even assuming GFS were for sale, it is a niche product and would not be very successful on the open market.

As a model for what can be done however, it is invaluable. The industry has strived for the last 20 years to add availability and scalability to an increasingly untenable storage model of blocks and volumes, through building ever-costlier “bulletproof” devices.

GFS breaks that model and shows us what can be done when the entire storage paradigm is rethought. Build the availability around the devices, not in them, treat the storage infrastructure as a single system, not a collection of parts, extend the file system paradigm to include much of what we now consider storage management, including virtualization, continuous data protection, load balancing and capacity management.

GFS is not the future. But it shows us what the future can be.

In Nutanix, the future has arrived.

Courteous comments welcome, of course.