Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Reviews

Our 125 seat VDI implementation went from barely usable, to a good alternative, to desktops. The performance of our server apps has never been better.

One-click upgrade and data locality are valuable features. The one-click upgrade provides simple management and upgrades. Data locality provides super-fast data access and ultra-low latency.

The focus on performance improvements over new features is more important to me. It is always fun to play with new buttons in the platform.

In reality, it is hard for me to find flaws in this platform because it is without comparing. For me, the fact that I run all of my workloads on Nutanix, which is a software defined datacenter platform, the biggest advantage for me is performance increases with updates. I was once asked what does "Software Defined" mean to me. My response was "a platform that allows for your next feature or performance upgrade to be as easy as a software patch or update."

To receive a performance enhancement by merely clicking the one button upgrade is the true value of the platform and what I look forward to the most. I do understand that new features provide the wow in the platform and I completely understand this value. However, for a datacenter admin, performance increases without cost, and sometimes unexpectedly delivered, is real wow.

There have been no stability issues so far.

There were no issues with scalability. It's built for scale.

Nutanix support is second to none. There has never been an issue when interacting with them.

We previously used Vblock, a converged solution. We switched for many reasons. Footprint, power, cooling, savings, and support time.

I did the setup myself in less than 45 minutes from box to data.

You get what you pay for here.

We evaluated VMware VXRail/Rack and SimpliVity. We did PoCs. The hands-down winner was Nutanix!

Do a PoC and judge for yourself. It costs nothing but time.

The Prism interface is valuable. It is very easy to manage, is based on HTML5, and all CVMs are able to assume the management role. They are not the SPOF.

Nutanix makes it easier for us to grow as the organization needs more resources. We can add more blocks and nodes in a granular way. This is unlike a traditional infrastructure that is initially invested in for four or five years.

I would like to see asynchronous replication in less than 60 minutes, or even in 15 minutes. I understand that they are working to lower replication times to one minute or less.

We have used this solution for two years.

There have been no stability issues.

There have been no scalability issues. On the contrary, it is easy to scale and approve new resources.

Technical support is fast, in our language, very efficient, and they have a great level of technical knowledge.

We used VMware vSAN. I did not change solutions for anything in particular. It was a decision of the organization, based on a corporate strategy.

The setup was very simple. It was simpler than any other solution.

If we compare prices with a three-tier environment, servers, and storage plus virtualization and licenses of VMware or Hyper-V, Nutanix has its own free hypervisor. It also natively incorporates backup and disaster recovery solution for free.

We evaluated VMware vSAN and HPE VSA.

Nutanix is a converged system with web-scale technology. The technology is invisible to the IT department. You can focus on your business, instead of making IT a problem in your organization.

Scalability is the most valuable feature because it is easy to scale-up and scale-out without impact in performance since it is always online.

Improves the management of our virtual infrastructure in a unified point and with unified support team.

Cloud integration, automation and orchestration need improvement.

I have used Nutanix for six months.

We have not had any stability issues.

We have not had any scalability issues.

I rate support 8/10.

I didn’t have a previous solution. I tested different solutions for my customers, such as Nutanix, VSAN, HPE VSA, etc, and evaluated them, but the solutions are for my customers. Also, I test all solutions in our infrastructure.

Setup was very easy. With a few steps and a nice wizard, you have your infrastructure up.

Is not a cheap solution, compare with competitors, but you must consider all variables in the environment to calculate the TCO. You have pre-sales tool Nutanix Sizer to calculate the TCO.

I looked at VMware vSAN, and HPE VSA.

Use the sizing tools in order to design the infrastructure properly.

The solution's performance and high density are most valuable.

It was a PoC, so we did not test it in a production system. Rather, we prepared a near identical environment and compared its performance to the customer's old SAN solution (NetApp Fas 3220 with full magnetic disks). This comparison showed us how far this technology went: same storage of the half rack old system and many times faster in response.

The hybrid solution we tested showed a big performance reduction after intensive work on the system, due to the caching mechanism that fills the SSDs (typical of low level Hyperconverged appliances).

We used this solution for three months.

We did not encounter any issues with stability.

We have not had the opportunity to test its scalability.

We did not test the technical support in a real situation, but only to ask some configuration questions without an SLA.

That was the first Hyperconverged system we tested, so we did not switch to this solution from a different solution.

Setup was simple, but we did not prepared the appliance (it was configured by our partner).

Licensing is good if you choose to use the proprietary OS (which is free).
Pricing is good if your enviroment can take advantage of the Hyperconvergence paradigm.

We did not evaluate other solutions.

Hyperconvergence gives a faster implementation than the "standard" solutions, and a high density architecture.

Others should see if their requirements can be fulfilled by this technology. I think it is good in enviroments like business intelligence (data mining and big data analytics).

• Service portal
• Self-service restore
• Single pane of glass for management.

