Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance comparison

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

July 2024

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Categories and Ranking

StarWind Virtual SAN

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2024, in the Software Defined Storage (SDS) category, the mindshare of StarWind Virtual SAN is 9.2%, up from 6.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is 3.0%, down from 7.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is 1.2%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Software Defined Storage (SDS)

Unique Categories:

HCI

2.1%

Software Defined Data Center (SDDC)

44.4%

Featured Reviews

Kyle Bautista

Systems Admininstrator at J&D Brush Company Inc.

Jul 22, 2024

Ensures that our critical data is always protected and easily recoverable

Implementing StarWind in our organization has been a game-changer, particularly in terms of cost savings. By leveraging StarWind's virtual tape library (VTL) solution, we have been able to use virtual tapes for our backups, which are then saved in Azure Blob storage. This approach has significantly reduced our dependency on physical tape hardware, leading to considerable savings in both equipment and maintenance costs. The virtual tapes are not only more cost-effective but also offer enhanced flexibility and scalability, enabling us to manage our growing data needs without substantial additional investment. Furthermore, the integration with Azure Blob storage ensures our backups are stored securely in the cloud, providing us with peace of mind and reducing the need for expensive on-premises storage solutions. The combination of StarWind’s VTL and Azure Blob has streamlined our backup process, reduced our overall backup costs, and improved our data management efficiency. We are extremely satisfied with the financial and operational benefits StarWind has brought to our organization.

What you might not know about Nutanix that makes it so unique

Samuel Rothenbuehler

CTO Enterprise Cloud at Amanox Solutions (S&T Group)

May 30, 2023

Nutanix has the potential to replace most of today's traditional storage solutions. These are classic hybrid SAN arrays (dual and multi-controller), NAS Filers, newer All-Flash Arrays as well as any object, big data etc. use cases. For capacity, it usually comes down to the price for large amounts of data where Nutanix may offer higher-than-needed storage performance at a price point that isn't very attractive. This has been addressed in the first step using storage-only nodes which are essentially intelligent disk shelves (mainly SATA) with their own virtual SDS appliance preinstalled. Storage nodes are managed directly by the Nutanix cluster (the hypervisor isn't visible and no hypervisor license is necessary). While this is going in the right direction, larger storage nodes are needed to better support "cheap, big storage" use cases. For typical big data use cases today's combined compute and storage nodes (plus optionally storage-only nodes) are already a very good fit! The Nutanix File Services (Filer with active directory integration) are a very welcomed addition customers get with a simple software upgrade. Currently, this is available as a tech preview to all Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV) customers and will soon be released to ESXi as well. This is one example of a service running on top of the Nutanix distributed storage fabric, well integrated with the existing management layer (Prism) offering native scale-out capabilities and One-Click upgrade like everything else. The demand from customers for a built-in filer is big, they are looking to not depend on legacy filer technology any longer. We are looking forward to seeing this technology mature and offer more features over the coming months and years. Another customer need is to be able to consume Nutanix storage from outside the cluster for other, non-Nutanix workloads. These could include bare metal systems as well as non-supported hypervisors (e.g. Xen Server etc.). This functionality (called Volume Groups) is already implemented and available for use by local VMs (e.g. Windows Failover Cluster Quorum) and will soon be qualified for external access (already working from a technical point of view including MPIO multi-pathing with failover). It will be interesting to see if Nutanix will allow active-active access to such iSCSI LUNs (as opposed to the current active-passive implementation) with the upcoming release(s). Imagine if you upgraded your Nutanix cluster (again this would be a simple One-Click software upgrade) and all of sudden you have a multi-controller, active-active (high-end) storage array. (Please note that I am not a Nutanix employee and that these statements describing possible future functionality are to be understood as speculation from my side which might never become officially available.)

Enabled us to significantly condense and eliminated excess in our server rack

Claire Madison

IT Manager at Projects Inc.

