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:
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Integrated virtualization: These features offer simplified automation and AHV streamlined operations. The services in this category are optimized for high performance and reliability.
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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.
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Microsegmentation: Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) offers features to prevent malware spread and reduce attack surfaces by leveraging machine learning (ML).
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Virtual networking: This set of features allows users to easily implement multi-tenancy in their environment or stretch networks across clouds.
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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.
Sangfor HCI is an IT infrastructure platform built on converged architecture. It integrates server virtualization, distributed storage, and networking. Sangfor HCI provides a unified management platform that converges compute, storage, networking, and security on a single software stack. This approach delivers a simplified architecture, ease of use, and reliability for business-critical applications.
Hyperconverged infrastructure is a unified system of data storage. HCI combines storage, computing, networking, and management, unlike traditional storage solutions. HCI systems enable you to build your private cloud, expand to a public cloud, or have your own true hybrid cloud. Sangfor HCI presents two product models: The Sangfor HCI server appliance is a hardware version that enables easy deployment. Sangfor HCI software is the digital version combined with a third-party server that enables flexible deployment.
Sangfor HCI supports Windows systems on desktop and is web-based. Its range of use cases cover a wide spectrum of industries, from healthcare to manufacturing. It is applicable for mid- and large-sized businesses. The software is customizable. Users can customize the logo and contact information in the user interface.
Benefits and Features
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Stability: Sangfor HCI delivers high reliability and availability with 0 RPO and 99.99% availability. The infrastructure is fully redundant to ensure business continuity. This means no data is lost in the event of hardware failure.
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Simplified infrastructure: The solution supports visual management, making it easier to use. The single platform provides a central control with access to resources.
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High performance: One unit of HCI can support up to 100,000 IOPS. The solution supports data striping, data locality, SSD caching and AI-based DB optimization. It also supports linear expansion without bottlenecks.
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Hyper-converged infrastructure that enables working with different scenarios. For instance, cloud transformation and data center consolidation. It is fully converged, which means it provides unified management, full resource visualization, and orchestration with SCP. The standardized HCI unit consolidates hardware appliances, a storage network, IP network, and server into a single unit.
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Integration: Sangfor HCI offers deep integration with NFV components. Users can deploy complex SDN networks.
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Pay-as-you-grow model: The pay-per-use model reduces operational expenses and total cost of ownership.
Use Cases
Sangfor HCI can be applied tin various scenarios:
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Enterprise applications: Users can benefit from the reliability and performance of Sangfor HCI for business-critical processes. The system is optimized for enterprise applications to enhance their performance and stability.
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Datacenter consolidation: The unified and software-defined technology simplifies the operational management and the architecture of data centers.
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Cloud transformation: You can add a cloud management platform, transforming Sangfor HCI into a complete cloud computing solution. You can then run your cloud workloads and benefit from the automation features of Sangfor HCI.
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Data protection and recovery: Sangfor HCI offers multiple data protection features, such as continuous data protection (CDP), which ensure the integrity of sensitive and user data. You can protect backup snapshots and take backups. It records virtual machine IO logs at frequent intervals. It offers disaster recovery capabilities that ensure business continuity.
Reviews from Real Users
Gabriele P., Senior Software and Systems Engineer at SAMU.IT, says "It is flexible like a hyper-convergence system. You can add nodes, and you can scale to have better performance and stability. I also like the backup feature, the recovery system, and the web interface GUI to handle everything."
A Junior Solutions Engineer at a tech services company adds that "Sangfor has many solutions, and you can easily manage their machine servers with just one management. They're always striving for greatness, and they continuously update their products. For example, they have now built endpoint security within the firewall. They are continuously improving not only the security but also all other products."
VMware vSAN is a software-defined storage product that is used in collaboration with VMware ESXi hypervisor and that provisions and manages storage based on policies, regardless of the underlying hardware. The solution enables you to prime your business for growth through its seamless evolution (it is integrated with vSphere and requires no new tools), its flexibility, and its multi-cloud capabilities. As an industry-leading software, VMware vSAN provides high levels of performance with minimal impact on CPU and memory.
VMware vSAN Features
VMware vSAN has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:
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Storage policy-based management (SPBM): VMware vSAN supports storage policy-based management for automated management of storage profiles.
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Software-defined data-at-rest encryption: With this VMware vSAN feature, you can prevent unauthorized access of data at rest.
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Multiple nodes: VMware vSAN provides clusters that can include as few as 2 nodes or as many as 64 nodes.
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High security and availability: VMware vSAN offers stretched clusters, allowing more than one virtualization host server to be used in the same setup, promoting higher security as well as availability.
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Deduplication: VMware vSAN’s deduplication compresses data to ensure efficient storage management and security.
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HCI mesh updates: VMware vSAN clusters can share storage capacity with non-HCI Sphere clusters and can adopt HCI without having to scale computing resources and storage or replace existing servers.
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Simplified file services: With VMware vSAN’s file services, backup of file shares is simplified. You can use APIs that allow backup and recovery software vendors to integrate with your VMware vSAN file services, which enables backup software to track new data and add scalability enhancements to files.
VMware vSAN Benefits
There are many benefits to implementing VMware vSAN. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:
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Reduced total cost of ownership (TCO): VMware vSAN helps you reduce upfront costs for businesses because it can be easily deployed on inexpensive x86 servers. In addition, its highly scalable infrastructure and quick deployment also save organizations time and money, making it an efficient storage solution.
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Good manageability: VMWare vSAN is easy to set up, manage, and provision, without sacrificing performance.
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Scalability: VMware vSAN is agile and allows administrators to scale storage on demand, quickly, and efficiently via policies and rules.
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Simplicity: VMWare vSAN is simple to configure since it is embedded in the vSphere hypervisor. Installing it using the vSphere Web Client can be done quickly.
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Reduced risk: VMWare vSAN reduces the risk associated with digital transformations by utilizing existing tools, skill sets, and solutions.
Reviews from Real Users
Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by PeerSpot users currently using the VMware vSAN solution.
PeerSpot user Yves S., CEO, Cloud Evangelist at Comdivision Consulting GmbH, says, “vSAN gives us a lot of advantages when we need to expand resources. We have an overall larger host infrastructure, and we split that up for specific customer test and use cases. In that specific scenario, we can easily add more hosts or reduce the number of hosts in the environment.”
A reviewer who works in Infrastructure Security explains, “The ease of use is great. The initial setup and upgrade process was pretty straightforward. And, technical support is great.”
Laurent N., Director at Softlogic, comments, "The feature that I have found most valuable is that it is easy to deploy. It is easy to create and delete virtual servers. It is easy to create the load balancing and the clustering."
