Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs SolidFire comparison

The compared Nutanix and NetApp solutions aren't in the same category. Nutanix is ranked #4 in HCI , with an average rating of 8.4, and holds a 9.5% mindshare in the category. NetApp is ranked #28 in AFS , with an average rating of 9.0, and holds a 0.2% mindshare. Additionally, 94% of Nutanix users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of NetApp users who would recommend it.

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructur...

Read 199 Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) reviews

15,564 Views
8,093 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

SolidFire

Read 33 SolidFire reviews

427 Views
371 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructur...

SolidFire

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) and SolidFire based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two HCI solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs. SolidFire Report (Updated: November 2022).

Buyer's Guide

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs. SolidFire

November 2022

Download the complete report

Helped 867,497 peers since 2012

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

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructur...

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.3

Number of Reviews

199

Ranking in other categories

Software Defined Storage (SDS) (5th), HCI (4th), Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) (1st), Hybrid Cloud Computing Platforms (4th)

SolidFire

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

All-Flash Storage (28th)

Mindshare comparison

While both are Storage Solutions solutions, they serve different purposes. Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is designed for HCI and holds a mindshare of 9.5%, up 8.1% compared to last year.
SolidFire, on the other hand, focuses on All-Flash Storage, holds 0.2% mindshare, down 0.2% since last year.

HCI Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI)	9.5%
VxRail	16.1%
VMware vSAN	14.0%
Other	60.4%

HCI

All-Flash Storage Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
SolidFire	0.2%
Dell PowerStore	15.9%
HPE Alletra Storage	10.0%
Other	73.9%

All-Flash Storage

Featured Reviews

MahendraPanchotiya

Infrastructure Manager at ER Tech Pros

Offers a unified platform, reduces downtime, and simple updates

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.

Read full review

Ramil Cerrada

Solution lead at Globe Mobile

A versatile storage solution suitable for various workloads in cloud environments providing scalable architecture, granular Quality of Service and consistent performance

The most significant benefit lies in its exceptional performance, driven by its Flash-based architecture. This enhances routing speed and, consequently, database performance. The provisioning process is efficient and doesn't demand higher latency, ensuring optimal data transfer performance which is particularly valuable for tasks like data mining, where quick results are essential.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The scalability, performance, and licensing model are the most valuable features."

"The tool is simple, stable, and easy to upgrade. It also requires few resources to manage, which simplifies our work. The solution's ease of upgrading is its valuable feature. AHV, provided by Nutanix, is excellent in performance and ease of use. It's based on an open-source product called KVM, which I also use for other services."

"The simplicity when it comes to building your own automation has been excellent."

"Single-click upgrades are the most valuable feature. In the sector in which we work, it is tough to have downtime and arrange firmware upgrades."

"The most valuable feature of Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure is its low cost, guaranteed to failover and failback with only a few clicks."

"Nutanix Acropolis AOS is easy to use, it is a great platform."

"It has a user-friendly dashboard and interface."

"Flexibility. We're able to mix performance nodes with storage nodes easily. Unlike other vendors where, if we start a hyperconverged solution with them, we have to stick to a specific model, to a specific series with specific capabilities, with Nutanix it's very easy to mix and match the best solution, especially for a dynamic infrastructure like ours."

More Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) pros

"Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."

"If we get complaints about any kind of performance metric issues, whether it's storage related or something on the virtual side, we use it to pinpoint what the actual issue is."

"Overall performance of the solution."

"The provisioning process is efficient and doesn't demand higher latency, ensuring optimal data transfer performance which is particularly valuable for tasks like data mining, where quick results are essential."

"Feature-wise, it is a good solution allowing users to monitor and simplify their networks. The solution also provides its users with flexibility by enabling them to utilize its extensions."

"The scalability and being able to implement it quickly."

"I would say in terms of architecture and in terms of functionality, the product is quite good."

"It is very easy to scale up SolidFire."

More SolidFire pros

Cons

"Compatible with third party hardware, but it's still very limited."

"Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure lacks compatibility with certain older processors."

"We had a few problems with the foundation machine that you can use to build your systems out. We've got it working now, but it should be improved."

"For the company process, the price is too high. We need to purchase add-ons for the extra key and extra terabyte."

"The pricing of the solution is too high. It needs to be adjusted or lowered to be more competitive."

"In terms of the IT different categories, I would like for the governing sections to be able to use it in the IT department. If they can have something like a one view management portal or software similar to VMware that would be an added value."

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

"The licensing cost could be lower."

More Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) cons

"This solution would be improved if it were made to be more compatible with other products."