Oct 15, 2019

Nearly all of it is valuable. On a software level, it works really well. I've never had any issues with the hosts communicating with each other. The failover works perfectly. They set up everything on a software level and I've been very happy with it. They can monitor the software remotely and make sure everything's working with our Hyper-V cluster. Overall, I have been very happy with the setup of the software. The hardware footprint is perfect. It fits in our rack perfectly and we were able to condense a lot of physical servers we had. It has greatly eliminated the excess stuff in our server rack. The footprint is completely acceptable. We have the ProActive Premium Support and it has reduced our monitoring efforts. It has been very useful. They have been able to detect things such as when there's an issue with the cluster or they're getting some kind of weird reading that I have no idea about. They're really quick to let me know about it and even set up a schedule to address it. I've been very happy with their level of support on that. For example, they had messaged me a couple of times in regard to what they assumed was a bad block on our server. That could be very devastating if there is something actually wrong with our data — a corruption or anything like that. They went in there a couple of times and looked at it and made sure everything was okay. I would consider that pretty nice preventative maintenance. When we first got the appliance, we hadn't done any major updates on the actual hardware itself. They recommended to me that we do an update on it. They pretty much did the whole process for me and that saved me a lot of time on software and firmware updates. The Premium Support has saved me about ten hours of troubleshooting time. Whenever there's an issue, they're quick to reach out to me. I'd consider that a good value in terms of my time in general. There is less I have to worry about, as far as something going wrong with these servers goes, when they're monitoring it 24/7.

More StarWind Virtual SAN pros

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Integration with virtualization platforms helped us to resolve many issues we were facing while using the physical storage."

"It is easy to use and can monitor system synchronization and check Storage status. StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN) combines flash and disks of the cluster and forms a virtual shared storage “pool” accessible by all hosts. StarWind cuts down virtualization cost and complexity by eliminating the need for a physical shared storage (SAN). -StarWind offers the Enterprise-level high availability (HA), deployed and easily configured . we get technical support from star wind team when implementation software and after setup if we face any issue."

"StarWind allowed us to deploy highly available shared storage within our budget."

"StarWind Virtual SAN for vSphere is a software-defined storage solution that has reduced administration time for storage. It's pretty straightforward to install and setup it and so far it has been robust and worked as advertised from StarWind."

"StarWind vSAN was very easy to integrate into our system and ran flawlessly during our entire use time."

"Having the ability to scale horizontally if needed is a huge plus for future growth."

"Implementing Starwind in our organization has been a game-changer, particularly in terms of cost savings. By leveraging Starwind's virtual tape library (VTL) solution, we have been able to use virtual tapes for our backups, which are then saved in Azure Blob storage."

"They offer top-tier support."

"Data locality provides super-fast data access and ultra-low latency."

"One of the most valuable features of Nutanix is that it's easy to use. I love this solution—it's easy to maintain and update, and I think it's almost perfect."

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

"We really love the Lifecycle manager and one-click upgrades."

"The most valuable features of Nutanix Acropolis AOS are storage and hyper-converged. The solution is easy to use and the administration is very good."

"Performing a Nutanix software upgrade is a very simple and non-disruptive process."

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

"Nutanix Acropolis AOS has very good stability."

More Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) pros

"Customer service has been excellent. Any questions we have had have been answered quickly."

"The easy way everything can be configured and ready to run in less than a day is great."

"What makes it valuable is the high-availability. In the education field, when you've got students in classrooms, any loss of service disrupts the lessons to a point that the whole lesson is affected. For part of the business which isn't business-critical, to have a little bit of a hiccup wouldn't be such a big thing, but here, it's the high availability of service that is important."

"The sales process is easy."

"Being able to upgrade machines and software during business operations just by switching nodes has been a huge improvement. We"

"Servers came pre-configured for our environment and as soon as they were in the rack, Starwind got them up and running."

"We run probably 16 virtual machines, and all of them are now highly available, and highly redundant."

"The pricing and discounts given by Starwind on the hardware were unmatched."

More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance pros

Cons

"When you will cease your contract with StarWind (for support) your product won't be updated and that is a big selling point, especially for us, as we have loads of products from StarWind."

"For someone entering the IT sector with little knowledge of storage, iSCSI, and virtual disks, they might not find the GUI immediately obvious."

