Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct vs Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) comparison

Microsoft and Nutanix are both solutions in the Software Defined Storage (SDS) category. Microsoft is ranked #10 with an average rating of 6.5, while Nutanix is ranked #3 with an average rating of 8.8. Microsoft holds a 7.5% mindshare in SDS, compared to Nutanix’s 5.3% mindshare. Additionally, 75% of Microsoft users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 99% of Nutanix users who would recommend it.

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 5, 2024

Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct and Nutanix Unified Storage compete in enterprise storage solutions. Nutanix Unified Storage seems to have the upper hand due to its advanced features offering compelling value for price.

Features: Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct has robust scalability, advanced resilience with automatic failover, and dynamic provisioning. Nutanix Unified Storage offers a unified platform with integrated data services, customizable workflows, and broader edge-to-cloud deployment capabilities.

Room for Improvement: Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct could improve in customer service consistency, user interface intuitiveness, and expanding comprehensive backup and recovery features. Nutanix Unified Storage has room for improvement in initial deployment complexity, pricing structure flexibility, and enhancement of native monitoring tools.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct integrates with Windows Server, making deployment straightforward with extensive documentation, though customer service can vary. Nutanix Unified Storage offers a hyper-converged infrastructure for seamless deployment, praised for responsive customer service and streamlined support.

Pricing and ROI: Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct offers competitive pricing, especially for organizations within the Microsoft ecosystem, providing a favorable ROI through reduced infrastructure costs. Nutanix Unified Storage requires a higher initial investment, justified by its comprehensive feature set and long-term operational efficiency, leading to significant ROI through enhanced data management capabilities.

To learn more, read our detailed Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct vs. Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) Report (Updated: June 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct vs. Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS)

June 2025

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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

Pure Storage FlashBlade

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Software Defined Storage (SDS) category, the mindshare of Pure Storage FlashBlade is 4.2%, down from 4.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct is 7.5%, up from 7.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) is 5.3%, up from 2.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Software Defined Storage (SDS)

Featured Reviews

Eric Black

Solutions Architect at Recovery Point Systems

The ability to leverage multi-tenancy along with immutability is a huge benefit for us

The only thing I feel FlashBlade is missing is the SOS API. If it had SOS API, that would put it well over the top. Veeam Backup specifically has started to streamline their API, and they are doing that with SOS API. They have optimized it. Any of the S3 devices out there that support this SOS API can have far more API calls at once. On our side, that translates to better restoration. With SOS API, it can leverage far more restorations at a single given time or read from the device in simple terms. That results in maximizing the output and throughput from the device itself.

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Stanislaw Mielicki

Solution architect at Netland

Achieve cost-effectiveness with superior performance while needing to address cluster support

I am working with Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct for applications, SQL, and VRS. I am an integrator for this solution The price performance is the best advantage of Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct. They introduced the All-Flash array using SSD or NVMe drives without cache drives. It is…

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Vishnu Mohan

Service Delivery Manager Cloud and DCO at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

Centralized management and high resiliency streamline data storage with immediate benefits and scalability

The most effective features of Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) for us are about making multiple copies of our data across hardware nodes, ensuring that if there is a hardware failure, we still don't lose our data, which I think is the most important. Also, they have a file solution that is good for file shares, and that is of value to us. The switch from solutions such as IBM to Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) was driven by the need for different skill sets for a separate storage team and separate compute team. Maintaining these old devices was getting prohibitively high, so consolidating everything onto Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) made sense and allowed one set of Nutanix engineers to manage the entire estate.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The ease of deployment and management has helped us simplify our storage. We also do not have to worry about capacity management as much. A lot of these things are native to Pure Storage."

"The most valuable features include the ease of implementation, ease of use and the speed that you can do backup and recovery on."

"The product is scalable and easy to expand."

"The initial setup is pretty easy and simple."

"The snapshots, replication, and the ability to have immutable blades are the most valuable features. You're putting data snapshots out in those blades, and they cannot be touched. Its performance is great."

"We have seen a reduction in the total cost of ownership by around 20%."

"It has absolutely simplified our storage because the dashboards on the consoles show a clear understanding of where you are, and it is also very easy to provision. This been a big help for our teams."

"Pure Storage FlashBlade is user-friendly. It's replication feature is great because it has active replication and active DR. That's the beauty of the product. It's a perfect solution for block storage."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pros

"The price performance is the best advantage of Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct."

"The most valuable feature is that there is no single point of failure."

"The performance, reliability, and affordability has been most valuable."

"The most valuable feature are the caching capabilities using the storage class memory."

"Its technical support is excellent."

"The initial setup is straightforward."

"The flash ability, in terms of tiering and caching, is amazing"

"It's mainly about the storage expansion, like in hyper-converged solutions."

More Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct pros

"We appreciate how Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) performs very well. We appreciate being able to have the duplication of the data to a secondary location."

"The simplicity of management is valuable because, in more traditional environments, the platform updates are much more complex."

"The reliability and stability of Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) is good, and the disaster recovery component is something impressive for this product."

"The most important point is the simplicity of the API integration. We can leverage the API integrations and connect our hybrid-cloud network environment with Nutanix's cloud storage."

"One of the main features of Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) that I find most valuable is the flexibility and scalability of it, as well as the ability to perform replication for our Disaster Recovery environment."

"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."

"It is more stable and scalable compared to the Windows file server."

"The interface is quite simple. It is very good. It is easy to configure. It also has a powerful CLI."

More Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) pros

Cons

"There could be improvements in public cloud integration."

"It's on the expensive side, as expected for a niche product."

"The Pure Storage Orchestrator is our biggest pain point at the moment. If we can have more say in future developments of feature sets that we will need to support for our use case, that would be pretty beneficial to us."

"In the realm of micro-services, I think that Pure Storage can do well if they start getting in there and making their arrays more micro-services ready."

"I would like to see more monitoring capability included in the next release of this solution."

"The feature that we're waiting on is better integration with the cell services."

"Commvault has mainly driven the Analytics, providing data and reports. However, the product has room for improvement, especially regarding storage analytics. Upgrading firmware has caused issues, requiring feature disabling to revert to traditional backups. The firmware upgrades sometimes affect Commvault backups."

"To improve FlashBlade, some analysts suggest enhancing its handling of relational database management systems and SQL queries."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade cons

"It is difficult to get a hardware compatibility certification for the solution."

"Microsoft closed the shared cluster support, which is important for the solution."

"More optimization could be done in terms of mirroring."

"Microsoft closed the shared cluster support, which is important for the solution."

"I think the online documentation needs a lot of work and so do the sizing tools."

"The management tool within this solution could be improved. We would also like to be able to access services like Azure when using this solution."

"It is scalable, but only beyond two nodes. If I go for two nodes it's not scalable. I need to build a complete cluster from the beginning if I'm going for two nodes."

"The integration is not difficult because there is no GUI, but we need to use a PowerShell command. This makes it difficult to monitor and to see the components' statuses."

More Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct cons

"I really want some AI or even basic AI to be included in the Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) license."

"It would be beneficial if there were a migration tool for the new way of syncing data for data protection."

"Nutanix should improve the one-click upgrade. There are a lot of dependencies on third-party licenses and HP hardware we use internally. The one-click upgrade fails sometimes."

"Improving quota policies would be advantageous, particularly by offering the option to implement blocking instead of just issuing warnings."

"From the speed perspective of Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS), it could enhance some features to make it the best storage solution in the market."

"There is no tagging concept in Nutanix Unified Storage where you can tag the servers."

"When it comes to Nutanix Files, one thing that would be great is a slightly easier way of managing snapshots and restore points, especially when a third party is involved."

"For future updates, I think Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) should look at features similar to what ONTAP of NetApp is doing, such as tiering to the public cloud."

More Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"In my opinion, we have paid the right price for the product. I don't think that it is too much or too little."

"Support is a separate line item. Support is a different cost, but whatever your support is now, that's what you're going to pay forever. If your support's $100 today, six years from now it's $100. It doesn't fluctuate unless you upgrade it, or change it, etc."

"Licensing fees are paid yearly."

"The price is a little high."

"The pricing for FlashBlade is between cheap and moderate."

"I have seen ROI. It has allowed me to increase the density of my VMs without having to purchase anything additional."

"I feel that the price could always be lowered."

"Our customers have seen a reduction in TCO."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pricing and cost advice

"The solution is expensive."

"Cost-wise the product is one of the more affordable within the category of products."

"With the data center licensing and everything that is connected to that, this solution is relatively costly."

"I am not the one who makes the calls, but it seems to me that it was very competitive. Other solutions would have required dedicated hardware, so an additional CapEx has to be put in place. In that sense, it was definitely a more competitive option to go with Nutanix Files."

"The pricing of Nutanix is generally higher compared to other vendors, which is a common observation, but it provides value through its support and features offered to customers."

"The solution’s pricing could be cheaper."

"I find Nutanix Files Storage competitively priced, even its feature set. Its price is seven out of ten."

"Nutanix is priced a bit higher than some of its competitors. A lot of Chinese companies like Huawei are entering the Saudi Arabian market trying to provide similar solutions for a lower price. It offers a good value, especially the support. Nutanix has a highly competent team. The after-sales support is excellent."

"Nutanix Unified Storage is competitively priced. There aren't any competitors that can do much better for the same price."

"It's competitive and attractive for moving things to it and then prioritizing those newly freed up resources for something else."