"So feature-wise, I would say more reporting tools that could be merged into it."

"Though it is a stable solution, its users may face some security issues at times...The security provided by the solution is one area that can be improved."

"The scalability of HCI or SolidFire as such isn't a concern, but when you compare it to PowerMax or NetApp AFF series devices, scalability is a concern because it's only the drives that are connected to the nodes. We don't have any shelf connectivity."

"A little better segregation of the multi-tenancy. Right now, it's just VLAN-specific, that's all you can do."

"We are looking for, potentially, on the Active IQ reporting side, to do reporting based on the datastore. Right now, I can report on the whole SolidFire, or I can report on just a certain datastore or a volume. I'd like to take all of my VDI infrastructure, which as an example would be multiple datastores."

"The user interface needs to be improved. Much of the client feedback involves comments such as "Oh, it's hard to navigate through.""

"They could do a file-based NAS: SolidFire NAS-based. It's probably not its niche, but that is our direction, not to use block, and it's block. Solid state block is what it is."

More SolidFire cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The one disadvantage is relative, financially Nutanix Acropolis AOS is a little bit more expensive than the old solution."

"We got the renewal done recently, and there was no cost involved."

"Our Nutanix license is for five years. There is a support arrangement there, but that aspect is more or less taken care of during the initial installation. With HCI architecture, whenever we do any kind of auto scaling or scaling of servers and resources, there is a significant amount of software licensing involved."

"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."

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

"The pricing of Nutanix is not cheap but there are options available."

"The license is quite clear to me. It's much clearer than what we had with our previous virtualization environment. The licensing is not complex to understand."

"The product’s licensing fee is moderately expensive."

More Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) pricing and cost advice

"The price of this solution is more expensive than others."

"We would probably use SolidFire more, except we're getting more bang for our buck with our purchases of ONTAP right now, and the deal we made with NetApp, so it's more of just a cost decision"

"Based on what I heard from other people, its price was on the higher side."

"It might be considered expensive, but when evaluating performance, it represents good value online because you pay for what you get."

"On a scale where one is a high price and ten is a low price, I rate the solution between three and four. It is an expensive solution."

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which HCI solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

867,497 professionals have used our research since 2012.

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…

Read full review

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

17%

Financial Services Firm

Manufacturing Company

Government

No data available

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	91
Midsize Enterprise	76
Large Enterprise	82

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	8
Midsize Enterprise	6
Large Enterprise	16

Questions from the Community

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 interface that allows you to talk directly to your VM from the present software. We fou...

See all answers

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 core to edge and multi-cloud environments. It helps IT and OT teams deploy hyper...

See all answers

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

See all answers

What do you like most about SolidFire?

The provisioning process is efficient and doesn't demand higher latency, ensuring optimal data transfer performance which is particularly valuable for tasks like data mining, where quick results ar...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SolidFire?

It might be considered expensive, but when evaluating performance, it represents good value online because you pay for what you get.

See all answers

What needs improvement with SolidFire?

There is room for improvement with a focus on creating a centralized storage system, functioning similar to AWS. This involves diverse storage tiers that can be designated for various customers.

See all answers

Comparisons

VxRail vs Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI)

Compared 7% of the time

Azure Stack HCI 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

HPE SimpliVity vs Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI)

Compared 6% of the time

VMware vSAN vs Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI)

Compared 6% of the time

More Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Competitors

NetApp AFF vs SolidFire

Compared 100% of the time

More SolidFire Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI)

August 2025

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) report

Download Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) product report

Buyer's Guide

SolidFire

August 2025

Download SolidFire product report

Also Known As

Nutanix Acropolis AOS, Nutanix AOS, Nutanix Acropolis

No data available

Overview

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

SolidFire delivers all five core elements needed to deliver newfound storage agility to your next generation data center and beyond. With SolidFire you can deploy new applications and capabilities faster, provide more agile and scalable infrastructure, increase application performance and predictability, enable automation and end-user self-service and raise operational efficiency and reduce cost.

NetApp

Sample Customers

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

California Public Utilities Commission, RFA, 1&1, Ultimate Software , Endicia, ezVerify, MercadoLibre, Sungard Availability Services, ServInt, Elastx, Hosted Network, Colt, Crucial, iWeb, Datapipe, Databarracks

Buyer's Guide

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs. SolidFire

November 2022

Free Report: Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs. SolidFire

Find out what your peers are saying about Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs. SolidFire and other solutions. Updated: November 2022.

DOWNLOAD NOW

867,497 professionals have used our research since 2012.

See our Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs. SolidFire report.

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.