"Regular updates to the software are required, and subtle design changes would be welcome."

"We would like to see the documentation more fully developed."

"The documentation can be better for the free tier."

"Pricing is a bit high."

"You have to do a "full" sync on write-back cache disks instead of a quick sync if there is an issue."

"They recommend RAID10 for HDD, which reduces the usable storage capacity."

More StarWind Virtual SAN cons

"As of now, Acropolis and VMware cannot talk to each other. Until we have some kind of interface, it would be much better for Nutanix if they built an interface that can talk. Otherwise, if I have a VMware stack and I already have a Nutanix stack, I can create containers, I create clusters on VMware, I create clusters on Nutanix."

"I feel like the flow chart and the automated processes have some room for improvement. They're nearly there, and the rest is fine. They've improved a lot over the past few years."

"Storage utilization and optimization should be better."

"Notifications could be improved as they're not currently very useful."

"Limits on increasing space with the inability to have or attach external storage."

"In Thailand, there really isn't a cloud version of Nutanx available to us."

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

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

More Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) cons

"In the future, it would be nice to be able to migrate from the Windows vSAN to the Linux vSAN without having to do a full restore from backups."

"Possible new features could be CSV-level snapshot capability, Veeam integration, and maybe a more straightforward setup. Granted, you don't have to worry about setups with the HCA, but if you want to implement StarWind vSAN in a lab to test it is a tedious setup process."

"This product is not one hundred percent enterprise-ready, so it is more suitable for SMB."

"The management console could use a facelift."

"I would request that the terms and conditions be reviewed and made more acceptable to corporate security so that we could finally turn on the proactive support feature, as it is included with our support agreement."

"The only thing I have run into is that I did want to add more hard drives into the host, so that we could look at doing a RAID 10, and the hard drive prices were pretty expensive... that's pretty nit-picky and I don't think it has anything to do with StarWind itself. I think it's more on whomever they work with for their hardware."

"I think that the pre-installation questionnaire was a little confusing and ambiguous."

"That situation, where Dell EMC servers were going down, has been my only real difficulty... it ended up being something that the wider audience of Dell EMC was actually aware of as an issue. Neither the StarWind technicians nor the Dell EMC technicians were able to actually identify that problem sooner than a week or so... The communication between Dell EMC support and StarWind support, in that particular scenario, left something to be desired, for me. I did express those concerns to StarWind and they were very responsive to that."

More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The licensing is a bit weird. If you license the standard version of StarWind, it allows you four terabytes. Then, they have a pro version, but with the pro version, the only difference is it doubles the terabytes to eight."

"For two nodes, it cost us $10,000, and we spend $2,000 a year on support."

"This is a good, economical solution compared to data storage systems."

"The free version is great to use for labs or test environments."

"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."

"It's priced fairly. It was definitely cheaper than the competition. The licensing terms are straightforward and reasonable."

"This solution has competitive prices and the implementation is very easy."

"The pricing is more than reasonable."

More StarWind Virtual SAN pricing and cost advice

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

"I know Nutanix and VxRail have similar prices and licenses. Nutanix is a go-ahead if AHV is used as hypervisor because it is already embedded in the price."

"Its price is fine. I can't really complain about that."

"When compared to the competitors, the price is reasonable."

"Its licensing is fine. They provide the flexibility to choose from different options. You can go with the standard plan. You can go with the pro or platinum plan. Generally, our clients go with the pro licenses, but if you go for the platinum license, you get even more capabilities. Their starter license is also quite good."

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

"They offer multiple tier licensing which means that lower level licensing will have less features."

"The price of the license for Nutanix Acropolis AOS is less expensive than the competition. There is a favorable cost saving. Having only the need to deal with a single vendor, the management of the customer's entire stack is cost-effective."

More Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) pricing and cost advice

"When I researched they came the most cost-effective."

"Our entire package was around $35,000 for everything, including three years of support."

"Its cost was reasonable."

"In terms of cost, a storage array is more expensive... For half the cost of Compellent, I got two hosts, more storage, and redundancy."

