Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs ScaleIO [EOL] comparison

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Nutanix and Dell Technologies are both solutions in the Software Defined Storage (SDS) category. Additionally, 94% of Nutanix users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Dell Technologies users who would recommend it.

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) and ScaleIO [EOL] based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

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To learn more, read our detailed Software Defined Storage (SDS) Report (Updated: October 2026).

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Software Defined Storage (SDS)

October 2026

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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

Everpure FlashArray

Featured Reviews

Sowjanya MV

Technical Lead at Wipro Limited

Has improved performance for mission-critical workloads and enabled seamless non-disruptive upgrades

The availability is 99.99%, which is the main factor any customer would need because their data should be available whenever they want to access it. This is one main critical thing. It is very easy to upgrade since Pure Storage FlashArray handles it well. Everything is non-disruptive now; previously, there were forklift shifts, but now that is not the case. Pure Storage FlashArray says no to forklift upgrades. Usually hardware requires downtime, but Pure Storage FlashArray has improved their footprint so that they are not asking for downtime; everything is just a non-disruptive activity, which is why customers are more inclined towards Pure Storage FlashArray. Customers want more of the models in their environment due to the performance they are giving, and everything is in one Pure1 Array console where we can view all the models on one page or just an orchestration tool. You don't miss anything; you have replication, notifications about replication, and details about which host groups replication is happening in and if that replication is successful or failed. On a daily basis, our purpose is to create volumes for infrastructure; our daily activities include creating volumes and mapping them to the host, doing any migrations from a VM, clearing the data stores, and carving the volumes to those VMs. One key factor is the data compression with a ratio of 5:1, focusing on space efficiency, inline deduplication, and the compression Pure Storage FlashArray works on; that is a major factor we can suggest to any customer. Analytical capabilities are crucial. Daily, we check the throughput and consumption, and Pure Storage FlashArray provides predictions for one year regarding usage. This prediction helps plan updates well ahead. For support, we just raise a case, and they follow up and get it done. There is also AI readiness, but with the model R2, we don't have much of that AI readiness. For others, we do have AI readiness that predicts capacity based on daily or monthly trends, enabling us to analyze how much space we need or if we need to expand the disk shelf. From an operational point of view, a good feature is that if you accidentally delete a volume, it will be retained in the destroyed state for the next twenty-four hours, which is not the same with any other vendor. I have worked in this storage domain for the past fifteen years, and this option is remarkable, benefiting any L1 or L2 engineer. Additionally, from a compliance perspective, Pure Storage FlashArray has REST APIs enabled. I have not explored automation much, but from a security standpoint, it is strong with encryption data. If you want to automate, you can easily integrate with all clouds and explore Pure Cloud for scheduling workloads, including volume creation. Customers find benefit in Pure Storage FlashArray's single management pane of glass due to the dual controller and active-active setup. If one of the controllers goes down, all workloads automatically shift to the other controller, ensuring their data is safe and accessible at all times. This is a highlighted feature that any customer desires because their data should always be accessible. For SAN workloads, we use Pure Storage FlashArray because for SAN FC fiber channel, we don't use it; we use NetApp for NAS activities. We have clearly split this, so SAN is for mission-critical applications, while network-attached storage handles file systems. This architecture helps us maximize the benefit from Pure Storage FlashArray due to the significant workloads from this giant retail client. From a footprint and energy consumption perspective, you can see energy consumption from the Pure1 storage portal on a daily basis, and it is very compact. The three models we use consume only three units, which is quite low. From a footprint and data center perspective, it doesn't occupy much space. As everything moves to cloud, there are requirements to avoid excess spending on data centers, and Pure Storage FlashArray is efficient in energy consumption and is environmentally friendly.

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Jean Charles

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.

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SunilKumar

Manager at Securetech

Meets our customers' needs but they should move towards high-level scaling

I the product already has scalability features, but in terms of size maybe they could do more to work with parent storage and move to high-level scaling. That area, I feel, is a place where there could be some more options in this solution. It would be a way to improve the scalability in another direction, maybe options to scale out rather than just up. So far we have done very few installations. So maybe in the coming days, weeks and months, we would be able to come up with some additional features that are needed, but right now the product has the competitive features that our clients need.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It makes things ten times easier."

"The most valuable features of Pure Storage FlashArray are simplicity, ease of use, and dashboard management."

"Pure Storage has the right business model and will be around for a long time."

"My advice to others looking into using Everpure FlashArray is that it's a really good product, especially if your main purpose is to get high speed with more redundancy and reliability; then go for it."

"The snapshot feature is valuable. It protects data based on the policy."

"The solution is easy to scale. I'm running two environments right now, so I need to scale. I'm running a part technology. I've got an A-side and a B-side."

"The stability is very good. I've done destructive testing on it and never had any type of storage outages from it."

"What I like most about this solution, is the speed, resiliency and scalability."

More Everpure FlashArray pros

"It has solid performance and provides data locality."

"We have been running Nutanix since 2019 and it has been a day and night difference from our old infrastructure."

