We performed a comparison between Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) and SwiftStack 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."The StarWind tech support is extremely helpful, especially during the initial setup."
"StarWind allowed us to deploy highly available shared storage within our budget."
"The product creates opportunities with hybrid on-premise solutions."
"The support team is available to solve any problem efficiently."
"Virtualizing data infrastructure with StarWind Virtual SAN improves efficiency and reduces operational costs."
"A great feature is that I basically set it and forget it, as everything is automatic."
"The ability for us to manage all of our nodes from the same console makes systems administration very easy."
"With an uptime of 384 days, StarWind has improved overall server reliability."
"It consolidates our servers, and improves our electricity consumption and cooling as well."
"It has centralized management. It is easy for an engineer to manage. More work goes to patching, upgrades, and maintenance. Nutanix is very easy to upgrade. It takes one click. Engineers do not need to spend additional time with Nutanix for upgrades. With one click, it will complete the upgrade and show the results. Other hypervisor solutions are not like this, specifically since you must do all the components one by one."
"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."
"Acropolis' main advantages are high performance and availability."
"The most valuable features are easy cloud administration and management."
"Most beneficial feature is simplicity, ease of use."
"The solution offers impressive performance."
"The scalability is great."
"The most valuable feature is its versatility. We use 1space and we can use it for almost anything: for our cloud service, for backups of VMs."
"It has helped us with the ability to distribute data to different data centers. As part of our DR strategy, we have nodes automatically replicating data from one data center to the other. This makes it easier for us to not have to shift tapes around."
"In terms of the hardware flexibility, with SwiftStack not being a hardware company, I literally buy any hardware that's the least expensive, from any vendor... from a flexibility standpoint, I think it's fantastic. I can go to anybody, anywhere - any vendor - and get my hardware."
"The scalability is phenomenal. It seems infinite, as long as you put enough storage in place, add enough nodes."
"The graphs are most valuable. They have a lot of graphs and reports that you can run to see what's happening in the background to configure OpenStack Swift."
"The performance is good. It is a secondary storage platform designed for archive and backup, so performance for the right use cases is very good. We have been pretty happy in that regard."
"The SwiftStack Controller, which is the web UI, provides out of band management. This has been one of the best features of it. It allows us to be able to do upgrades and look at performance metrics. It is a top feature and reason to choose the product."
"SwiftStack is also quite flexible when it comes to hardware. It depends, of course, on the use case and the kind of hardware you want to buy. But you have quite a bit of choice in hardware. The SwiftStack software itself does not impose anything on you."
"Performance when in storage-separate configuration needs to be improved."
"StarWind Command Center's single-pane management solution only works with Hyper-V."
"The setup and documentation for the installation with the free version could definitely be improved."
"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."
"Our company was hoping for deduplication and encryption across HCI. That is currently not supported."
"An update caused a syncing issue and it took over a month to resolve it"
"The platform needs to improve user management and the web console."
"Security on the ISCSI protocol could be improved by adding features like OS-type control access, especially for the data center environment."
"The documentation could be improved."
"Areas for improvement would be the memory setting and the CPU setting reserve features, which are not available on Acropolis. I also feel that the DR solution, the reporting, and the component that is combined with the Nutanix OSP need to be improved."
"Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure's LTS version needs to be more reliable."
"Lacks sufficient integration with other vendors and public clouds."
"The latency needs improvement"
"Nutanix needs to improve network features like Passthrough – SR-IOV. It could be improved by supporting SR-IOV, if they had that support, I would not have needed to implement the VMWare vSAN."
"The pricing model for software and hardware subscription renewals can be improved."
"One of the very important things that I would like to see in Nutanix, but I'm not sure if it's in the roadmap or not, is to have some kind of caching optimization at remote sites, to build active-active data centers more easily."
"They should provide a more concise hardware calculator when you're putting your capacity together."
"It's very well done for what it's supposed to do, and I don't have anything to add, but I would like them to keep it available to the public. SwiftStack is going out of the market. NVIDIA purchased SwiftStack a couple of years ago, and they won't be making it available to the public anymore. Our license is up to March 31st."
"The file access needs improvement. The NFS was rolled out as a single service. It needs to be fully integrated into the proxy in a highly available fashion, like the regular proxy access is. I know it's on the roadmap."
"The biggest room for improvement is the maturity of the proxyFS solution. That piece of code is relatively new, so most of our issues have been around the proxyFS."
"On the controller features, there needs to be a bit more clean up of the user interface. There are a lot of options available on the GUI which might be better organized or compartmentalized. There are times when you are going through the user interface and you have to look around for where the setting may be. A little bit more attention to the organization of the user interface would be helpful."
"At the moment we are using Erasure coding in an 8+4 setting. What would be nice is if, for some standard configurations like 15+4 and 8+4, there were more versatility so we could, for example, select 8+6, or the like."
"[One] thing that I've been looking for, for years as an end user and customer, for any object store, including SwiftStack, is some type of automated method for data archiving. Something where you would have a metadata tagging policy engine and a data mover all built into a single system that would automatically be able to take your data off your primary and put it into an object store in a non-proprietary way - which is key."
"I would like to see better client integrations, support for a broader client library. SwiftStack could be a little bit more involved in the client side: Python, Java, C, etc."
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Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is ranked 2nd in HCI with 194 reviews while SwiftStack is ranked 17th in File and Object Storage. Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is rated 8.6, while SwiftStack is rated 8.6. 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 SwiftStack writes "It has helped us with the ability to distribute data to different data centers". Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is most compared with VMware vSAN, VxRail, HPE SimpliVity, VMware vSphere and Hyper-V, whereas SwiftStack is most compared with MinIO, Dell ECS, Red Hat Ceph Storage, Cloudian HyperStore and Scality RING. See our Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs. SwiftStack report.
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