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Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 5, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
8.5
Pure Storage FlashBlade delivers cost savings, efficiency gains, and increased VM density, with returns seen within four years.
Sentiment score
7.6
Nutanix Unified Storage offers significant cost savings, enhanced productivity, and scalability, improving resource allocation and disaster recovery capabilities.
Sentiment score
6.8
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance reduced costs, improved stability, and streamlined operations, quickly achieving substantial ROI and enhancing management efficiency.
It does not require much management once you set up correctly, so it saves time, allowing an admin to focus on other work.
For me, the biggest return on investment when using this solution is that we do not have to have much support staff to run it.
The scalability challenge with previous systems is lessened with Nutanix since we can expand by adding new hardware without needing migrations.
We are saving approximately 20% to 25% compared with the competition.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.0
Pure Storage FlashBlade's customer service is praised for expertise but sometimes experiences slower responses due to growth challenges.
Sentiment score
7.9
Nutanix Unified Storage support is praised for responsiveness and knowledge, with high satisfaction despite occasional delays for complex issues.
Sentiment score
8.5
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance's 24/7 customer service is praised for quick responses, proactive monitoring, and expertise despite language barriers.
I would rate them an eight out of ten.
The support is done through email and is not that great, making it a very problematic area I've been dealing with for over four years.
They come on the call, start troubleshooting immediately, and resolve issues effectively.
They are very knowledgeable, and if they can't solve the problem, they find the answer within a day or so.
I would give the customer service and technical support a ten out of ten.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
8.8
Pure Storage FlashBlade is praised for its scalability and ease of expansion, satisfying various industries like banking and media.
Sentiment score
8.1
Nutanix Unified Storage offers scalable, flexible expansion with seamless capacity adjustments, praised for supporting diverse workloads efficiently.
Sentiment score
7.9
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance offers scalable options for SMBs, supporting expansion through nodes, RAM, or storage to align with cloud strategies.
Pure Storage FlashBlade is scalable.
This means you don't have to buy everything upfront; you can buy what you need and add more as you grow, which is advantageous.
These three components utilize scalability tools, enabling storage addition to nodes and supporting independent, linear performance growth.
I can rack mount the server or node and add it to the cluster anytime with just one click.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.8
Pure Storage FlashBlade is highly rated for stability, reliability, and performance, with minimal downtime and swift recovery.
Sentiment score
8.4
Nutanix Unified Storage is praised for its stability, reliability, minimal downtime, seamless updates, and efficient data management.
Sentiment score
8.7
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance offers exceptional stability, zero downtime, excellent support, and ease of use, ensuring reliable performance.
In case there is any issue with any blade, the data is moved to another.
We have not experienced these issues with Nutanix, which I attribute to the all-flash technology, the quality of their platform, and the responsiveness of the hyper-converged infrastructure.
Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) is very stable.
It automatically triggers tasks, causing performance issues.
 

Room For Improvement

Users want better cloud integration, support, pricing, efficiency, and improvements in analytics, configuration, and backup for FlashBlade.
Nutanix Unified Storage needs better simplicity, security, integration, cost efficiency, support, and improvements in interface, protocols, and analytics.
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance needs hardware, software, and management improvements, with focus on Linux support and streamlined scalability.
Technical support definitely needs significant improvement.
Its configuration should be easier.
The main concern is pricing, which could deter some customers; addressing this would enhance its appeal.
The system should move towards AI-driven optimization and enhance S3 object storage capabilities.
System downtime can disturb the entire ecosystem and impact all applications.
 

Setup Cost

Pure Storage FlashBlade is costlier but valued for performance, ease, and reliability, justifying its comprehensive licensing with included software.
Nutanix Unified Storage offers competitive pricing, valued for performance and flexibility, but can be costly for smaller businesses.
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance offers competitive, cost-effective pricing, significantly cheaper than competitors like Nutanix, with transparent, all-inclusive fees.
The pricing of Pure Storage FlashBlade is expensive compared to other products I used from other companies in the past, but one benefit is that they have built-in ransomware protection.
Compared to buying three or four vendor solutions, it is much cheaper.
The cost has doubled for the same amount of data, which was a challenge when presenting use case justifications for the increased cost.
Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) has definitely helped reduce our total cost of ownership.
 

Valuable Features

Pure Storage FlashBlade offers high performance, scalability, and ease of use with excellent data protection and seamless integration for large storage needs.
Nutanix Unified Storage offers scalable, centralized management, enhancing performance, accessibility, and security for efficient IT infrastructure.
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance provides ease of use, high availability, flexible deployment, and cost-effective, reliable performance with excellent support.
We can plug in many blades, and we can have data up to one terabyte.
The best features of Pure Storage FlashBlade include better throughput and better performance.
Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) is appreciated for its fault tolerance and redundancy at the cluster level, which ensures reliable storage of files, folders, and other information accessible on the client side.
The cybersecurity features of Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) when dealing with unstructured data, such as ransomware threats, provide the ability to detect and back up block-based storage, allowing me to restore repositories or sets of block storage with one button click, which is automatic.
My experience with using Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) for data-intensive workloads is that we have many SQL Servers and they perform much better than they did when we used hybrid converged previously.
 

