Dell PowerFlex vs Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary

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.
To learn more, read our detailed Dell PowerFlex vs. Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Report (Updated: September 2023).
734,678 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"StarWind saved us about 80% of our storage costs over our old solution.""It's very easy to resize disks and they show up in VMware almost instantly.""The backup is readily available for use, and the restoration process is easy.""The failover redundancy is why we bought this product and it has never let us down.""I have found the graphical user interface to be the most useful thing about Virtual SAN.""Support keeps track of alerts of the system and verifies with us if we need help to fix any issues. They have great and quick technical support.""The customer support provided by StarWind is excellent.""Having the ability to migrate machines live in our environment was made possible by this software."

More StarWind Virtual SAN Pros →

"We've had no issues with scaling the solution.""The catalog of APIs for automation has been most valuable, although they are quite limited.""Saves us a lot of space in the data center.""Dell PowerFlex is a one-stop-shop solution. Storage, compute, network, application monitoring, and support cases are all combined into one solution. It's very easy to administer compared to when you have a reference architecture where you need to design and build everything yourself. You would also then have to work with multiple vendors.""The solution is scalable.""The integration with AWS is a valuable feature."

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"Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure's most valuable feature is the flexibility to move the VMs easily, keeping everything together.""There are a lot of things I really like. Perhaps the best part is taking a snapshot of a virtual machine. It's very quick. Another useful part is replication and creating a protection domain: using the protection feature to replicate a machine to a remote site for DR purposes.""The most valuable feature is the integration of all parts in Prism Element, the browser-based management tool.""The pricing is pretty good.""Ability to create multiple VMs.""It gives us a single dashboard to control multiple sites and multiple zones. It helps to do things on a single platform and data sharing is quite easy. The network and the security are easy to manage.""The most valuable aspect of Nutanix is the performance of the storage, which is excellent. And controlling compute, storage, the network, and security all together in one box is very efficient for us. It gives us a single platform to manage our all infrastructure.""Acropolis AOS is scalable to nodes and the cloud."

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Cons
"There should be publicly available tutorials on YouTube or other platforms that help the users to integrate this solution with other platforms, for example.""The software could benefit from more tooling to help with initial deployment.""While StarWind.com excels in numerous areas, there are a couple of notable functionalities that it currently lacks. One of these is duplication, which could be an invaluable feature for data redundancy and backup purposes. The ability to duplicate data across different storage locations can be crucial for safeguarding against data loss, and its absence is a minor limitation in an otherwise stellar offering.""The only way I can see this product needing improvement is the consultation level of the StarWind sales and engineers.""We just need more integration with Veeam.""For someone entering the IT sector with little knowledge of storage, iSCSI, and virtual disks, they might not find the GUI immediately obvious.""I had issues locating the documentation that applied to my version of StarWind vSAN.""I would say that the documentation is mostly great, however, some features could be expanded upon a bit."

More StarWind Virtual SAN Cons →

"We've had some issues around the licensing.""They should provide continuous support for data migration.""The support of containers needs to be improved. At present, it is limited to VMware. There needs to be direct communication with the hardware rather than through a hypervisor.""It would be great to get earlier access to beta builds because we have to develop providers on our own. The APIs and enablers for custom automation could also be improved.""Compared to similar solutions, Dell PowerFlex is not cost-effective and has room for improvement.""Licensing restrictions can be frustrating."

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"There is a need is to be able to consume Nutanix storage from outside the cluster for other, non-Nutanix workloads.""Lacks sufficient integration with other vendors and public clouds.""I would like them to update their licensing to provide more features with their basic license.""The initial setup can be a bit difficult.""In the future, I would like to see multi-tenancy in Nutanix Acropolis AOS.""We ran into an issue as a managed service provider because Acropolis isn't designed to be used the way we are running it. For example, if we want to deploy a Kubernetes service, the customer networks need to reach our protected cluster network. We have isolated our customers in separate VLANs. However, our customers' networks must access our cluster network to get features like iSCSI or Kubernetes to run. It's challenging.""The software-defined networking should be improved. It is quite substandard as compared to the VMware variant. The software-defined networking is quite limited, and we usually use other products to do that. We're aware that Nutanix is working on that and will be coming out with better solutions, and we can't wait because to do a fully software-defined architecture, the abstraction layer needs not only software-defined storage, which you have, but also the software-defined networking piece.""The licenses for Nutanix are very complicated."

