We performed a comparison between Dell PowerFlex and Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two HCI solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."It's quite easy to install."
"The failover protection and the ability to expand storage and nodes with no downtime are by far the best physical features we have benefited from."
"When we need additional storage but want to keep the size of the SANs manageable, the StarWind Virtual SAN has allowed me to do everything needed."
"The biggest benefit was that it allowed us to provide SAN services on a limited hardware budget."
"The price was right."
"StarWind allowed us to deploy highly available shared storage within our budget."
"Active-active work mode leads to true redundancy of storage and allows us to distribute the load between multiple nodes."
"A great feature is that I basically set it and forget it, as everything is automatic."
"The most valuable feature is high availability."
"We've had no issues with scaling the solution."
"The catalog of APIs for automation has been most valuable, although they are quite limited."
"The support is highly responsive."
"Saves us a lot of space in the data center."
"The solution is quite stable."
"The support team responds quickly."
"The solution was connected to alternate storage. It provides great scalability and reliability."
"Nutanix Acropolis AOS is easy to use, integrates with other hardware configurations, and is simple to manage."
"One major thing that comes up again and again is stability. Our downtime is literally based on hardware upgrades that need to be done. Acropolis is very, very user friendly. You don't have to physically have a super IT guy to manage the system. You can actually give it to a younger guy to manage and there won't be problems. And if he makes a mistake, it's very, very easy to fall back and sort out the mistake."
"It allows us to have a cloud-based ecosystem."
"Best features are around data locality, compression, and deduplication."
"The tool is simple, stable, and easy to upgrade. It also requires few resources to manage, which simplifies our work. The solution's ease of upgrading is its valuable feature. AHV, provided by Nutanix, is excellent in performance and ease of use. It's based on an open-source product called KVM, which I also use for other services."
"Ease of deployment"
"I can use VMware or Hyper-V license, if I already have. But if I use a similar solution as Nutanix Acropolis hypervisor (AHV) that comes embedded in Nutanix solution, I can manage all my virtual environments with everything I need without spend more money on licenses."
"The most valuable features are easy cloud administration and management."
"The most disappointing side of the application is the free edition. There used to be GUI attached. That has recently changed to only CLI management of the application."
"If there are domain controllers inside the cluster, there needs to be some sort of logic allowing them to boot independently so all the rest of the domain clients can gain the authority they need to come online."
"Scaling the product is fairly easy except for the computing aspect. It would entail another appliance. While not a show stopper, it isn't as easy as dropping in a few extra SSDs."
"If it's possible to make a driver/solution that does not make use of the iSCSI targets of Windows, that would be great. I don't know if that's possible, however, it could make the configuration a little easier."
"I would definitely like to see quite a bit more on the monitoring side of things."
"There should be some kind of active monitoring connected to StarWind vSAN, so you will be able to act when needed."
"The software monitoring should be web-based to be reachable from any VLAN workstation."
"StarWind relies on the underlying OS to manage the "SAN files" whether that would be a RAID volume, software RAID (such as LVM), etc. It would be useful if StarWind could incorporate the actual physical drive management inside of the solution, similar to Storage Spaces Direct."
"The storage capability must be improved."
"The installation is complex."
"Needs some more monitoring tools."
"Exporting data from the dashboard is not very user-friendly. It's just designed in a way that it's going to cover let's say 90%, 80%, of the end-users needs. If you need more sophisticated reporting it's not easy to have."
"Licensing restrictions can be frustrating."
"They should provide continuous support for data migration."
"I am not really impressed by the technical support of this solution."
"I think there might be some room for improvement when it comes to pricing, because although I know how to convert customers, at the end of day, it's quite expensive. Sometimes your feature architecture is still coming out much cheaper than hardware costs for your infrastructure."
"In the future, I would like Acropolis to add support for publishing external storage."
"Nutanix Acropolis AOS is new technology in a competitive market. Pricing is too high for a new product and requires better discounts to be able to compete with IBM, Dell EMC, and HP."
"We had a few problems with the foundation machine that you can use to build your systems out. We've got it working now, but it should be improved."
"Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure lacks compatibility with certain older processors."
"NCI's pricing is expensive."
"Benchmark testing indicated that workloads did slightly better on our Vblock by a few percentage"
"One of the very important things that I would like to see in Nutanix, but I'm not sure if it's in the roadmap or not, is to have some kind of caching optimization at remote sites, to build active-active data centers more easily."
"Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure's cloud platform management software could be improved so that I can manage my load between the cloud and on-premises."
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Dell PowerFlex is ranked 10th in HCI with 19 reviews while Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is ranked 2nd in HCI with 194 reviews. Dell PowerFlex is rated 8.2, while Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Dell PowerFlex writes "Infrastructure management solution that offers rapid provisioning of computer storage but the APIs and enablers for custom automation could be improved". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) writes "A powerful solution with easy deployment, upgrades, and management". Dell PowerFlex is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series, HPE SimpliVity and HPE Alletra dHCI, whereas Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is most compared with VMware vSAN, VxRail, HPE SimpliVity, VMware vSphere and Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series. See our Dell PowerFlex vs. Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) report.
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