Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs Oracle Sun ZFS Storage Appliance comparison

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) and Oracle Sun ZFS Storage Appliance based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Nutanix, VMware, Dell Technologies and others in HCI.
To learn more, read our detailed HCI Report (Updated: March 2023).
688,083 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"Highly available storage is the most valuable feature. The entire rollout is hyper-converged and requires no extra storage further than the hosts in which Hyper-V is running. Another feature that has been great is the support from StarWind in general. We have their proactive support package on the main cluster that employs Starwind Virtual SAN.""The StarWind VSAN is always up and allows us to move VMS to other nodes for maintenance, without interruption to service.""We are running Hyper-V on twin servers in failover, and being able to manage servers from anywhere I need to, virtually, has been a game changer.""Starwind made it easy to deploy fully redundant, highly available storage at a low cost.""It integrates (fully) with VMware and Veeam, my hypervisor, and backup vendors, so for me, all the puzzle pieces simply fit and work smoothly.""The Windows-based StarWind GUI is easy to use and understand and integrates seamlessly with VMware's vSphere portal as well.""The user interface for this application is amazing.""Support keeps track of alerts of the system and verifies with us if we need help to fix any issues. They have great and quick technical support."

More StarWind Virtual SAN Pros →

"The most valuable features are the user-friendly dashboard and that we don't need to move resources manually when adding new nodes into running clusters.""The solution is well integrated with other vendors.""Nutanix has the best virtual desktop infrastructure.""The most valuable feature is Move, which allows you to migrate virtual machines from VM to AHV.""Some of the most valuable features of Nutanix Acropolis are that it's free from Nutanix and it's very stable.""Nutanix Acropolis AOS makes it easy to use and manage projects and it has a good reputation.""It has centralized management. It is easy for an engineer to manage. More work goes to patching, upgrades, and maintenance. Nutanix is very easy to upgrade. It takes one click. Engineers do not need to spend additional time with Nutanix for upgrades. With one click, it will complete the upgrade and show the results. Other hypervisor solutions are not like this, specifically since you must do all the components one by one.""The scalability is great."

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"I like its storage capacity, quick access to the data, speed, and overall storage management."

More Oracle Sun ZFS Storage Appliance Pros →

Cons
"It would help if the manufacturer provided clearer and more detailed documentation, with explanations of how the application can be installed in various HA configurations.""It would be good to have a little more access to control certain aspects within the UI.""While it is possible to implement disk encryption in StarWind using Windows Bitlocker, such a solution can be a little tricky to manage.""The console is something that I believe could be enhanced.""If it's possible to make a driver/solution that does not make use of the iSCSI targets of Windows, that would be great. I don't know if that's possible, however, it could make the configuration a little easier.""I had issues locating the documentation that applied to my version of StarWind vSAN.""The most disappointing side of the application is the free edition. There used to be GUI attached. That has recently changed to only CLI management of the application.""The main issue we ran into was the documentation. We attempted to set up the product in our test environment by ourselves and ran into several areas of the documentation that were unclear to us."

More StarWind Virtual SAN Cons →

"In the future, I would like Acropolis to add support for publishing external storage.""Notifications could be improved as they're not currently very useful.""It would be great if they could improve the GUI features.""I believe that improvements could be made in regards to the DR in addition to deduplication and integration with others platforms. They also do not offer opportunities for network virtualization so it would be nice to see that in the future.""Nutanix Acropolis AOS could improve by adding some NAS features, similar to the ones that are available in the NetApp solution.""They need to improve the look and feel of the interface. The functionality is fine, but the appearance could be better.""Areas for improvement would be the memory setting and the CPU setting reserve features, which are not available on Acropolis. I also feel that the DR solution, the reporting, and the component that is combined with the Nutanix OSP need to be improved.""The software-defined networking should be improved. It is quite substandard as compared to the VMware variant. The software-defined networking is quite limited, and we usually use other products to do that. We're aware that Nutanix is working on that and will be coming out with better solutions, and we can't wait because to do a fully software-defined architecture, the abstraction layer needs not only software-defined storage, which you have, but also the software-defined networking piece."

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"The main thing Oracle can improve is the cost. It would be better if Oracle opened up the system to enable integration with other vendors. Whether it's the database, application server, or storage appliance, they should make it easy to integrate them. They need to open up more to ensure that it can work in any environment and IT ecosystem."