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Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "For two nodes, it cost us $10,000, and we spend $2,000 a year on support."
  • "If you are looking at a traditional SAN for a small cluster, give StarWind vSAN because you will save thousands without any compromise."
  • More StarWind Virtual SAN Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "The cost of this solution is fair."
  • "The solution is expensive and I give the cost a two out of ten."
  • "The solution's price is medium."
  • More Dell PowerFlex Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "The pricing is quite good in comparison with HPE SimpliVity, Nutanix Scale, and even traditional architecture."
  • "When compared to the competitors, the price is reasonable."
  • "The cost of Nutanix Acropolis AOS is reasonable."
  • "We got the renewal done recently, and there was no cost involved."
  • "The price of the solution could improve. Nutanix has recently changed its pricing model from perpetual to subscription. They have identified there are challenges with the pricing model."
  • "This product is expensive, but they do have discounts. At one point, I saw that they were giving a 70% or 80% discount, which is a good thing, but maybe they should have a more realistic price and then a 5% to 10% discount."
  • "Our Nutanix license is for five years. There is a support arrangement there, but that aspect is more or less taken care of during the initial installation. With HCI architecture, whenever we do any kind of auto scaling or scaling of servers and resources, there is a significant amount of software licensing involved."
  • "Its licensing model is easy, but the bad thing is that we need to pay for the whole capacity at once. With VMware vSAN, we only have to pay for the capacity that we are using, which is not the case with Nutanix. So, we have more overhead for the licensing cost with Nutanix."
  • More Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:We like their high availability. It reduces the downtime for our entire organization's environment.
    Top Answer:The Premium ProActive service price is a little high, yet worth the price.
    Top Answer:It is hard to find adequate technical documentation on their support website. However, they have a fantastic technical… more »
    Top Answer:VxRail vs. Dell EMC PowerFlex VxRail provides stable solutions for technical problems while at the same time not being… more »
    Top Answer:We found the reduced power consumption with Nutanix Acropolis AOS a very attractive feature. We also like the interface… more »
    Top Answer: Cisco HyperFlex HS series vs Nutanix Acropolis AOS Cisco HyperFlex gives extended hyper-convergence functions… more »
    Top Answer:We found the reduced power consumption with Nutanix Acropolis AOS a very attractive feature. We also like the interface… more »
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    VxFlex, VxRack FLEX, PowerFlex
    Nutanix Acropolis AOS, Nutanix AOS, Nutanix Acropolis
    Learn More
    Overview

    StarWind Virtual SAN provides high availability and fault tolerance for virtualized environments without the need for dedicated SAN hardware. It allows for real-time replication between servers, shared storage for Hyper-V clusters, and enables vMotion and High Availability features for VMware vSphere. The solution reduces costs and leverages existing hardware while providing a scalable and reliable infrastructure. Valuable features include ease of use, scalability, top-tier support, hardware agnosticism, and the ability to use off-the-shelf standard servers to increase storage space. StarWind VSAN has helped organizations improve performance, data availability, and data security while reducing downtime and providing cost-saving storage options.

    VxRack System consists of hyper-converged rack-scale engineered systems, with integrated networking, to achieve the scalability and management requirements of traditional and cloud native workloads. The VxRack series is purposely designed to enable customers to quickly deploy Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and/or Private Cloud architectures. VxRack Systems tightly integrate hardware with software and management layers.

    The result is a fully tested, pre-configured, hyper-converged system with simplified operations at data center and Service Provider scale. VxRack Systems support the deployment of a variety of application workloads, allowing IT to rapidly deliver new services while improving overall agility and efficiency.

    Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is a top-ranking HCI software, cloud management tool, and Software Defined Storage (SDS) tool that is marketed as the foundation for users' hybrid clouds. It offers a powerful and secure hyperconverged infrastructure to deliver all data and applications at any scale and on any cloud. The solution offers a complete software stack that allows users to unify their hybrid cloud infrastructure. 

    NCI’s services include computer, storage and network, hypervisors and containers, and deployment in public or in private clouds. The product also comes with built-in resilience, disaster recovery capabilities, self-healing, and high-security capacities. It provides further deployment flexibility through several software and hardware options and platforms. NCI includes a full set of enterprise capabilities. It can also be deployed on a wide range of servers from popular manufacturers.

    The capabilities of the product are categorized into three main groups:

    • AOS storage
    • Flexible and open compute
    • Automated and secure networking

    Outside of these categories, NCI also offers other capabilities:

    • Integrated disaster recovery
    • Full-stack lifecycle management
    • VMware with Nutanix
    • Intelligent operations

    Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Features

    Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) offers its customers various features and tools in each of the previously mentioned categories. The available features for users currently include:

    • High-performance: This set of features utilizes hardware advances such as NVMe and RDMA to accelerate users' most demanding applications with consistent performance. The tools in this feature category work alongside data locality to ensure successful results.

