Nutanix has scored Lenovo as a hardware manufacturer for its hyperconverged system software, effectively wedging its foot in China's front door.

A family of Lenovo-built hyperconverged appliances will be aimed at nearly all workloads, including enterprise applications, databases, virtualized desktops, and big data analytics, with improved efficiency and scalability.

Nutanix's software merges compute and storage into one entity: the storage capacity in a cluster of server nodes is collected into one virtual SAN pool that can be accessed by virtual machines running in the cluster.

We're told Lenovo is ploughing cash into a dedicated enterprise and global sales team for the kit, which will also be sold through Lenovo channel partners worldwide. The Chinese goliath and San Jose-based Nutanix intend to make what they call substantial investments in platform engineering and development, as well as go-to-market initiatives.

It means Lenovo joins Dell as a Nutanix machine maker. This deal should add substantially to Nutanix's revenues in 2016-17 and beyond.

Interestingly, Lenovo has a deal with SimpliVity – seemingly a reseller-like arrangement – which it added to earlier deals with Maxta and StorMagic. It looks like Nutanix has pipped all three to favoured-son status.

The other large indigenous IT supplier in China, Huawei, perhaps needs its own hyperconverged strategy more than ever. Maybe SimpliVity's door might now be worth a knock? ®