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HPE MSA vs Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
6.8
HPE MSA provides cost-effective storage solutions, optimizing business operations and delivering substantial monetary savings and better returns.
Sentiment score
6.8
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure delivers ROI by reducing costs and simplifying management, enhancing resource efficiency and minimizing downtime.
It certainly shows a return on investment with HPE MSA, but we have framework contracts with special prices for the HP hardware, so I am not sure that our return on investment calculation corresponds to what other people should have.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.4
HPE MSA support is mostly effective and reliable, but improvements in response times and proactive measures are needed.
Sentiment score
8.1
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure's customer service is praised for quick, knowledgeable support and effective resolution despite some cost concerns.
I would rate technical support a three out of five due to the lack of effectiveness in preventing recurring problems.
The technical support from Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is excellent, deserving a nine out of ten rating.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.5
HPE MSA is scalable for small to medium businesses, offering easy expansion and positive feedback on workload hosting capabilities.
Sentiment score
7.9
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure offers seamless scalability, allowing effortless, efficient cluster expansion to accommodate diverse business sizes and needs.
It is more profitable to use HPE MSA because if you run out of space, you can expand the capacity of the array using expansion enclosures, making it more flexible and profitable.
HPE MSA's scalability benefits are notable as its speed and performance are good.
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.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.4
HPE MSA is highly reliable and stable, excelling in performance and compatibility, despite occasional hard disk concerns.
Sentiment score
8.2
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure offers outstanding reliability and stability, with minimal downtime and prompt support addressing minor issues effectively.
I faced issues with hard disk reliability, as they frequently fail and risk losing redundancy.
Compared to VM, we find it most stable.
Regarding stability, I would rate Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) a seven out of ten.
 

Room For Improvement

HPE MSA requires better scalability, GUI, replication, cloud integration, security, performance, and affordable support, addressing user concerns.
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure needs improvements in pricing, setup, integration, user interface, performance, and multi-tenancy features for users.
Data security features are more important to me than anything else, and I think HPE MSA lacks in this area.
If it could be a hybrid with SSDs and hard disks, then it would be more economical and efficient.
They should add AI features in the future.
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.
 

Setup Cost

HPE MSA's pricing is high with costly support and licensing, but users value responsive support; better pricing could aid businesses.
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure provides competitive pricing and flexible licensing, offering good ROI and TCO benefits despite hardware costs.
The pricing of HPE MSA is not deemed reasonable.
It costs more compared to VMware due to different licensing areas.
The pricing is renewed every year, at almost $100,000 per year.
It is expensive to move to the cloud.
 

Valuable Features

HPE MSA is praised for its ease of management, scalability, robust features, and suitability for SMBs due to reliable performance.
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure offers high performance, user-friendly management, scalability, integration, and cost efficiency with seamless updates and monitoring.
In terms of disaster recovery, we can define global spares in HPE MSA. When one disk fails, a global spare is automatically allocated to that particular disk, which saves the data.
Compared to Huawei, however, I found that Huawei's processing power, performance, and cost were more advantageous.
The most useful feature of HPE MSA is VAAI, which are the functions embedded in the system, allowing operations on the server or storage without using server CPU, making it easier.
When technology development or devops teams request server provisioning, the setup time has been reduced from hours to less than 20 minutes.
It is easy to use, and it's easy to maintain.
The replication method between Nutanix clusters is a valuable feature.
 

Categories and Ranking

HPE MSA
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
26
Ranking in other categories
Modular SAN (Storage Area Network) (5th)
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructur...
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
199
Ranking in other categories
Software Defined Storage (SDS) (5th), HCI (4th), Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) (1st), Hybrid Cloud Computing Platforms (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Storage Solutions solutions, they serve different purposes. HPE MSA is designed for Modular SAN (Storage Area Network) and holds a mindshare of 18.8%, up 17.8% compared to last year.
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), on the other hand, focuses on HCI, holds 9.5% mindshare, up 8.1% since last year.
Modular SAN (Storage Area Network) Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
HPE MSA18.8%
NetApp FAS Series15.6%
IBM FlashSystem15.6%
Other50.0%
Modular SAN (Storage Area Network)
HCI Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI)9.5%
VxRail16.1%
VMware vSAN14.0%
Other60.4%
HCI
 