    • Foolproof resiliency: These Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure features protect data and keep it available by facilitating advanced distributed consistency algorithms. Users can utilize these features to protect their data from issues like bit rot, hardware failures, and even entire site failure.

    • Flexibility: This set of features allows storage to be sized for the needs of each organization and expanded promptly and easily so that the organization and its data can grow. The features offer flexibility to users in terms of applying storage policies logically on a pre-workload basis, instead of being tied to hardware.

    • Hypervisor choice: Users can choose from the leading hypervisors - Microsoft Hyper-V or VMware ESXi. They can also leverage the built-in hypervisor AHV that Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) provides.

    • Integrated virtualization: These features offer simplified automation and AHV streamlined operations. The services in this category are optimized for high performance and reliability.

    • Kubernetes: Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) offers features to build and deploy cloud-native applications on intelligent distributed infrastructure. Apps can be integrated with cloud-compatible storage and both building and deployment can be achieved within the same platform.

    • Microsegmentation: Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) offers features to prevent malware spread and reduce attack surfaces by leveraging machine learning (ML).

    • Virtual networking: This set of features allows users to easily implement multi-tenancy in their environment or stretch networks across clouds.

    • Centralized network management: Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) provides organizations with a way to manage networking configurations centrally. Users can utilize it across their human-computer interaction (HCI) environment with simple virtual switch management.

    Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Benefits

    The product offers various benefits to users who utilize its capacities. Some of these include:

    • NCI reduces technology sprawl and frees up technical resources to allow organizations to focus on other activities, potentially reducing costs for the business.

    • The product allows customers to deploy, scale, and bridge to the public cloud to be able to react in evolving business environments.

    • Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure improves data availability while simultaneously protecting it against several kinds of failures and attacks.

    • The solution offers high-performance, resilient distributed storage for all workloads.

    • Working alongside Nutanix Cloud Platform, NCI offers simple management of data from one console.

    • Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure works by the zero trust philosophy, protecting users' apps and data through specially designed security protocols.

    Reviews from Real Users

    According to Gerhard J., an IT manager at Q4 Fuel, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) provides serious reliability and stability across the entire system makes for ROI.

    A solutions architect at a computer software company describes NCI as a stable, straightforward to set up, and scalable solution.

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    Learn more about Dell PowerFlex
    Learn more about Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI)
    Sample Customers
    Baker Tilly BVI, CMS Internet, Board Harpeth Hall School
    Canopy, 8x8Inc., Atos, Canadian Pacific, City of Denton, CenturyLink, BNP Paribas, Asyaport, EDF, CSC, Fox Sports, Insight, Hunter, KPIT, Paetec, Rosetta Stone, Sonda, Xerox
    St. Lukes Health System, the City of Seattle, Yahoo! Japan, Sligro, Empire Life, Hyundai AUS, and many others.
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Manufacturing Company10%
    Construction Company9%
    Educational Organization8%
    Computer Software Company8%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company19%
    Government9%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    Financial Services Firm7%
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm22%
    Construction Company11%
    Energy/Utilities Company11%
    University11%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company15%
    Financial Services Firm12%
    Manufacturing Company10%
    Government7%
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company17%
    Comms Service Provider11%
    Manufacturing Company10%
    Financial Services Firm8%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization24%
    Computer Software Company15%
    Government7%
    Financial Services Firm6%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business63%
    Midsize Enterprise22%
    Large Enterprise15%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business25%
    Midsize Enterprise17%
    Large Enterprise58%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business17%
    Midsize Enterprise22%
    Large Enterprise61%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business22%
    Midsize Enterprise12%
    Large Enterprise66%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business36%
    Midsize Enterprise31%
    Large Enterprise33%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business18%
    Midsize Enterprise34%
    Large Enterprise48%
    Buyer's Guide
    Dell PowerFlex vs. Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI)
    September 2023
    Find out what your peers are saying about Dell PowerFlex vs. Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) and other solutions. Updated: September 2023.
    734,678 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Dell PowerFlex is ranked 10th in HCI with 6 reviews while Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is ranked 2nd in HCI with 89 reviews. Dell PowerFlex is rated 7.6, while Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Dell PowerFlex writes "Stable with good technical support and the capability to scale". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) writes "What you might not know about Nutanix that makes it so unique". Dell PowerFlex is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series, HPE SimpliVity and Rubrik, whereas Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is most compared with VMware vSAN, VxRail, HPE SimpliVity, Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series and Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure. See our Dell PowerFlex vs. Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) report.

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    We monitor all HCI reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.