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NetApp HCI [EOL] vs Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) comparison

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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:
 

Categories and Ranking

NetApp HCI [EOL]
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
5.6
Number of Reviews
32
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructur...
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
199
Ranking in other categories
Software Defined Storage (SDS) (6th), HCI (4th), Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) (3rd), Hybrid Cloud Computing Platforms (5th)
 

Q&A Highlights

Miriam Tover - PeerSpot reviewer
Service Delivery Manager at PeerSpot
Oct 31, 2019
 

Featured Reviews

MB
Chief Information Officer at Lucart S.p.A.
Crashed continuously, complex to deploy, and bad after-sales support - NETAPP FIXED the problems in 2022
Their after-sales support, SLA, and third-parties availability should be improved. NetApp's support is very difficult to engage. We have an SLA of onsite support within 24 hours. but they don't respect the SLA. Its stability was very bad. It has been crashing continuously. In one year, we got three crashes, which is unbelievable for an appliance that is guaranteed for 10 years without any crashes. In 2022, NetApp Italy, driven by the country manager Davide Marini, fixed all our issues and added additional computation power for free. This is a great example of customer care. They could have done it right the first time of course, but admitting the errors and putting in place such a remediation plan has been a very professional behavior.
JD
Dsi at OFFICE PUBLIC DE L HABITAT DE ROUEN
Hyper-converged storage has improved performance and now supports high redundancy for our VMs
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) was transparent because we were on a regular infrastructure before. We went on NCI and were able to improve performance, but it did not really change how things worked. The performance was really better for applications and access times to the data. I regularly looked at the analytics to see what was going on in my servers and what it was saying to optimize performance. It was pretty interesting because it could analyze and give insights on how to get things working better. In the latest versions, the Prism interface has been replaced by Prism Central. This requires another machine to be deployed to manage the servers.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The ability of this solution to scale on-demand is great."
"We went with NetApp based on the cost-effective solutions, technologies, and protocols."
"In terms of helping us with storage persistence across private and hybrid clouds, we do store data internally and in Azure. It has allowed us to consolidate a number of workloads, across our old NetApp and a number of our older storage arrays, into a single unit and have that unit also working with Azure."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the SolidFire interface."
"It has automated a lot of workloads. It has automated us from ticketing a large number to a very small number."
"Using NetApp HCI has made things a lot easier to set up."
"When you are doing lifecycles for your equipment, you can just swap out pieces of equipment. We used to do one big iron to another big iron, and that's a major migration hassle. Whereas, with this environment, you can go with small nodes, one at a time, and do a refresh."
"Stability is one of the things we absolutely have to have, because if the HCI is down, our assembly lines are down, and that could potentially lead to our customer being down. If our customer is down, that's $10,000 a minute; and any time the assembly line is down, that could potentially lead to overtime. We don't get to charge one and a half times for something we billed just because you happened to build it on overtime. Any technology we bring in, has to be built for what I call "three in the morning." It can't be built for whenever everybody's in the plant, everybody can watch it, and everybody can babysit. It has to be built for three a.m. when you've got a skeletal staff there, and you just have to know that it's just running. As I stand here, right now, I don't have to check my phone, I don't have to check my email. I know it's running. Period"
"Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure's most valuable features are all the cloud facilities or benefits it provides for my data center."
"It can help my customers achieve their business goals in the simplest way."
"The machines provisioning times have reduced drastically."
"The administration console, automation, and the first cluster are all valuable features."
"This is so dramatically more stable than other hypervisor solutions I have used its almost hard to believe."
"In the world of IT operations, there is a lot of noise. Traditionally, systems would generate a great deal of alerts, events, and notifications, often leading to the operator either a) not seeing critical alerts since they are lost in the noise or b) disregarding the alerts/events."
"My advice to anyone considering Nutanix Acropolis AOS is that you won't go wrong."
"I don't have any requests for features; it does everything that I need it to do, and then some."
 

