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

 

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
7.4
Number of Reviews
198
Ranking in other categories
Software Defined Storage (SDS) (5th), HCI (3rd), Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) (1st), Hybrid Cloud Computing Platforms (4th)
 

Q&A Highlights

Miriam Tover - PeerSpot reviewer
Oct 31, 2019
 

Featured Reviews

MB
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.
Andrea Beccia - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers satisfying data protection and workload movement features with exceptional stability
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure can be used up to 100% of its capacity, but our company is presently using 80% of the solution's resources. Our company manufactures iron casting products in the metal industry, and Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure is also used. For virtualization purposes, Nutanix Acropolis is used as a full-stack solution. For the Windows virtual machines in our company's server, Nutanix Acropolis is utilized instead of solutions like VMware Hypervisor. One of the main reasons our company adopted Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure was its data protection features. The solution is also used in disaster recovery through the automatic snapshots feature on the local site. Next year, our organization will try to join clusters in the network using the solution. Network clustering will help our organization's team move workloads into the geographical cluster automatically. Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure is considered an ideal solution for disaster recovery where data protection remains embedded. The solution is capable of even capturing auto snapshots for remote sites. Next year, our company plans to test new features of Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure that will assist in automated workload movements on two sides at a distance of 60 kilometers. I would recommend others use the solution for its exceptional stability, performance, hardware compatibility, and overall flexibility. Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure allows the use of varying hardware for the same cluster. I would rate the solution a nine out of ten overall.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It has automated a lot of workloads. It has automated us from ticketing a large number to a very small number."
"The scalability is great, because it can scale independently."
"This is a strong product and it works very well, and the processes around it continue to grow and mature."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the SolidFire interface."
"The ease of deployment is a positive feature that allows us to scale easily."
"The most valuable feature is the software design storage that really provided a faster, agile, easier to scale up and out storage path."
"HCI has helped with storage persistence across private and hybrid clouds for the last year. It's faster and more reliable with minimal downtime, as it doesn't require any maintenance."
"Scalability was another thing I was looking at. The solution, by its very nature, is designed to be expandable and flexible, so you don't have to buy performance you don't need today, but you're also not stuck with something you can't expand."
"Their Google operating system is more mature, so their results are much better."
"There are a lot of things I really like. Perhaps the best part is taking a snapshot of a virtual machine. It's very quick. Another useful part is replication and creating a protection domain: using the protection feature to replicate a machine to a remote site for DR purposes."
"Nutanix has the best virtual desktop infrastructure."
"Great flexibility and scalability."
"Nutanix does a superb job with technical support."
"I can use VMware or Hyper-V license, if I already have. But if I use a similar solution as Nutanix Acropolis hypervisor (AHV) that comes embedded in Nutanix solution, I can manage all my virtual environments with everything I need without spend more money on licenses."
"It's quite easy to scale, and you have the option to have distributed nodes everywhere around the world that work as one. You can also have a solution for small branch offices with only two nodes for redundancy, and that's good enough to start."
"It is easy to use. One of the things they have as a design goal is to reduce complexity and simplify things."
 

Cons

"I would like to see higher level graphics support because we are going to be doing some virtual desktop for our CAD software, and I want to be able to support AutoCAD and Cantillo on remote desktop machines."
"The fact that it doesn't have all the data points we need and all the historical data that I would like. I find that a lot of the performance analysis is done through support, where they have something that we don't have. It would be nice just to have all that on-prem."
"The price should be lowered. It's a little expensive."
"If you want to have a really dense data center then it's hard to have a big chunk of cabling going through everything."
"The administration side of it needs to be improved. We expect an easier interface and a single upgrade for updating the infrastructure."
"I would like to see the implementation process improved."
"The problem is that it needs to be much more stable, for example, when I want to do the upgrade to 1.7 that just released, I also need to issue a ticket to the support guy in India and he asked me to deploy another mlock. There are a lot of manual steps compared with other products."
"My biggest pain point is the installation part. I would like to see the appliance itself remove the entire switch that goes behind it and figure out how to do all the cluster interconnects within the box itself."
"One disadvantage of Nutanix Acropolis AOS is it doesn't support external storage. Connecting external SAN storage to Nutanix, it's not supported."
"Nutanix Acropolis AOS is new technology in a competitive market. Pricing is too high for a new product and requires better discounts to be able to compete with IBM, Dell EMC, and HP."
"We would like to see it support other systems outside of the compute stack from which it was built."
"In Thailand, there really isn't a cloud version of Nutanx available to us."
"This product would be improved if it included a hybrid cloud solution."
"We ran into an issue as a managed service provider because Acropolis isn't designed to be used the way we are running it. For example, if we want to deploy a Kubernetes service, the customer networks need to reach our protected cluster network. We have isolated our customers in separate VLANs. However, our customers' networks must access our cluster network to get features like iSCSI or Kubernetes to run. It's challenging."
"Deployment could be more user-friendly - currently, it requires certain skills with the network and nodes."
"The productivity and work efficiency of Nutanix Acropolis AOS could improve."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Licenses run on a yearly basis, and there aren't any additional fees other than the standard licensing fee."
"The licensing fees are renewed annually."
"Its price is aligned with the market. In addition to the standard licensing fees, there is an integrator cost."
"Its pricing is lower than our previous solution."
"You still have to pay for the licensing for VMware and Red Hat licenses separately. It's not all inclusive at this point."
"All the licenses are included when you buy the program."
"The price of the solution is okay but could improve."
"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."
"There are a lot of features included with Nutanix that cost a lot with other companies."
"I don't feel that I am receiving the performance which I am paying for."
"They offer multiple tier licensing which means that lower level licensing will have less features."
"If they could further reduce the cost, that would be great. I would like to see the cost be less than the equivalent three-tier architecture."
"The licensing costs are a bit expensive but when you compare the features, it's reasonable."
"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 pricing of Nutanix is not cheap but there are options available."
"Setup cost is minor, pricing is quite a bit (we have a 7-node-cluster for about 450K EUR with 2 vGPU-nodes for Citrix) but that includes hardware, software, and support."
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Comparison Review

it_user244362 - PeerSpot reviewer
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
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
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
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
Financial Services Firm
18%
Real Estate/Law Firm
18%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Educational Organization
27%
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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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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