"We are very satisfied with the speed, compression and duplication."

"I would say that it's a simple to use product, it fits all sizes and it is budget-friendly."

"A great feature involves real-time hardware changes."

"The solution has single-window management, the ability to create VMs and monitor their usage on the fly, and the ability to add more resources if required."

"We went on Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) and were able to improve performance, but it did not really change how things worked."

"The stability is good. This is the number-one product in that regard."

More Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) pros

"The ScaleIO UI: EMC has been working with storage for a long time; therefore, they know how to clearly present any important data, including data flow and each drive's IOPS/bandwidth, and allow the user to easily monitor bottlenecks and problems, especially the rebuild and rebalance status of child objects."

"Comparing other products that are competing with Dell EMC (Enhanced Memory Controller), Dell seems to us to always come out on the high-side."

"Automatic rebalancing is the feature saving administration time, and also auto rebuilding."

"We are using it as the primary virtualization storage (both for internal corporate users and external customers) for VMware and Hyper-V virtualization platforms."

Cons

"Pure Storage FlashArray has not helped decrease the total cost of ownership."

"I'd like to see a move towards individual VMs for what the performance of each VM is in a VD infrastructure. I can see the overall volume, but I would love to see things in a more granular level on the VM side."

"The pricing needs to be improved as they offer very high budgeting prices. Searching is a big challenge in Pure Storage FlashArrays, especially when trying to restore a VM."

"I like what they're doing, but some of my customers complain that they do not have all the bells and whistles and knobs to fine-tune workloads that some of the competitors have. In my opinion, that's good. All customers don't have dedicated storage gurus, and they can get themselves into trouble if they fine-tune too many of those high-performance knobs, but they do get knocked down. Pure Storage takes a hit in the minds and opinions of some of the customers because they cannot customize things as much as compared to a legacy storage provider's appliance such as NetApp, Dell EMC, or even HPE. I personally think 95% of my customers are better off letting the system fine-tune itself. That was something that you needed to do 12 or 15 years ago, but now with all-flash, the technology can handle what it needs to handle. Customers just end up shooting themselves in the foot if they are tweaking too many default settings."

"Reports of performance and LUN utilization could be improved."

"We ran into some issues with the program at first and we had to work around those issues to fix our problems."

"The solution is expensive."

"I would like a feature to integrate with external or cloud solutions. For example, if I want to use this storage for a backup from the cloud, I want to have integration with the cloud vendors, such as Microsoft, Oracles, or Amazon. It could be available as an API to allow seamless integration. Additionally, the solution could improve by having native integration with a cloud provider, such as VMware or Microsoft, this would reduce the need to use third-party solutions to complete the task."

More Everpure FlashArray cons

"Some clients find the solution's cost to be too high."

"Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure's cloud platform management software could be improved so that I can manage my load between the cloud and on-premises."

"The self-service side of the product needs to be improved. We should be able to add two-factor authentication and more security layers to it."

"I rate it a nine out of 10 because I think there is still room for improvement on the price."

"The patch updates of Nutanix Acropolis could be improved. I'm work on the corporate side, but I get feedback from our IT team that patch updates and other updates are taking a significantly longer time. This definitely needs to be resolved. We are in discussion with Nutanix regarding certain configuration issues we are having, so maybe something can be changed to ease these patch updates."

"It would be great if it could emulate some of the features that their competitor VMware has, for example port mirroring or Netflow output at hypervisor level."

"When we have issues with the solution, they tend to be around networking."

"Site-to-site replication needs some work."

More Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) cons

"It would be nice to set minimum IOPS per volume, besides just the maximum, to be able to satisfy this demand from customers out-of-the-box, not by calculating number of disks, etc."

"There is room for improvement in the area of horizontal scaling."

"If they could introduce a write cache feature, the product would be perfect overall."

"I think ScaleIO already has some features for scalability as it is part of the reason for the product, but in terms of size, maybe they should try to address parent storage."

"Ecosystem around the product: There is no built-in system for viewing history data, such as volume IOPS. We have to provide graphing by Prometheus and Grafana, which would be a good new feature in ScaleIO."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There is an annual or perpetual license required for this solution."

"I would rate it a seven out of ten for pricing. It could be improved."

"I don't know the exact cost but it's around $1,000."

"The price of the solution is not expensive."

"We purchased a license to use this solution and we pay for the storage ourselves."

"The cost has room for improvement."

"While more expensive than NetApp, Pure Storage FlashArray offers superior performance that often justifies the higher cost and adds value overall."

"The price is very reasonable when compared to other solutions."

More Everpure FlashArray pricing and cost advice

"It's a cost-effective solution"

"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."

"Nutanix Acropolis AOS price includes no additional costs for features."

"It's a bit expensive, but it's worth it."

"The initial cost is affordable but the renewal fees are high."

"The cost of Nutanix Acropolis AOS is reasonable."

"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."

"We renew our license on a yearly basis and have no costs in addition to the standard fee."

More Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) pricing and cost advice

Information not available

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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…

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Manufacturing Company

13%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Comms Service Provider

10%

Outsourcing Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

No data available

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	73
Midsize Enterprise	38
Large Enterprise	160

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	93
Midsize Enterprise	76
Large Enterprise	88

No data available

Questions from the Community

Which should I choose: HPE 3PAR StoreServ or Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform F Series?

Both are great platforms, but if you are considering all flash solutions, I would recommend you to consider Pure Stor...

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

When comparing cost, I find that the cost is either the same or slightly higher, but that is returned by the ease of ...

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What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashArray?

The only thing I think could be improved is price. The price is the main concern for our customers.

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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 ...

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What makes Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) worth using?

NCI is a product with many tools and services but the one that, in my opinion, makes it better than similar products...

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

NCI is one of the best out there. For any software, no matter how good it is, technical support makes it or breaks it...

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Everpure FlashArray

October 2026

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Buyer's Guide

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI)

October 2026

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) report

Download Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) product report

Buyer's Guide

Software Defined Storage (SDS)

October 2026

Download ScaleIO [EOL] product report

Also Known As

Pure Storage FlashArray

Nutanix Acropolis AOS, Nutanix AOS, Nutanix Acropolis

EMC ScaleIO

Overview

The FlashArray family delivers consistent, high-performance data services across block, file, and object workloads. As part of the Everpure Platform, it provides the foundation for a unified data plane, enabling applications to reliably access, protect, and manage data across environments with simplicity and predictability. With built-in capabilities such as inline data reduction, snapshots, replication, and ransomware resilience, FlashArray ensures efficient operations, protected data, and consistent application uptime.

As the foundation of the (unified) data plane, FlashArray enables policy-driven automation, monitoring, and centralized management while integrating across cloud and on-premises environments. Built on an Evergreen architecture, it supports non-disruptive upgrades and continuous performance improvements over time while simplifying operations at scale.

What Key Features Does FlashArray Offer?

Simplicity and Speed: Easy management and rapid performance enhancements.
Data Reduction: Effective deduplication and compression.
Flash Architecture: Seamless upgrades and outstanding resilience.
VMware Integration: Excellent compatibility with virtualization platforms.
Predictive Analytics: Strong insights for proactive management.

What Benefits Should Users Consider?

Reliability: Proactive support with minimal downtime.
Efficiency: Reduced storage footprint and enhanced data management.
Performance: Faster processing speeds and low latency.
User Experience: Simplified management with Evergreen model.

In industries like finance, banking, and healthcare, FlashArray supports high-performance storage needs focusing on virtualization and database environments. Employed for VMware workloads, disaster recovery, and storage provisioning, it ensures application performance in private or hybrid cloud setups while enhancing management of virtualized environments.

Everpure (formerly Pure Storage)

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure delivers high performance and scalability with central management and one-click upgrades. It enhances data protection and reduces deployment complexities, perfect for businesses seeking efficient virtualization.

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure offers a comprehensive platform integrating compute, storage, and network for optimal infrastructure management. It supports multiple hypervisors, offering flexibility, efficiency, and ease of use. With features like Prism for centralized management, organizations can manage resources effectively while benefiting from data protection enhancements such as deduplication and compression. Hyper-convergence enables seamless integration, reducing operational costs and increasing scalability. Though the pricing is high, and setup and administration can be complex, the ability to support hybrid cloud implementations and critical infrastructures like VDI and databases provides notable advantages.

What are the key features of Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure?

Prism for Centralized Management: Simplifies resource management with a single control interface.
High Performance: Offers efficient I/O operations to enhance processing efficiency.
Scalability: Easily adjusts to growing business needs with one-click upgrades.
Data Protection: Uses deduplication and compression for secure data handling.
Hyper-Convergence: Integrates compute, storage, and network to optimize infrastructure.
Multi-Hypervisor Support: Provides flexibility to choose preferred hypervisors.

What benefits should users look for in Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure?

Cost Effectiveness: Reduces operational costs through resource optimization.
Ease of Management: Centralized control enhances administrative efficiency.
Scalability: Grows seamlessly with business demand.
Data Protection: Increases security and reliability of data management.
Performance Improvement: Streamlines server provisioning and resource management.

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure finds adoption across industries for virtualization, cloud services, and infrastructure consolidation. Organizations utilize it for hybrid clouds and virtual server hosting, supporting applications like databases and virtual desktop infrastructures. They report enhanced data protection, disaster recovery capabilities, and improved performance, facilitating effective resource management.

Nutanix

ScaleIO is purposely designed to be an enterprise-grade scale-out software-defined storage solution. It applies the principles of server virtualization to standard x86 server flash and hybrid media, turning them into high performance, sharable, pools of storage. Whether your block storage needs are for traditional, modern or cloud workloads, ScaleIO has you covered.

Dell Technologies

Sample Customers

Nielsen, Lamar Advertising, LinkedIn, Betfair, UT-Dallas

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

Check Point Software Technologies, Blue Central, Deltares, Sentinel Technologies, The Binding Site Group, Swisscom, Itrica

Buyer's Guide

Software Defined Storage (SDS)

October 2026

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