Cons

"HCI has not enabled us to consolidate workloads or break down silos and has not increased application performance. It has also not resulted in more efficient use of compute resources."
"It would be great if they took something like kernel storage and integrated straight into the NetApp as well."
"It doesn't have all the data points we need and all the historical data that I would like."
"I would like to see the implementation process improved."
"I would like to see a better upgrade process, like the one that ONTAP has."
"The price should be lowered. It's a little expensive."
"The initial setup is very painful. It's not straightforward, requires a lot of knowledge to get it going."
"The setup was a bit challenging because it's a fairly new product and I think some of the stuff is not quite well baked yet."
"Nutanix now supports four hypervisors but they are not all at feature parity."
"The price could be lower."
"Make it easier to manage."
"The look and feel of the web GUI of this system needs improvement, when compared to other systems. Its hardware integration also needs improvement."
"In terms of automation, I know there are ways to do it, but it's not very user-friendly. I've been working for the last three years with Nutanix and I've managed to automate certain things, but it's a somewhat more complex job than it should be. I would like to see more documentation or knowledge base articles."
"I believe the only things that may need to improve is that the Nutanix Controller VM consumes quite a lot of resources."
"Nutanix needs more development on DRC solutions embedded in Acropolis."
"The patch updates of Nutanix Acropolis could be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Its pricing is lower than our previous solution."
"The licensing fees are renewed annually."
"Where we lost nearly 75 percent of our infrastructure due to a malicious attack and were able to recover two and a half hours into it due to the integration, it saved us and all of our customers. Because we were able to recover so fast from the attack, the solution paid for itself right there."
"You still have to pay for the licensing for VMware and Red Hat licenses separately. It's not all inclusive at this point."
"This solution reduced our maintenance costs. We were going to have to pay one to two million dollars to put in compute nodes. We are avoiding those costs."
"Licenses run on a yearly basis, and there aren't any additional fees other than the standard licensing fee."
"Its price is comparable to the competitors in the market."
"The price of the solution is okay but could improve."
"It is not cheap, but if you look at the return on investment and the total cost of ownership, it is worth the price."
"The price of the solution is expensive. However, the price to performance is good. The cost for development and installation is very low."
"I would rate the price seven out of ten with ten being the most expensive."
"Its licensing model is easy, but the bad thing is that we need to pay for the whole capacity at once. With VMware vSAN, we only have to pay for the capacity that we are using, which is not the case with Nutanix. So, we have more overhead for the licensing cost with Nutanix."
"The license is quite clear to me. It's much clearer than what we had with our previous virtualization environment. The licensing is not complex to understand."
"We renew our license on a yearly basis and have no costs in addition to the standard fee."
"The solution could be a little less expensive."
"Nutanix is cheaper than Cisco HyperFlex, although it depends on the configuration because Nutanix can also be expensive."
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Comparison Review

it_user244362 - PeerSpot reviewer
Managing Consultant with 51-200 employees
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…
 

Answers from the Community

Miriam Tover - PeerSpot reviewer
Service Delivery Manager at PeerSpot
Oct 31, 2019
Oct 31, 2019
The biggest difference is the ability to scale compute and storage independently. NetApp can scale up the storage without the need for extra CPU (and hence VMware licenses for ESX). Nutanix does have a storage node, but it has limitations. Another key difference is the NetApp uses an inbuilt method for the central storage plane and doesn't use VSAN which saves on licensing. Cost wise, Nutanix i...
2 out of 15 answers
AG
Regional Manager at VAD
Mar 13, 2019
it depends on your needs NetApp Is Very Good , but expensive as it's All Flash , based on SolidFire Storage . It will support only VMware but Nutanix can be ALL Flash or Hybrid , also can work with Hyper-v , VMware or Nutanix AHV
it_user951444 - PeerSpot reviewer
Solutions Architect with 5,001-10,000 employees
Mar 13, 2019
The biggest difference is the ability to scale compute and storage independently. NetApp can scale up the storage without the need for extra CPU (and hence VMware licenses for ESX). Nutanix does have a storage node, but it has limitations. Another key difference is the NetApp uses an inbuilt method for the central storage plane and doesn't use VSAN which saves on licensing. Cost wise, Nutanix is almost always more expensive than alternative solutions.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
19%
Outsourcing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Outsourcing Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise9
Large Enterprise19
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business93
Midsize Enterprise76
Large Enterprise88
 

Questions from the Community

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Have you received reliable help from Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure's support when you contacted them?
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Also Known As

No data available
Nutanix Acropolis AOS, Nutanix AOS, Nutanix Acropolis
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

American Showa, Children's Mercy, Coca-Cola, Consultel Cloud, Evangelische Landeskirche in Wurttemberg, Imperva, Surface Mount Technology
St. Lukes Health System, the City of Seattle, Yahoo! Japan, Sligro, Empire Life, Hyundai AUS, and many others.
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