We are a Managed Service Provider and these capabilities make our platform agile and easy to use for our customers.

• Less IT admin
• More performance
• More resiliency
• More protection of data (lots of storage SnapShots with no performance impact)

In order to replace massively Install base of VMware vSphere, they need to expand their ecosystem with ISVs (i.e. F5, PaloAlto, Citrix, TrendMicro etc.) in order to provide a wider range of solutions running as a virtual appliance (vApp), just like VMware did years ago. There is currently an ecosystem, but I think it is around 30-40 providers.

So they should expand the eco-system for Virtual Appliances with Acropolis. Network Segmentation is also a must with AHV.

We have used the solution for about 18 months.

We have not encountered any issues with stability.

We have not encountered any issues with scalability.

Technical support is the best.

We previously used legacy infrastructures: EMC, NetApp, and IBM.

The initial setup takes about one hour and then you are done.

I don't have anything special to advise about licensing and pricing.

We evaluated VMware vSAN.

Don't be afraid of Acropolis Hypervisor. It is stable and powerful, just as vSphere is.

It has built-in advanced analytics and powerful operations, Self Service Portal and components for DevOps included, managed by a single pane of glass (Prism) via HTML5 and it is free of charge – This is why Nutanix is so advanced and revolutionary.

• Data protection in its various flavours.
• Overall performance of the platform.
• Scalability.
• Ease of implementation.
• Great GUI.

We can test even the most storage-performance-hungry workloads on our Nutanix blocks.

Pricing transparency: Software and hardware should be separate items.

I have used it for 12 months.

We have not encountered any deployment issues.

We have not encountered any stability issues.

We have not encountered any scalability issues.

Customer service is a perfect 10.

Technical support is a perfect 10.

We currently use several HCI solutions.

Initial setup was straightforward.

An in-house team implemented it.

The consolidated storage: no need to use central storage that has a performance penalty. For example, while using central storage that enables file-sharing NAS services & SAN services, when one VM had an IO overload, all the VMs in the same data store in the VMware environment on the same LUN suffered from I/O latency. Now, in the new consolidated storage, this does not happen.

We can deploy VM as a service & we can perform updates on the nodes without downtime in a very simple, direct way.

The improvement needed is for elastic clusters, meaning the ability to depart and join nodes in an automatic way. We have a laboratory that needs to perform bare metal tests and therefore needs to unjoin the nodes from the cluster and later on join them back.

I have used it for two years.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

I have not encountered any scalability issues, but we are about to add another node to the cluster and it should be a very simple task .

Technical support is very good, and good with responsive time.

We were using central storage and suffered from bad performance latency.

Initial setup was straightforward.

At the time we checked, this solution was unique.

Perform resizing. Check the needs and deploy only what is needed. Check the memory DIMMs and make sure for the price you get, you have free DIMMs.

We Added a dedicated switch for this cluster so that all layer 2 networking will be in this switch and separate from the main routers.

Our company was in a high growth period, tripling in size within 30 months. Our demand was outstripping our ability to provide additional capacity.

With traditional converged infrastructure (Vblock), the length of our acquisition cycle (analyze, predict, design, justify, procure, manufacture, deliver, install, configure, and provision) was in excess of six months.

We were able to respond to demand more quickly and with less hysteria with Nutanix.

When I left the company, we had decided to use Nutanix to build out our non-production development environment and use the Vblocks only for production and bare metal.

• Speed of acquisition and ease of deployment
• Shorter timeline from PO, to delivery, to operation than converged infrastructure solutions like Vblock
• Able to grow with smaller, more linear increments of investment

Performance was not bad, but it could be better. I never fielded complaints from developers or users, but benchmark testing indicated that workloads did slightly better on our Vblock by a few percentage points.

This wasn’t a major concern, as our stated use case for Nutanix was purely non-production.

We did not encounter any significant stability issues that I was aware of at my level.

It scales nicely if your workloads are predictable and you build for the right mix of storage and compute.

I had no complaints from my engineers with regard to the technical support.

We previously used Vblocks for nearly everything, production and non-production, and we were in a high growth phase.

The large incremental purchase cycles of Vblocks in terms of cost and lead time were causing significant distress.

We had also struggled through some difficult RCM upgrades on the Vblocks. Nutanix was just so much easier to manage and deploy.

We were in the process of migrating non-production to Nutanix and keeping only production on the Vblocks when I left the company in early 2016.

My engineers raved about the ease of setup and configuration, especially when compared to a Vblock.

I wasn’t directly involved in the original purchase. My initial reaction was that we either overpaid or Nutanix was overpriced.

But our experience with the product was very positive and subsequent pricing from the VAR seemed more reasonable. Competition is a good thing.

The team that did the evaluation was not my team so I can’t speak about the specifics. I know they looked at SympliVity as well and there was some lively discussion around the merits of both products.

The market for hyper-converged is competitive and rapidly changing. Take a look around.