Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct vs Nutanix Acropolis AOS comparison

Storage Spaces Direct uses industry-standard servers with local-attached drives to create highly available, highly scalable software-defined storage at a fraction of the cost of traditional SAN or NAS arrays. Its converged or hyper-converged architecture radically simplifies procurement and deployment, while features like caching, storage tiers, and erasure coding, together with the latest hardware innovation like RDMA networking and NVMe drives, deliver unrivaled efficiency and performance.

Nutanix Acropolis AOS is a foundation operating system or "data plane.” It is the operating system for the Nutanix hyper-converged infrastructure platform. Compare this to Nutanix's "control plane" components, Prism and Calm. The Acropolis Operating System is abbreviated as AOS. It is a back-end solution for workload and resource management, as well as for provisioning and operations. Its purpose is to separate the supporting resource from the workloads that are operating, while offering a single platform to operate on. Workloads can now travel between hypervisors, cloud providers, and platforms without interruption. Nutanix Acropolis AOS is a turnkey solution that can be implemented in 60 minutes or less, out of the box. Nutanix Acropolis AOS eliminates standalone SAN or NAS-based storage and costly virtualization. 

Nutanix Acropolis AOS Features

Nutanix Acropolis AOS has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

• Preinstalled AHV virtualization: Nutanix Acropolis AOS includes AHV, our native virtualization solution, as well as VMware ESXi and Microsoft Hyper-V virtualization technologies. Nutanix AHV is a full enterprise virtualization solution that is deeply integrated into Acropolis and comes at no extra cost. AHV provides the functionality needed to run enterprise applications.

• Enterprise storage: Nutanix Acropolis AOS offers a distributed storage fabric that offers enterprise-class storage services such as de-duplication, compression, encryption, and erasure coding to all types of applications. Its data locality assures the most efficient performance.

• Platform services: Nutanix Acropolis AOS provides a comprehensive collection of software-defined platform services that enable IT organizations to centrally manage and consolidate all of their workloads on the Nutanix platform.

• Networking services: Nutanix Acropolis AOS offers a comprehensive collection of services for securing applications with native microsegmentation, analyzing network and performance, and automating routine network tasks.
• VXLAN:  This is a virtualization overlay network that allows for the creation of private, isolated networks in the data center. These networks are layer 2 switches to which all traffic is routed. 

Nutanix Acropolis AOS Benefits

There are many benefits to implementing Nutanix Acropolis AOS. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

• Less hardware: With Acropolis AOS, enterprise IT can consolidate on fewer hardware components and lower costs. The solution can be deployed on virtual machines, with no need for expensive hardware. It can also be deployed by external parties.
  
• Default policy-based networking: Acropolis AOS by default discovers and applies policies that govern traffic in the network. This greatly simplifies management, as it is easier to simply enable or disable policies rather than use individual firewall rules per server.
  
• Network fencing is used to control traffic entering or leaving a specific VM-to-VM port group based on access rules. This provides a way of selectively enabling or disabling services across VMs within a port group to help ensure traffic is managed in an appropriate manner.

Reviews from Real Users

Nutanix Acropolis AOS stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are its stability and its all-inclusivity, which saves users money. PeerSpot users take note of the advantages of these features in their reviews:

Gerhard J., IT Manager at Q4 Fuel, says of the solution, “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.”

Another PeerSpot reviewer, a Solutions Architect at a computer software company, writes, “From a grander view, it's allowed our customers to actually reduce the amount of software that they have to purchase. Not only do they have to purchase the hypervisor, and if they're in VMware, in most cases, they're purchasing disaster recovery tools and a whole bunch of other things. However, Nutanix has it all built-in so that users have one area to manage and maintain.”