Featured Reviews

Pragnesh Sachania - PeerSpot reviewer
Scalable, easy to manage, and used for virtualization environments
We didn't face any issues with the technical functionality. However, we faced a lot of challenges with our custom configuration. The HPE support person who did the installation was very technical. He answered all the queries, and we resolved the entire setup. We set up the storage as per our requirements. We previously used a physical server instead of virtualization. With the help of an HPE engineer and partners, we prepared a strategy for migrating the entire physical servers to our virtualization infrastructure. It took two days to deploy the solution. Six people were involved in the solution's deployment, including two from HPE and four from our IT team.
MahendraPanchotiya - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers a unified platform, reduces downtime, and simple updates
Nutanix offers a unified platform for managing databases, virtual machines, and applications. This simplifies management by consolidating everything into a single interface. While Nutanix may have a higher upfront cost compared to other hypervisors, it can significantly reduce the resources needed for infrastructure management. With our previous hypervisor, we needed nearly ten IT personnel. Nutanix has allowed us to streamline our team to just three members. We use a combination of database technologies, including SQL databases and web servers such as IIS, BHP, and NGINX. Nutanix features helped our organization reduce downtime. I don't recall the last time we had downtime related to Nutanix because it is such a stable product. Nutanix, a reliable product, helps us streamline our processes, which in turn improves company revenue. We began to see the benefits after two years, with a 40 percent reduction in operational costs. We migrated 200 servers from AWS to Nutanix. Nutanix may not consolidate applications, but it helps us run them more efficiently on its platform. Updating is simple with one click. I would rate the updating processes 10 out of 10. Adding compute and storage on demand is not difficult. However, we need to factor in the existing and new firmware and software requirements.
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Comparison Review

it_user244362 - PeerSpot reviewer
Aug 30, 2015
Nutanix vs. VMware EVO:RAIL vs. FlexPod
Originally posted at www.storagegaga.com/dont-get-too-drunk-on-hyper-converged/ I hate the fact that I am bursting the big bubble brewing about Hyper Convergence (HC). I urge all to look past the hot air and hype frenzy that are going on, because in the end, the HC platforms have to be aligned…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
14%
Government
8%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business11
Midsize Enterprise11
Large Enterprise7
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business91
Midsize Enterprise76
Large Enterprise82
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about HPE StorageWorks MSA?
The most valuable feature of HPE StorageWorks MSA is its flexibility.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for HPE StorageWorks MSA?
I did not compare the cost of HPE MSA with others because we buy with a framework contract, and HP is the only brand available on that contract, so we have no comparison.
What needs improvement with HPE StorageWorks MSA?
The user web interface is a bit slow, but it is really easy to use, although you still have to wait a bit when you send an operation. We have had some drive failures, but with the redundancy, we ha...
What is the biggest difference between Nutanix Acropolis and VMware vSphere?
We found the reduced power consumption with Nutanix Acropolis AOS a very attractive feature. We also like the interface that allows you to talk directly to your VM from the present software. We fou...
How do I choose between Cisco Hyperflex HX Series and Nutanix Acropolis AOS?
Cisco HyperFlex HS series vs Nutanix Acropolis AOS Cisco HyperFlex gives extended hyper-convergence functions from core to edge and multi-cloud environments. It helps IT and OT teams deploy hyper...
Which would you choose - Nutanix Acropolis AOS or VMware vSAN?
We found the reduced power consumption with Nutanix Acropolis AOS a very attractive feature. We also like the interface that allows you to talk directly to your VM from the present software. We fou...
 

Also Known As

HP StorageWorks MSA
Nutanix Acropolis AOS, Nutanix AOS, Nutanix Acropolis
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Femsa CSC, TTX, Rabobank
St. Lukes Health System, the City of Seattle, Yahoo! Japan, Sligro, Empire Life, Hyundai AUS, and many others.
Find out what your peers are saying about NetApp, Hitachi Vantara, IBM and others in Modular SAN (Storage Area Network). Updated: September 2025.
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