"In the manufacturing industry, we operate under very lean principles where costs are heavily scrutinized. There was some initial hesitation, but the performance we've experienced since switching to the Nutanix platform, along with the peace of mind from having confidence in our platform to not give us issues that keep us up at night, has smoothed over much of that scrutiny."

More Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

16%

Computer Software Company

13%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

15%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

32%

Educational Organization

15%

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Pure Storage FlashBlade?

The tool's most valuable feature is its fast performance, especially in handling snapshots. It helps during power out...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure Storage FlashBlade?

The pricing for FlashBlade is between cheap and moderate. FlashBlade is worth the money due to the experience and per...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashBlade?

Its configuration should be easier. There should be easier language for the configuration.

See all answers

How does VMware vSAN compare with Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct?

We found VMware’s vSAN was easy to set up, configure, and manage compared to other solutions we considered. It is bes...

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct?

Pricing is an advantage of Storage Spaces Direct. Licenses can be on a monthly or yearly basis, depending on the addi...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct?

Microsoft closed the shared cluster support, which is important for the solution. At the moment, the new version does...

See all answers

What do you like most about Nutanix Unified Storage?

Nutanix has excellent product documentation available on their portals, written in simple, easy-to-understand language.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Nutanix Unified Storage?

Nutanix solutions are often perceived as premium-priced, but they deliver substantial ROI in terms of performance, re...

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What needs improvement with Nutanix Unified Storage?

Nutanix Unified Storage is already a robust and forward-thinking platform. That said, one area for potential improvem...

See all answers

Comparisons

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 20% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 11% of the time

MinIO vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 11% of the time

VAST Data vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 10% of the time

NetApp AFF vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 2% of the time

More Pure Storage FlashBlade Competitors

VMware vSAN vs Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct

Compared 62% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct

Compared 14% of the time

StarWind Virtual SAN vs Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct

Compared 7% of the time

DataCore SANsymphony vs Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct

Compared 4% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct

Compared 3% of the time

More Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct Competitors

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS)

Compared 17% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS)

Compared 16% of the time

MinIO vs Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS)

Compared 9% of the time

Amazon S3 vs Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS)

Compared 5% of the time

Qumulo vs Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS)

Compared 4% of the time

More Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Pure Storage FlashBlade

May 2025

Download Pure Storage FlashBlade product report

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct

May 2025

Download Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct product report

Buyer's Guide

Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS)

May 2025

Download Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) product report

Also Known As

No data available

MS Storage Spaces Direct

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

Overview

FlashBlade is the industry’s most advanced scale-out storage for unstructured data, powered by a modern, massively parallel architecture to consolidate complex data silos (like backup appliances and data lakes) and accelerate tomorrow’s discoveries and insights.

Pure Storage

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.

Microsoft

Nutanix Unified Storage provides high availability and seamless cloud platform integration, ensuring robust redundancy, scalability, and streamlined management. It supports hybrid cloud connectivity, enhancing storage security and performance.

Nutanix Unified Storage is designed for effective data protection across block, file, and object storage, offering features like ransomware detection and a centralized management interface through Prism Central. Users gain improved SLAs and IT cost savings through its efficient performance. Despite its user-friendly interface, there is a demand for enhanced security measures such as Multi-Factor Authentication and DLP. While its resilience is notable, users seek improvements in protocol compatibility, storage capabilities, pricing, and support processes.

What are the most important features of Nutanix Unified Storage?

User-Friendly Interface: Simplifies storage management and monitoring.
High Availability: Ensures continuous operation and reliability.
Seamless Cloud Integration: Compatible with platforms like Azure and AWS.
Robust Redundancy: Protects data against hardware failures.
Scalable Architecture: Easily adapts to growing data storage needs.
Ransomware Detection: Enhances data protection measures.

What benefits and ROI might users find in reviews?

Improved SLAs: Increased service reliability and performance.
IT Cost Savings: Reduces expenses through efficient resource use.
Enhanced Security: Stronger data protection and reduced risk.
Centralized Management: Easier control and monitoring from one dashboard.

Industries implement Nutanix Unified Storage for tasks such as file storage, database performance improvement, and storage solution consolidation. Companies deploying virtual machines, securing against ransomware, connecting hybrid clouds, and backing up data find it useful. It supports workloads like Citrix VDI, Kubernetes, and research data, assisting many organizations migrating from legacy storage for better cost efficiency and reduced data center footprints.

Nutanix

Sample Customers

ServiceNow, Mercedes-AMG Petronas Motorsport, Dominos, Man AHL

Acuutech, Quest Technology Management, Bradley, Mead & Hunt

JetBlue, International Speedway Corporation, Volkswagen SAIC, Brighton and Hove City Council, Foresters Financial, Janus International Group, Cloud Comrade, Serco

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct vs. Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS)

June 2025

Free Report: Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct vs. Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS)

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