More Oracle Sun ZFS Storage Appliance Cons →

Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "The StarWind VSAN business model is very cost-effective."
  • "This solution has competitive prices and the implementation is very easy."
  • "StarWind is a low-cost, full-featured alternative to the traditional SAN environment, and their support will guide you every step of the setup."
  • "The support contract is well worth it. The price for it was very reasonable and their team has been very engaged whenever we reach out."
  • "This solution is very accessible and the pro-level for support is well worth the cost."
  • "We found that the pricing was perfect; simple and clear."
  • "For two nodes, it cost us $10,000, and we spend $2,000 a year on support."
  • "If you are looking at a traditional SAN for a small cluster, give StarWind vSAN because you will save thousands without any compromise."
  • More StarWind Virtual SAN Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "There is a license required for this solution and my clients usually purchase a two-year license with extended support. The price of the solution could be reduced, it is more expensive than competitors."
  • "The price of the solution is high."
  • "The pricing is quite good in comparison with HPE SimpliVity, Nutanix Scale, and even traditional architecture."
  • "When compared to the competitors, the price is reasonable."
  • "The cost of Nutanix Acropolis AOS is reasonable."
  • "We got the renewal done recently, and there was no cost involved."
  • "The price of the solution could improve. Nutanix has recently changed its pricing model from perpetual to subscription. They have identified there are challenges with the pricing model."
  • "This product is expensive, but they do have discounts. At one point, I saw that they were giving a 70% or 80% discount, which is a good thing, but maybe they should have a more realistic price and then a 5% to 10% discount."
  • More Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "The price could be better. We have many competing products now like Huawei and Dell EMC, and these are slightly cheaper."
  • More Oracle Sun ZFS Storage Appliance Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:The most valuable features are high availability and real-time replication between two servers.
    Top Answer:The StarWind Management Console is available only for Microsoft Windows/Windows Server, and should also be available for… more »
    Top Answer:We found the reduced power consumption with Nutanix Acropolis AOS a very attractive feature. We also like the interface… more »
    Top Answer: Cisco HyperFlex HS series vs Nutanix Acropolis AOS Cisco HyperFlex gives extended hyper-convergence functions… more »
    Top Answer:We found the reduced power consumption with Nutanix Acropolis AOS a very attractive feature. We also like the interface… more »
    Top Answer:I like its storage capacity, quick access to the data, speed, and overall storage management.
    Top Answer:The price could be better. We have many competing products now like Huawei and Dell EMC, and these are slightly cheaper.
    Top Answer:The main thing Oracle can improve is the cost. It would be better if Oracle opened up the system to enable integration… more »
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    Nutanix Acropolis AOS, Nutanix AOS, Nutanix Acropolis
    Sun ZFS Storage Appliance
    Learn More
    Overview

    For SMB, ROBO, Cloud and Hosting providers, who look to cut down virtualization expenses, our solution is StarWind VSAN. It is software that eliminates any need in physical shared storage by basically “mirroring” internal hard disks and flash between hypervisor servers. There is less hardware to buy in general, consequently less money is spent on purchase and maintenance. The existing hardware is used with maximum efficiency, so there is no money wasted at all.

    StarWind Virtual SAN targets those who already have servers, or are bound to a particular vendor list to buy from. In case there is a new virtualization infrastructure to be built from scratch, StarWind offers a much better way – StarWind HyperConverged Appliance. It is a turnkey solution complete with hardware and software, powered by StarWind Virtual SAN. Those who need to build and maintain virtualization infrastructure at little to no expense, may be interested in StarWind Virtual SAN Free.

    Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is a top-ranking HCI software, cloud management tool, and Software Defined Storage (SDS) tool that is marketed as the foundation for users' hybrid clouds. It offers a powerful and secure hyperconverged infrastructure to deliver all data and applications at any scale and on any cloud. The solution offers a complete software stack that allows users to unify their hybrid cloud infrastructure. 

    NCI’s services include computer, storage and network, hypervisors and containers, and deployment in public or in private clouds. The product also comes with built-in resilience, disaster recovery capabilities, self-healing, and high-security capacities. It provides further deployment flexibility through several software and hardware options and platforms. NCI includes a full set of enterprise capabilities. It can also be deployed on a wide range of servers from popular manufacturers.

    The capabilities of the product are categorized into three main groups:

    • AOS storage
    • Flexible and open compute
    • Automated and secure networking

    Outside of these categories, NCI also offers other capabilities:

    • Integrated disaster recovery
    • Full-stack lifecycle management
    • VMware with Nutanix
    • Intelligent operations

    Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Features

    Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) offers its customers various features and tools in each of the previously mentioned categories. The available features for users currently include:

    • High-performance: This set of features utilizes hardware advances such as NVMe and RDMA to accelerate users' most demanding applications with consistent performance. The tools in this feature category work alongside data locality to ensure successful results.

    • Foolproof resiliency: These Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure features protect data and keep it available by facilitating advanced distributed consistency algorithms. Users can utilize these features to protect their data from issues like bit rot, hardware failures, and even entire site failure.

