We performed a comparison between NetApp AFF and Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two All-Flash Storage solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The solution is easy to scale. I'm running two environments right now, so I need to scale. I'm running a part technology. I've got an A-side and a B-side."
"One of the features that my customers are really interested in is immutable snapshots. There are immutable snapshots to which your applications can be reverted back if you are hit by some kind of ransomware threat or malicious attack. That's kind of a key deal, and it is one of the selling points I use to point out to my customers the value and the features that Pure Storage brings to the table."
"The performance is very good."
"The console is simple to use. It has good performance. It is easy to install, understand, and manage, with a good ratio of deduplication and compression. It is doing its job."
"As soon as we introduced our first Pure Storage FlashArray, the first benefit was at least twice the performance increase. Our production databases simply ran twice as fast with no other change."
"Access speed and power consumption are most valuable."
"It helps simplify storage. When you're running Pure all-flash, you don't have to do a lot of the old Oracle best practices. You don't have to worry about putting log files on a different disk channel than the data files, and those types of issues... That has made it vastly easier to do large volumes, rapid provisioning in databases, without taking a performance hit."
"The first year, we started out with one or five terabytes and it took what was 20 terabytes of storage down to less than one terabyte."
"The most valuable features are the IO performance that we get, the cluster part, and the increased workload and performance with the SSDs."
"The tool's most valuable feature is efficiency."
"There are two compression technologies available within it, and they are valuable because they allow for significantly higher data storage capacity and the retention of a larger number of snapshots on the system."
"Data efficiency is the most valuable feature because of the dedupe and compression."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is data protection and snapshot technology for backup."
"The speed is great. That's probably number one in terms of features we appreciate."
"The Snapshot, SnapMirror, and SnapRestore functionalities."
"Speed. it's very performance designed. It's designed to have a lot of high speed."
"The HCI environment itself is very intuitive. Everything is centralized under one solution. And, they also have fast server built in in addition to a network analyzer."
"The dashboard of Nutanix Acropolis AOS allows for simple management. The dashboard has all the information online about what's going on at any given time."
"It has been stable so far."
"The most valuable feature is the one-click to update the firmware and software."
"The most valuable feature of Nutanix Acropolis AOS is it has centralized management."
"The most valuable feature of Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure is its low cost, guaranteed to failover and failback with only a few clicks."
"The solution is very stable. We haven't had any issues."
"The most valuable feature is the integration of all parts in Prism Element, the browser-based management tool."
"I like what they're doing, but some of my customers complain that they do not have all the bells and whistles and knobs to fine-tune workloads that some of the competitors have. In my opinion, that's good. All customers don't have dedicated storage gurus, and they can get themselves into trouble if they fine-tune too many of those high-performance knobs, but they do get knocked down. Pure Storage takes a hit in the minds and opinions of some of the customers because they cannot customize things as much as compared to a legacy storage provider's appliance such as NetApp, Dell EMC, or even HPE. I personally think 95% of my customers are better off letting the system fine-tune itself. That was something that you needed to do 12 or 15 years ago, but now with all-flash, the technology can handle what it needs to handle. Customers just end up shooting themselves in the foot if they are tweaking too many default settings."
"The price of Pure Storage FlashArray could be better."
"When we were doing some tests, we found that there was an I/O freeze when they were switching the controller."
"Pure Storage FlashArray could improve the recent file storage capabilities because it is lacking a lot of features."
"We would like to see more development on their Copy Automation Tool (CAT) for Oracle, as well as better integration for our customers running Oracle VM."
"We would like to be able to connect to data tape for backup, specifically to the LTO backups."
"The backend of this solution utilizes an Active/Passive architecture, rather than an Active/Active architecture, which is a disadvantage, when compared to some of its competitors. Its storage capacity should be expanded in the next release."
"The technical support is okay, but could be improved."
"The quality of technical support has dwindled over time and needs to be improved."
"The monitor and performance need improvement. Right now we are using the active IQ OnCommand Unified Manager, but we also have to do the Grafana to do the performance and I hope we will be able to see the improvement of the active IQ in terms of the performance graph. It should also be more detailed."
"It used to give us the volume where LANs should be placed when we created a LAN in the older version. However, in the newer version of ONTAP, it does not give where to place the LAN in the volume. So, that liberty has been taken away. If that was there again, it would be very good."
"We were migrating from Data ONTAP 7-Mode to its Cluster-Mode. Therefore, we had to get swing gear, then do the migration from loner gear and back onto our new gear. This was a bit difficult. It took us several months to do multiple migrations."
"NetApp AFF could improve SAN storage because it feels as if it was not put together at the beginning, it functions as an afterthought. Additionally, the cloud features could be more mature."
"We currently use some thin provisioning for our planning system, but we will probably move away from thin provisioning because our Solaris planning system actually has some issues with the thin provisioning and way Solaris handles it, since Solaris uses a ZFS file system. The ZFS file system doesn't like the thin provisioning changing things and it brings systems down, which is bad."
"NetApp AFF needs to focus more on block storage. It has to focus on high-end, performance-driven applications."
"Better stability, not releasing features until they are fully functional, or at least giving us a software train that doesn't add them until they are fully functional and proven."
"The patch updates of Nutanix Acropolis could be improved. I'm work on the corporate side, but I get feedback from our IT team that patch updates and other updates are taking a significantly longer time. This definitely needs to be resolved. We are in discussion with Nutanix regarding certain configuration issues we are having, so maybe something can be changed to ease these patch updates."
"Nutanix can be a bit complex to understand."
"There are other services that Nutanix has that could be improved, but I'm not very familiar with the other services of Nutanix, such as Era and Flow. However, they seem a bit hard for us to implement and integrate with the Nutanix Acropolis AOS and other Nutanix tools. We would not dare to implement those other Nutanix solutions into Nutanix Acropolis AOS right now. The implementation of that tool could be the problem, I am a bit hesitant to implement the other tools into Nutanix Acropolis AOS."
"The licenses for Nutanix are very complicated."
"It was not a great fit for really large databases that required high-end or lots of compute. They might already have addressed this concern around very high-end databases that require high-end compute. In the past, it wasn't a great fit for them."
"Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure's LTS version needs to be more reliable."
"In the future, I would like to see multi-tenancy in Nutanix Acropolis AOS."
"Nutanix has a complex infrastructure, we have customers that consider VMware instead. Additionally, the performance could be better."
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NetApp AFF is ranked 2nd in All-Flash Storage with 280 reviews while Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is ranked 2nd in HCI with 194 reviews. NetApp AFF is rated 9.0, while Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of NetApp AFF writes "Since switching, our clients have reported improved performance and reduced latency". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) writes "A powerful solution with easy deployment, upgrades, and management". NetApp AFF is most compared with Dell Unity XT, Dell PowerStore, Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series, VMware vSAN and NetApp FAS Series, whereas Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is most compared with VMware vSAN, VxRail, HPE SimpliVity, VMware vSphere and Hyper-V. See our NetApp AFF vs. Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) report.
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