Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs Portworx Enterprise comparison

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs. Portworx Enterprise

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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

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.

Offers a unified platform, reduces downtime, and simple updates

MahendraPanchotiya

Infrastructure Manager at ER Tech Pros

Nutanix offers a unified platform for managing databases, virtual machines, and applications. This simplifies management by consolidating everything into a single interface. While Nutanix may have a higher upfront cost compared to other hypervisors, it can significantly reduce the resources needed for infrastructure management. With our previous hypervisor, we needed nearly ten IT personnel. Nutanix has allowed us to streamline our team to just three members. We use a combination of database technologies, including SQL databases and web servers such as IIS, BHP, and NGINX. Nutanix features helped our organization reduce downtime. I don't recall the last time we had downtime related to Nutanix because it is such a stable product. Nutanix, a reliable product, helps us streamline our processes, which in turn improves company revenue. We began to see the benefits after two years, with a 40 percent reduction in operational costs. We migrated 200 servers from AWS to Nutanix. Nutanix may not consolidate applications, but it helps us run them more efficiently on its platform. Updating is simple with one click. I would rate the updating processes 10 out of 10. Adding compute and storage on demand is not difficult. However, we need to factor in the existing and new firmware and software requirements.

A solution backed by strong customer support, that is stable and scalable

Paulo Jose Bosco Otto

Consultant at PBOservicos-Informatica

As a company managed in a Kubernetes environment, being trusted by a Kubernetes vendor, Red Hat creates barriers against using other certified solutions that work. Because IBM is a competitor of Pure Storage, things seem to be getting worse. I don't have plans to use Portworx Enterprise in the future because, at the moment, I am working with Ondat, and I have to follow NetApp's direction on that. When evaluating Portworx, one should make sure their company has already chosen Pure Storage. Still, if they are evaluating the solution on Ondat or Dell or other platforms, they should get a roadmap statement from Pure Storage, that they will continue to develop storage hardware diagnostics. I rate Portworx a nine out of ten.

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pros

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable features of this solution are the rewrite speed and the nonstop services."

"The onboarding and integrated monitoring tools are pretty good."

"The initial setup was straightforward. If you know how to plug in power and network you're pretty much qualified. They were on site to configure the network, the box to fit into our network architecture. Other than that, we self-managed from there."

"The most valuable features of FlashBlade include its replication capabilities, reports, and easy allocation. Everything is user-friendly."

"The tool's most valuable features are data warehousing, speedy recovery, and analytics. Its latest release is cost-effective."

"We can capacity plan at a greater level than we used to."

"It helps simplify our storage, because the user interface is very simple and the installation is easy."

"The most valuable feature is Safe Mode."

"It is very easy to clone systems using the solution."

"The most valuable feature is the integration of all parts in Prism Element, the browser-based management tool."

"Best features are around data locality, compression, and deduplication."

"Some of the most valuable features of Nutanix Acropolis are that it's free from Nutanix and it's very stable."

"Customer service is awesome. I would rate it ten out of ten."

"We have had good feedback from our customers about this solution."

"Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure's most valuable feature is the flexibility to move the VMs easily, keeping everything together."

"Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure has a simple, user-friendly GUI, and I also like the remote recovery capabilities. It provides a single platform for managing databases."

More Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) pros

"The solution is user-friendly."

"Portworx virtualizes the aspects of the underlying block storage. That is good because they can also use block storage for their future deployment instead of just NFS."

"A custom IBM script is designed to tackle the storage management challenges within containerized environments, providing crucial data services and features required for enterprise applications."

"The best thing about Portworx is the Stork, they have called the VPS (Volume Replacement Strategy) and they also have topology awareness, and these are the three features I like."

"I like that you have a small dedicated file system that is fast and resilient for containerized workloads."

"Portworx is a simple solution. It's similar to Pure Storage products. They're all easy to use and install. You need to have a little expertise with containers to use Portworx, but it will be no problem for you if you understand containers."

Cons

"Its configuration should be easier."

"I want efficiency. FlashBlade doesn't have efficiency now."

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

"The features provided for SMB customers are limited."

"We haven't been able to use much of the cloud area of Pure Storage. We have a storage server and it would be better if it could integrate with other cloud features of this solution."

"The solution is expensive."

"I would like to see the licensing fees improved as well as the price per terabytes."

"The documentational aspect of FlashBlade needs improvement."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade cons

"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."

"It would be ideal if it was more secure."

"The reporting section of the dashboard could be improved to include more detailed reporting about the servers."

"One of the improvements I would like to have is related to naming. It is getting confusing because they are using three-letter acronyms, which are more or less misleading. What I do not like is that they changed names and reused names. They had a meaning in the past and they are still using the names for something similar."

"I think some of the tasks that must be done using CLI could be added to the web interface."

"The product could be improved with more security. The product needs a bit more experience in the market. I think you don't have the possibility to add other hardware. It could be improved with the ability to add and extend."

"Native File-Services are under heavy development and Container Services just came out."

"It is a CentOS-based operating system, but CentOS releases security patches almost every week or every other week. However, Nutanix releases their upgrade at three or four month intervals. According to my organization's SLA, if a critical patch is released during that time, then I need to implement the patches within 30 days. If it is a standard patch, then I need to patch it within 60 days. Since that is my SLA, I cannot meet my SLA for security because Nutanix will not release the upgrade within these 30 days. Between the critical patch release and the Nutanix release, my customers say they are vulnerable and I am accepting the risk while the SLA is breached."

More Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) cons

"The documentation could be better."

"The integration has room for improvement."

"I think the vendor could provide more training for new users who may not be familiar with containers."

"They have not integrated Portworx with Ondat since they are too focused now on Pure Storage APIs and not on users like us."

"I would like to see a more native mapping to mainframe-type systems."

"It would be highly advantageous to include an integrated backup solution within the same license, rather than purchasing backup separately."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price of this solution could be made more affordable."

"It's a costly solution, but Pure Storage FlashBlade doesn't require additional licenses. All of the software is combined into one bundle."

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

"Our customers have seen a reduction in TCO."

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

"The price could be cheaper."

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

"The price is a little high."

More Pure Storage FlashBlade pricing and cost advice

"The solution is quite expensive."

"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."

"When we purchase a new physical server or a couple of physical servers into our cluster, we always purchase it with Nutanix licensing. We are receiving the license from Nutanix directly and not from the vendor. In the way we're dealing, with the licenses it is a bit costly for us but as the company is getting larger, day by day or year by year, those licensing costs become lower each time for us. We are purchasing the licenses for three years for some of our clusters and for some others for five-year licenses and the licenses are still costly. We have good discounts for the licenses, but it is still expensive."

"Many of my customers have issues with Acropolis' licensing model because they are charging the customers based on two things— the CPUs and the capacity in the solid stack disk — and that's a problem. Nutanix's competitors are not licensing that layer, so this is something that they should change. They should abandon this licensing model because it's too complex. Technical support is bundled with the subscription."

"The overall cost depends on the contract of each customer and the discounts they have, but the price for the three-tier architecture can be slightly lower."

"Pricing varies greatly between license and editions."

"The cost of Nutanix Acropolis AOS is reasonable."

"I would rate the price seven out of ten with ten being the most expensive."

More Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) pricing and cost advice

"It has two offerings. One is free, which is limited to only five nodes. The other is enterprise, which is a bit pricier."

"The price is competitive, but it is too expensive when paired with Red Hat IBM."

"The price of Portworx Enterprise is high."

"I'm not sure how the licensing was broken out, but I don't think our offering of the Portworx was more than USD $20,000."

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Comparison Review

it_user244362

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…

What do you like most about Pure Storage FlashBlade?

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

13%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

Computer Software Company

17%

Financial Services Firm

Manufacturing Company

Government

Financial Services Firm

17%

Computer Software Company

14%

Manufacturing Company

12%

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

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

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

The pricing of Pure Storage FlashBlade is expensive compared to other products I used from other companies in the pas...

What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashBlade?

I believe there is not much improvement needed because they have everything we need, but the interface is a little bi...

What is the biggest difference between Nutanix Acropolis and VMware vSphere?

We found the reduced power consumption with Nutanix Acropolis AOS a very attractive feature. We also like the interfa...

How do I choose between Cisco Hyperflex HX Series and Nutanix Acropolis AOS?

Cisco HyperFlex HS series vs Nutanix Acropolis AOS Cisco HyperFlex gives extended hyper-convergence functions from ...

Which would you choose - Nutanix Acropolis AOS or VMware vSAN?

We found the reduced power consumption with Nutanix Acropolis AOS a very attractive feature. We also like the interfa...

What do you like most about Portworx Enterprise?

A custom IBM script is designed to tackle the storage management challenges within containerized environments, provid...

What needs improvement with Portworx Enterprise?

It would be highly advantageous to include an integrated backup solution within the same license, rather than purchas...

What advice do you have for others considering Portworx Enterprise?

I would recommend ensuring that you perform regular backups, specifically the TX backup, which is essential for Portw...

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Comparisons

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MinIO vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 10% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

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Pure Storage FlashArray vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 10% of the time

VAST Data vs Pure Storage FlashBlade

Compared 9% of the time

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VxRail vs Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI)

Compared 7% of the time

Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure vs Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI)

Compared 7% of the time

Azure Stack HCI vs Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI)

Compared 6% of the time

HPE SimpliVity vs Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI)

Compared 6% of the time

VMware vSAN vs Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI)

Compared 6% of the time

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Red Hat Openshift Data Foundation vs Portworx Enterprise

Compared 44% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs Portworx Enterprise

Compared 16% of the time

NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP vs Portworx Enterprise

Compared 9% of the time

VMware vSAN vs Portworx Enterprise

Compared 5% of the time

Rakuten Cloud vs Portworx Enterprise

Compared 3% of the time

More Portworx Enterprise Competitors

Product Reports

Pure Storage FlashBlade

Download Pure Storage FlashBlade product report

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI)

Download Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) product report

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) report

Cloud Software Defined Storage

Download Portworx Enterprise product report

Also Known As

No data available

Nutanix Acropolis AOS, Nutanix AOS, Nutanix Acropolis

No data available

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

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.

Nutanix

Portworx is the solution for running stateful containers in production, designed with DevOps in mind. With Portworx, users can manage any database or stateful service on any infrastructure using any container scheduler, including Kubernetes, Mesosphere DC/OS, and Docker Swarm. Portworx solves the five most common problems DevOps teams encounter when running stateful services in production: persistence, high availability, data automation, security, and support for multiple data stores and infrastructure.

Pure Storage

Sample Customers

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

St. Lukes Health System, the City of Seattle, Yahoo! Japan, Sligro, Empire Life, Hyundai AUS, and many others.

NIO, GE Digital, DreamWorks Animation, Lufthansa, beco, NEW CONTEXT

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs. Portworx Enterprise