    • Flexibility: This set of features allows storage to be sized for the needs of each organization and expanded promptly and easily so that the organization and its data can grow. The features offer flexibility to users in terms of applying storage policies logically on a pre-workload basis, instead of being tied to hardware.

    • Hypervisor choice: Users can choose from the leading hypervisors - Microsoft Hyper-V or VMware ESXi. They can also leverage the built-in hypervisor AHV that Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) provides.

    • Integrated virtualization: These features offer simplified automation and AHV streamlined operations. The services in this category are optimized for high performance and reliability.

    • Kubernetes: Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) offers features to build and deploy cloud-native applications on intelligent distributed infrastructure. Apps can be integrated with cloud-compatible storage and both building and deployment can be achieved within the same platform.

    • Microsegmentation: Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) offers features to prevent malware spread and reduce attack surfaces by leveraging machine learning (ML).

    • Virtual networking: This set of features allows users to easily implement multi-tenancy in their environment or stretch networks across clouds.

    • Centralized network management: Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) provides organizations with a way to manage networking configurations centrally. Users can utilize it across their human-computer interaction (HCI) environment with simple virtual switch management.

    Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Benefits

    The product offers various benefits to users who utilize its capacities. Some of these include:

    • NCI reduces technology sprawl and frees up technical resources to allow organizations to focus on other activities, potentially reducing costs for the business.

    • The product allows customers to deploy, scale, and bridge to the public cloud to be able to react in evolving business environments.

    • Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure improves data availability while simultaneously protecting it against several kinds of failures and attacks.

    • The solution offers high-performance, resilient distributed storage for all workloads.

    • Working alongside Nutanix Cloud Platform, NCI offers simple management of data from one console.

    • Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure works by the zero trust philosophy, protecting users' apps and data through specially designed security protocols.

    Reviews from Real Users

    According to Gerhard J., an IT manager at Q4 Fuel, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) provides serious reliability and stability across the entire system makes for ROI.

    A solutions architect at a computer software company describes NCI as a stable, straightforward to set up, and scalable solution.

    Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance integrates the cloud into its core architecture, making cloud storage available to all users and access protocols while eliminating on-premises cloud access licensing charges and the need for external gateways. Built using a powerful SMP design, multi-threaded OS, massive DRAM caches, and all flash storage, Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance powers the most demanding applications, from fast query responses and, rapid transaction processing to virtualization and cloud workloads. With these performance levels, you can easily achieve 4:1 consolidation of your current NAS filers and gain a higher return on your storage investment.

    Offer
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    Learn more about Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI)
    Learn more about Oracle Sun ZFS Storage Appliance
    Sample Customers
    Baker Tilly BVI, CMS Internet, Board Harpeth Hall School
    St. Lukes Health System, the City of Seattle, Yahoo! Japan, Sligro, Empire Life, Hyundai AUS, and many others.
    Translational Genomics Research Institute, Nara Institute of Science and Technology, CyberSolutions Inc., Y-Telecom, First Alliance Bank Zambia Limited, AZ Sint-Jan Brugge-Oostende, Mutlinet Pakistan, TDC A/S, Digi-Key Corporation, Thurgau Cantonal Bank
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Manufacturing Company11%
    Educational Organization9%
    Construction Company9%
    Computer Software Company8%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company19%
    Government9%
    Comms Service Provider8%
    Manufacturing Company7%
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company16%
    Comms Service Provider11%
    Manufacturing Company10%
    Energy/Utilities Company9%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company20%
    Comms Service Provider10%
    Government9%
    Educational Organization7%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company25%
    Government13%
    Comms Service Provider9%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business63%
    Midsize Enterprise22%
    Large Enterprise15%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business25%
    Midsize Enterprise17%
    Large Enterprise58%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business39%
    Midsize Enterprise29%
    Large Enterprise33%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business22%
    Midsize Enterprise19%
    Large Enterprise58%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business17%
    Midsize Enterprise14%
    Large Enterprise69%
    Buyer's Guide
    HCI
    March 2023
    Find out what your peers are saying about Nutanix, VMware, Dell Technologies and others in HCI. Updated: March 2023.
    688,083 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is ranked 1st in HCI with 74 reviews while Oracle Sun ZFS Storage Appliance is ranked 8th in Modular SAN (Storage Area Network) with 1 review. Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is rated 8.6, while Oracle Sun ZFS Storage Appliance is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) writes "Serious reliability and stability across the entire system makes for ROI". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Oracle Sun ZFS Storage Appliance writes "A stable unified storage system that enables quick access to data". Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, HPE SimpliVity, VMware vSphere and Hyper-V, whereas Oracle Sun ZFS Storage Appliance is most compared with NetApp FAS Series, HPE 3PAR StoreServ, IBM FlashSystem, HPE StorageWorks MSA and Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform G Series.

    We monitor all HCI reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.