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IBM SoftLayer vs Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 1, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

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

Categories and Ranking

IBM SoftLayer
Ranking in Public Cloud Storage Services
19th
Average Rating
8.6
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS)
Ranking in Public Cloud Storage Services
3rd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
119
Ranking in other categories
All-Flash Storage (8th), Software Defined Storage (SDS) (2nd), File and Object Storage (3rd), NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2026, in the Public Cloud Storage Services category, the mindshare of IBM SoftLayer is 2.0%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) is 2.9%, up from 2.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Public Cloud Storage Services Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS)2.9%
IBM SoftLayer2.0%
Other95.1%
Public Cloud Storage Services
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer1032702 - PeerSpot reviewer
Global Principal Cloud Architect at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees
Stable with excellent speed and agility
The most valuable aspect of the solution is simply to have the ability to host in a cloud form and out of the data center - the IBM big iron solution. It's the speed and the agility that really sell SoftLayer. The ELT versus ETL extract, transform and load versus extract, load, and then transform, the ELT method is what really sells SoftLayer. The ability to extract act from your current location, load into your future location, with limited change, and then be able to take the transfer actions slowly and methodically after you're in your new location is the part that really makes this awesome. The stability and scalability are quite good.
NISHANTPANCHAL - PeerSpot reviewer
Principle Technical Specialist at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees
Unified storage has simplified private cloud operations and delivers strong security and ROI
Regarding areas for improvement, I think Data Lens could be enhanced from Nutanix's side, but it has been a long time since I logged into that console, so I do not remember much. It is a SaaS-based offering on the Nutanix portal. It is not something you deploy on-premises; it is not on-prem access. You connect your cluster to the SaaS-based Nutanix and then access the Lens console. I need to check it since it has been almost two or three months since I logged in. Nutanix Enterprise AI actually needs to improve a lot if I compare it with any other product such as NVIDIA and other offerings in the market. Nutanix Enterprise AI still requires a lot of work. I did not check that in much detail technically, but whatever I thoroughly checked, it still lags behind in many features. When it comes to AI-related features, I think the ecosystem of Nutanix is not as big as NVIDIA because NVIDIA has its own inferencing system and model training platform such as NeMo, NeMoTron, and others. Nutanix does not have such things. It can be built using NVIDIA CUDA libraries, but what I saw when I was testing the product is that you can run NVIDIA NeMo and PyTorch and two other things, but as a software, Nutanix does not have an end-to-end platform. That is something Nutanix should focus on.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The ELT versus ETL extract, transform and load versus extract, load, and then transform, the ELT method is what really sells SoftLayer."
"The ability to extract from your current location, load into your future location with limited change, and then be able to take the transfer actions slowly and methodically after you're in your new location is the part that really makes this awesome."
"The solution is highly stable."
"The stability is the solution's most valuable aspect for our organization."
"The benefit that our clients see is the security of the whole Nutanix platform where they have simplified usage."
"Regarding downtime issues, we haven't had downtime in generations, and everything is going very well."
"Overall, this is a good product and I recommend it."
"The most valuable feature is that it is highly available, solving the pain-point of delaying updates to Windows-based file servers during production hours. And then the second one would be ransomware protection and analytics. It gives you great visibility and protection on your file shares that are otherwise the most common sources of vulnerabilities."
"The management interface is great and you have handy access to several details about your file shares."
"We have virtually zero downtime with Nutanix. It updates itself, and we can easily move machines from one cluster to another."
"The benefit for our customers is cost effectiveness. The customer is spending substantial money refreshing NetApp storage. We identified a use case from a NAS point of view. Using Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) helps in reducing costs, as they are not spending a dedicated cost for storage procurement."
"One of the best features of the Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) is that I find everything, all the solutions, in one single box; if you look into Nutanix, the HCI plus whatever storage is required as part of the requirements, such as if applications are hosted on Kubernetes or container platforms requiring S3, NFS, or any other protocol, we can access everything from a single system, eliminating the need to manage multiple systems and different storage in the data center, as one system from one OEM provides everything."
 

Cons

"For us, the versioning was an issue."
"The interface is hard to use for us. It should be simplified."
"The interface could be improved."
"As you have to go through all of the steps of technical support, it takes longer to get to an escalated level."
"We couldn't access Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) from Prism Central due to bugs. The bugs that Nutanix fixed in newer versions prevented us from accessing Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) from Prism Central."
"Nutanix needs to improve their cybersecurity options at the storage level."
"The escalation process with technical support could do with some improvement."
"While they are good and they do work, some of the snapshotting and tiering features are not as simple to set up as they could be."
"Since it's part of Prism, I might suggest integrating the management console into Prism instead of having a separate console; that's the only change I would recommend, and it's not a significant issue."
"The problem is that we need to invest a lot of money to get AI, and therefore, we are not going to purchase AI right now."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"In my opinion, the product is fairly priced."
"It is not too high for what we are using."
"Nutanix's pricing is definitely much better when compared to other storage providers. That was one of the main reasons we switched to this platform."
"The licensing model the tool has is cheaper than an HCI storage solution."
"The solution's pricing is fair."
"I hope that it will stay the way it is. We have seen the changes in VMware and what happened to them. I have heard that Nutanix will raise the prices, but I hope that they will not do that."
"Compared to other solutions, NUS is cost-effective and efficient. It also has good performance."
"It is very good. It is much more competitive than a dedicated storage platform."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Manufacturing Company
13%
Computer Software Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Outsourcing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business32
Midsize Enterprise31
Large Enterprise69
 

Questions from the Community

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Nutanix Unified Storage?
The pricing for Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) is subscription-based with capacity-based licensing and has moderate to high setup complexity depending on the size of the environment. Costs depend on...
What needs improvement with Nutanix Unified Storage?
One area for improvement I noticed while using Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) is expanding advanced analytics and predictive capacity planning capabilities to help administrators make even better lo...
What advice do you have for others considering Nutanix Unified Storage?
My advice for others looking into using Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) is to clearly understand your storage requirements before implementation and evaluate current and future needs for file, object...
 

Also Known As

CloudLayer
Nutanix Files Storage, Nutanix Volumes Block Storage, Nutanix Objects Storage
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Whogohost Ltd., Skypicker, Infinity Computers and Communications Company, Grace Co. Ltd., Keyword, Uvionics Tech, Tennis Australia, immixGroup, Salesbox, Cxense ASA, Avnet Inc., Komsomolskaya Pravda, Seekr
JetBlue, International Speedway Corporation, Volkswagen SAIC, Brighton and Hove City Council, Foresters Financial, Janus International Group, Cloud Comrade, Serco
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM SoftLayer vs. Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
915,287 professionals have used our research since 2012.