"I was able to bring the price per year down by going out to a five-year plan."

"This was all completed at an affordable price point for an SMB, which was also a key element for an NPO."

"The HCA price is all-inclusive (setup, hardware, support, warranty), except for your standard Microsoft Server licensing."

"The other solutions we were looking at were priced much higher than this and they didn't necessarily have full redundancy... Nutanix and VxRail were in the final running... but it came down to our price point."

More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance pricing and cost advice

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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 StarWind Virtual SAN?

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

19%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

Financial Services Firm

Educational Organization

29%

Computer Software Company

14%

Financial Services Firm

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

18%

Educational Organization

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

It is easy to use and can monitor system synchronization and check Storage status. StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN) combin...

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for StarWind Virtual SAN?

Make the most of your 30-day trial license, and if needed, you should contact the sales department of StarWind to ext...

What needs improvement with StarWind Virtual SAN?

The dashboard is functional, but it could benefit from a more modern and visually appealing design. A facelift would ...

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 StarWind HyperConverged Appliance?

StarWind's proactive support is my favorite feature.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for StarWind HyperConverged Appliance?

Keep in mind that StarWind VMs for the vSAN will take up 24GB of memory per host. If you do decide to go with StarWin...

What needs improvement with StarWind HyperConverged Appliance?

I honestly don't have anything to complain about. Nothing is perfect, though, over the past three years, there were t...

VMware vSAN vs StarWind Virtual SAN

Comparisons

Compared 32% of the time

StorMagic SvSAN vs StarWind Virtual SAN

Compared 17% of the time

Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct vs StarWind Virtual SAN

Compared 16% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs StarWind Virtual SAN

Compared 14% of the time

Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure vs StarWind Virtual SAN

Compared 2% of the time

More StarWind Virtual SAN Competitors

VxRail vs Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI)

Compared 10% of the time

VMware vSAN vs Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI)

Compared 9% of the time

VMware vSphere vs Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI)

Compared 8% of the time

Dell PowerFlex vs Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI)

Compared 8% of the time

Hyper-V vs Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI)

Compared 8% of the time

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Dell PowerFlex vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

Compared 14% of the time

VMware vSAN vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

Compared 13% of the time

VxRail vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

Compared 11% of the time

StorMagic SvSAN vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

Compared 10% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

Compared 9% of the time

More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance Competitors

Product Reports

Download StarWind Virtual SAN product report

StarWind Virtual SAN

June 2024

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI)

July 2024

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) report

Download Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) product report

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

June 2024

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance report

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Also Known As

StarWind SAN & NAS

Nutanix Acropolis AOS, Nutanix AOS, Nutanix Acropolis

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StarWind

Nutanix

StarWind

Overview

StarWind Virtual SAN provides high availability and fault tolerance for virtualized environments without the need for dedicated SAN hardware. It allows for real-time replication between servers, shared storage for Hyper-V clusters, and enables vMotion and High Availability features for VMware vSphere. The solution reduces costs and leverages existing hardware while providing a scalable and reliable infrastructure. Valuable features include ease of use, scalability, top-tier support, hardware agnosticism, and the ability to use off-the-shelf standard servers to increase storage space. StarWind VSAN has helped organizations improve performance, data availability, and data security while reducing downtime and providing cost-saving storage options.

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.

For SMB, ROBO and Enterprises, who look to bring in quick deployment and operation simplicity to virtualization workloads and reduce related expenses, our solution is StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA). It unifies commodity servers, disks and flash, hypervisor of choice, StarWind Virtual SAN, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct or VMware Virtual SAN and associated software into a single manageable layer. The HCA supports scale-up by adding disks and flash, and scale-out by adding extra nodes.

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance consists of StarWind Virtual SAN, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct or VMware Virtual SAN “Ready Nodes”, targeting those, who are building their virtualization infrastructure from scratch. In case there is an existing set of servers, we offer a “software only version”, which is essentially our years proven StarWind Virtual SAN. Basically, it’s the fuel powering StarWind HCA.

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.

Sears Home and Franchise Business