Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) and Dell vSAN Ready Nodes are competing solutions in the cloud infrastructure market. NCI has a competitive edge due to its more feature-rich platform and better customer support.
Features: NCI is known for its one-click upgrades, data locality, deduplication, compression, scalability, and disaster recovery. Dell vSAN Ready Nodes emphasize storage solutions with features like storage auto-tiering and redundancy, along with a distributed file system and scalability.
Room for Improvement: NCI could enhance integration with software-defined networking, improve cloud feature offerings, provide better pricing transparency, and add support for external storage solutions. Dell could benefit from improvements in automation capabilities, further scalability, pricing flexibility, and better cloud environment integration.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: NCI offers versatile deployment options with on-premises, hybrid, and private cloud environments, backed by a responsive and knowledgeable customer support team. Dell vSAN Ready Nodes focus on on-premises and private cloud deployments but receive mixed feedback on deployment ease and customer service consistency.
Pricing and ROI: NCI pricing is premium due to its extensive features and excellent support, leading to significant long-term ROI through reduced operational costs. Dell vSAN Ready Nodes are perceived as expensive with less flexible pricing but both solutions report positive ROI by improving storage and hardware maintenance cost-efficiency.
The OPEX benefits are around 30 to 40% because the same engineer who manages vSphere can handle Dell vSAN Ready Nodes, eliminating the need for additional support engineers.
There is always room for improvement in terms of response time and reaching knowledgeable staff quickly.
Whether we have pro support plus or just the basic level, they are helpful and reliable as long as we provide the necessary details.
The technical support from Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is excellent, deserving a nine out of ten rating.
For large environments with frequent scalability actions, we propose the Terraform solution that builds ESXi, does necessary configuration, and automatically starts up for associating with the existing environment.
I would rate scalability around seven because when customers want to expand capacity but all the drive slots are full, they are forced to buy new servers or nodes which adds more costs with licenses and hardware.
The scalability of Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) deserves an eight out of ten rating, as there is no solution that is 100% efficient and there is always room for improvement.
A disk group for five disks can be problematic, and customers need to tolerate downtime if the disk is not available.
Compared to VM, we find it most stable.
Regarding stability, I would rate Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) a seven out of ten.
A faster firmware lifecycle with the release of validated firmware catalogs more quickly would be a desired improvement.
Dell vSAN Ready Nodes are useful as a product, but the lack of expansion with VMware has led customers to refrain from further upgrades.
In some cases, we have seen hardware failures and performance issues where performance suddenly deteriorates.
I would suggest that Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) should develop their own P2V (physical to VM) tools instead of requiring users to rely on third-party solutions.
We hope Nutanix can integrate inside our current license module.
As a group under Comcast, we receive very good pricing from Dell due to our considerable business dealings.
It costs more compared to VMware due to different licensing areas.
The pricing is renewed every year, at almost $100,000 per year.
The ability for single-team management without requiring a separate storage team for managing arrays and fiber channel switches is also a valuable feature.
I would say in-house management, administration, and storage policies are the three key differentiators compared to normal non-Dell vSAN Ready Nodes where we are leveraging external storage.
Dell's technical support is generally very good.
When technology development or devops teams request server provisioning, the setup time has been reduced from hours to less than 20 minutes.
The replication method between Nutanix clusters is a valuable feature.
Dell EMC vSAN Ready Nodes are pre-configured building blocks that reduce deployment
risks with certified configurations, improve storage efficiency by up to 50%1
, and can help
you build or scale your vSAN cluster faster.14 Whether you're just getting started, and/or
expanding your existing VMware environment, Dell EMC is here for you every step of the
way with consulting, education, deployment and support services for the entire solution.
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:
Outside of these categories, NCI also offers other capabilities:
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:
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Benefits
The product offers various benefits to users who utilize its capacities. Some of these include:
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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