Categories and Ranking

Pure Storage FlashBlade
Sponsored
Ranking in Software Defined Storage (SDS)
7th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.8
Number of Reviews
38
Ranking in other categories
All-Flash Storage (16th), File and Object Storage (6th)
Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS)
Ranking in Software Defined Storage (SDS)
3rd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
105
Ranking in other categories
All-Flash Storage (6th), Public Cloud Storage Services (5th), File and Object Storage (2nd), NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays (4th)
StarWind HyperConverged App...
Ranking in Software Defined Storage (SDS)
11th
Average Rating
9.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
66
Ranking in other categories
HCI (14th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Software Defined Storage (SDS) category, the mindshare of Pure Storage FlashBlade is 4.2%, down from 4.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) is 5.3%, up from 2.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is 2.1%, up from 1.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Software Defined Storage (SDS)
 

Featured Reviews

Eric Black - PeerSpot reviewer
The ability to leverage multi-tenancy along with immutability is a huge benefit for us
The only thing I feel FlashBlade is missing is the SOS API. If it had SOS API, that would put it well over the top. Veeam Backup specifically has started to streamline their API, and they are doing that with SOS API. They have optimized it. Any of the S3 devices out there that support this SOS API can have far more API calls at once. On our side, that translates to better restoration. With SOS API, it can leverage far more restorations at a single given time or read from the device in simple terms. That results in maximizing the output and throughput from the device itself.
Vipin Kumar Sha - PeerSpot reviewer
Pricing challenges overshadow efficient data handling and fast deployment
In terms of improvement areas for Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS), pricing is a significant issue, and another aspect is that the export of Nutanix backups does not support CD-ROMs, which is a disadvantage. Currently, it only supports QZ bus types for backups, which limits compatibility. When comparing Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) with other solutions in the market, it falls short because it only supports iSCSI backups, while competitors also support QZ, iSCSI, fiber channel, and NVMe storage. The solution requires no maintenance for patching since it is designed effectively, but Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) does not support fiber channel connectivity or external attached storage through NAS, limiting its compatibility. Additionally, technical support response time and efficiency are lacking in comparison to competitors.
Russ Le Puill - PeerSpot reviewer
Proactive support with improved speed and resilience
There was a long delay with shipping, which we weren't expecting, but we were kept updated throughout. It wasn't made clear to us that we needed to provide our own SFP modules to connect to our infrastructure, so that could have been a bit clearer. It would be amazing if there was, perhaps, a more automated process for updating the hosts themselves, although the maintenance mode works well. Our StarWind command center doesn't seem to have all the options available currently, which support is investigating for us.
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859,129 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
14%
Educational Organization
12%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
32%
Educational Organization
14%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
5%
Computer Software Company
14%
Educational Organization
13%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Pure Storage FlashBlade?
The tool's most valuable feature is its fast performance, especially in handling snapshots. It helps during power out...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure Storage FlashBlade?
The pricing for FlashBlade is between cheap and moderate. FlashBlade is worth the money due to the experience and per...
What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashBlade?
Its configuration should be easier. There should be easier language for the configuration.
What do you like most about Nutanix Unified Storage?
Nutanix has excellent product documentation available on their portals, written in simple, easy-to-understand language.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Nutanix Unified Storage?
Nutanix solutions are often perceived as premium-priced, but they deliver substantial ROI in terms of performance, re...
What needs improvement with Nutanix Unified Storage?
Nutanix Unified Storage is already a robust and forward-thinking platform. That said, one area for potential improvem...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for StarWind HyperConverged Appliance?
It's not the cheapest, however, the solution works incredibly well and is so simple to licence and maintain.
What needs improvement with StarWind HyperConverged Appliance?
There was a long delay with shipping, which we weren't expecting, but we were kept updated throughout. It wasn't made...
What is your primary use case for StarWind HyperConverged Appliance?
We desperately needed to update yet downsize our data centre. We had six hosts for only approximately 14 or so Virtua...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Nutanix Files Storage, Nutanix Volumes Block Storage, Nutanix Objects Storage
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

ServiceNow, Mercedes-AMG Petronas Motorsport, Dominos, Man AHL
JetBlue, International Speedway Corporation, Volkswagen SAIC, Brighton and Hove City Council, Foresters Financial, Janus International Group, Cloud Comrade, Serco
Sears Home and Franchise Business
Find out what your peers are saying about Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
859,129 professionals have used our research since 2012.