IT Central Station’s crowdsourced user review platform helps technology decision makers around the world to better connect with peers and other independent experts who provide advice without vendor bias.
Our users have ranked their solutions according to their valuable features, and have also discussed where they see room for improvement. You can read user reviews for the top 5 hyper-converged infrastructure solutions from Q1 2017 here, to help you decide which solution is best for you.
#1 Nutanix
Nutanix is ranked by our users as the number one hyper-converged infrastructure tool of Q1 2017, but what do users really think of the solution?
“The fully distributed metadata database” is a valuable feature that Nutanix offers, says a Senior System Engineer at Amanox Solutions (S&T Gruppe).
He describes:
“Every node holds a part of the database (the metadata belonging to it's currently local data for the most part and replica information from other nodes).
All metadata is stored on at least three nodes for redundancy (each node writes to its neighbor nodes in a ring structure, there are no meta data master nodes).
No matter how many nodes your cluster holds (or will hold) there is always a defined number of nodes (three or five) involved when a metadata update is performed (a lookup/read is typically local).”
“There is always room for improvement” adds James VanBrocklin, a Unix Systems and Storage Manager at a marketing services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees.
VanBrocklin finds that “One area Nutanix can improve on is DevOps automation. While there is some built-in capability via REST service exposure, a more robust automation controller would be welcome. The recent purchase of Calm.io seems to be a step in this direction.”
#2 VMware vSAN
The IT Central Station community ranks VMware vSAN as the number two hyper-converged infrastructure solution of Q1 2017.
“The most important feature for us is the converged infrastructure, which is all this tool is about” says Harri Waltari, ICT Network Administrator at a maritime company with 501-1,000 employees.
“There is no need to manage separate storage areas in SAN/NAS environments. Storage management comes built-in with the vSAN tool”, says Waltari.
Miguel Pérez Rodríguez shares that he “would like to see faster re-sync and recovery times after a host failure.”
“It’s so difficult to restore a normal situation after a failure”, he explains. “There is a large amount of data to re-sync after a host failure. We have a 1GB vSAN network, and the restore process can last several hours or days.
I would also like to see a granular sync system, rather than the current “all data” transfer.”
#3 FlexPod
FlexPod is ranked by our users as the number three hyper-converged infrastructure tool of Q1 2017.
“The most valuable features are flexibility, high availability, and redundancy”, writes a Senior Systems Administrator at Cardinal Logistics.
He explains that “It's the easiest way to deploy hardware. We use it with VMware. It's the easiest way to deploy solutions quickly and scale out.
In our environment, we are constantly expanding laterally. It allows us to create the capacity and the resources on the fly that we need to get our jobs done.”
Deepak Seth, a Principal Storage Engineer at Esurance, “would like to see the ability to combine a couple of FlexPods into a cluster. You cannot do that now. You cannot combine two FlexPods into a single entity, into a larger FlexPod.
To the best of my knowledge, FlexPods are meant to be in silos and you cannot create clusters at all. If there is a way to do that, that would be interesting.”
#4 SimpliVity
The IT Central Station community ranks SimpliVity as the number four hyper-converged infrastructure solution of Q1 2017.
“The most valuable feature is inline deduplication”, writes a CTO - IT Value Consulting at a tech services company with 51-200 employees.
He explains that “Inline dedup allows us to support more VMs per host, because less IO goes to disk if you use the same OS on the server side.
Deduplication at SimpliVity means that metadata caching and the acceleration card support the efficiency of using less SSD and less HDD access.”
“We would like to see more possibilities to monitor the SimpliVity platform”, shares Dennis Koenders, Senior Engineer/Virtualization Specialist at a tech services company with 51-200.
“Also, storage balancing between nodes within clusters with more than two nodes could be better. I believe this is solved in the new release of the software, but we still have to test it.”
#5 Stratoscale
Stratoscale is ranked by our users as the number five hyper-converged infrastructure of Q1 2017.
“We use Stratoscale to allow our end customers and our integrators to manage their own servers and their own product”, shares Nir Ashkenazi, Global VP Technology & President at a tech services company with 51-200 employees.
Ashkenazi describes how “We're allowing them a great deal of flexibility in terms of how they utilize the cloud. We're making the cloud a lot closer to them, rather than having only six locations like Amazon does.”
“We've been working with the product for so long, we've actually been very satisfied”, writes Ashkenazi.
“But they could integrate more products. They recently purchased a DB-as-a-service provider, which is something we've been expecting.”
Read more hyper-converged infrastructure reviews on IT Central Station.
Im no agree than FlexPod is the second Hyper-Converged of course much less VMware vSAN.
BR