We performed a comparison between Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) and StarWind Storage Appliance 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."Starwind made it easy to deploy fully redundant, highly available storage at a low cost."
"The failover redundancy is why we bought this product and it has never let us down."
"The solution offers easy one-click PowerShell scripts that are ready to run."
"The product only requires two VMWare ESXi host servers versus three host servers for VMware's comparable solution."
"One of the most valuable features is the way it sets up the virtual SAN, because we don't have to buy a separate appliance for storage. It uses the existing storage on the servers, which is definitely a cost savings for us."
"It also provides a high degree of mobility, as the virtual SAN can be moved relatively painlessly between on-site devices and the cloud."
"The ease of reaching the support team and their promptness for support is great."
"I like the asynchronous replication and failover features. They are what I'm primarily using it for. The asynchronous replication is helpful because our servers are backed up continuously throughout the day. If anything goes wrong we just fail over immediately. That is a very nice feature to have."
"The virtualization environment is now much easier to manage and maintain, there is only one vendor to call in case of issues and one single console to manage everything."
"In the world of IT operations, there is a lot of noise. Traditionally, systems would generate a great deal of alerts, events, and notifications, often leading to the operator either a) not seeing critical alerts since they are lost in the noise or b) disregarding the alerts/events."
"Prism Central allows managing the cluster from a single pane of glass, and it allows a deeper dive into the solution."
"It's much easier and faster even when you want to create a server from a template or clone."
"The most valuable feature of Nutanix Acropolis AOS is it has centralized management."
"The most valuable features of Nutanix Acropolis AOS are ease of management, hyper-convergence platform, and it has robust operations."
"The most valuable feature is Move, which allows you to migrate virtual machines from VM to AHV."
"There are a lot of things I really like. Perhaps the best part is taking a snapshot of a virtual machine. It's very quick. Another useful part is replication and creating a protection domain: using the protection feature to replicate a machine to a remote site for DR purposes."
"We saw an ROI. We have saved both time and money by using it."
"The management interface is the most valuable feature for us."
"Another good feature is that you can pause the appliance if you want to move it from one location to another and then once it's moved you can resume it, this way you can physically move the whole cluster or storage without any downtime. Its really easy to use, if you have a good foundation in storage and clustering then you will need less then one hour to figure out how to operate it."
"I would say data protection and easy management are the most valuable features of the product...I rate the technical support a nine out of ten."
"They call us when monitoring shows a possible issue and are very flexible in working with our schedule to troubleshoot when it is convenient for us."
"The integration is excellent."
"Having instant failover redundancy helps me sleep easier at night."
"It is very easy to use and very cost effective."
"We have, in rare cases, received conflicting guidance between different support folks within StarWind."
"Management tools could be improved, sometimes the usage seems to be slowed down and confusing. A native web interface could also be an option. I love to see in the future port of the software on a general Linux distribution like RedHat or Ubuntu in order to avoid windows license costs. I would also like to see features like erasure coding implemented. On the VSAN software, I would like to see some improvements in the storage pools (eliminate the usage of the file as a data container and use the raw partition)."
"Proper training sessions should be included with the licensing."
"A mobile app to sync up for overview and status would really be helpful."
"I'd love to see native export of metrics (via Prometheus or something of that nature) to allow us to get more metrics available on our existing dashboard software."
"Some of the documentation seems to be a bit older and refers to deprecated items."
"The documentation is good. However, if compared with competitors, it could be enhanced and made more professional."
"vSAN's free version does not have a graphical user interface."
"When we have issues with the solution, they tend to be around networking."
"They could improve the graphical user interface."
"Pricing and varieties of options could be better."
"There should be a little more access to Nutanix files."
"The cost of the solution is too expensive. There are other options, such as VMware, that are offered for less money. In Latin America, it seems to be overpriced for the market."
"The reporting section of the dashboard could be improved to include more detailed reporting about the servers."
"Nutanix Acropolis AOS could improve by having an auto-update feature. At this time I have to update each system manually. However, I bought the standard license and I did not buy the maximum license they have available. There could be a certain license that does the updates automatically."
"Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure can be improved in terms of the sizing of the solution."
"StarWind no longer sells HDDs for primary storage."
"Other solutions, such as StorMagic, offer more flexibility in terms of handling caching and moving data between additional nodes."
"It needs more integration with backup vendors so there is native integration with it that will allow storage level backup/snapshots. I would love to see integration with Veeam and Commvault so it can be recognized by them directly and added as network storage."
"They could improve by providing integration with HP."
"The dashboard features are not in the free version."
"They offered onsite installation, but we chose to do it ourselves. That took longer and was more work for us but saved us a ton of money in the end."
"An improvement would be if they reached out to education customers with other available products."
"With StarWind Storage Appliance, it would be better to have an overall easier setup with a little bit of configuration changes since, currently, even a small mistake may cause the setup process to go wrong."
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Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is ranked 2nd in HCI with 194 reviews while StarWind Storage Appliance is ranked 10th in NAS with 9 reviews. Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is rated 8.6, while StarWind Storage Appliance is rated 9.2. The top reviewer of Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) writes "A powerful solution with easy deployment, upgrades, and management". On the other hand, the top reviewer of StarWind Storage Appliance writes "Offers stable performance even with a single node failure and manages everything with just two nodes". Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is most compared with VMware vSAN, VxRail, HPE SimpliVity, VMware vSphere and Hyper-V, whereas StarWind Storage Appliance is most compared with FreeNAS, StoneFly VSO NAS, StorMagic SvSAN and VMware vSAN. See our Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs. StarWind Storage Appliance report.
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