Nutanix Database Service Reviews

Our main requirement was to simplify our database operations and management. We have a large number of databases and we have DBA teams that support and provision databases. The idea was to look into a database as a service. Similar to their offerings in AWS and Azure, where you can provision based on your requirements, and automatically everything will be handled by the platform, reducing human errors and waiting times. This is why we looked at Nutanix.

The time to provision the database went from taking a couple of days to now taking a few minutes. That is the immediate impact we saw. It helped the team to focus more. They can now be focused on support rather than spending time provisioning, which is a repetitive activity.

Additionally, one of the features we really like is the patch management. Patch management was always a challenge for us because we had to schedule. We have to manually apply the patch, and there is a process for it. Now with NDB, this is all automated. There are hotfixes that automatically get applied, there are other major updates that are all managed by NDB. It reduces the team's effort. They can now focus more on fine-tuning and improving the database we have.

We are saving around eighty percent of the time spent on provisioning and recovery with this product. 

Another benefit is the recovery. That's one of the features that I like a lot. It gives us the capability to recover data within minutes. It has a time machine similar to Mac's time machine. You can go back in time and recover your data almost immediately. The traditional way of doing backup and restore usually takes hours and you will have to restore the whole database tool to recover only a little bit of data.

Nutanix helped automate database admin tasks like provisioning, recovery, and patching.

With the ease of provisioning, Nutanix has really helped to expand and fast-track the provisioning of the applications.

There will always be room for improvement, there is nothing perfect from day one. There are some technical challenges that we have with NDS. I believe with time it will be sorted out. 

They focus more on increasing performance and resiliency. They make your normal databases as a managed Service, like SQL, and Oracle Database and I believe there could be improvements for resiliency and high availability technologies. They could seamlessly provide that for those databases. 

I have been using Nutanix Database Service for three to four years. 

Stability is excellent.

Scalability is built into the platform, it's excellent. 

They have a very good response time. Engineers that connect to support are experienced and knowledgeable compared to other vendors.

Positive

We see ROI in the automation that saves admin time. 

It's a little expensive. They should reduce the price if they want a bigger customer base. 

I've seen something similar to NDB from the AWS and Azure offerings in the cloud. We wanted something on-prem. We went with Nutanix because we're a bank. We need data resiliency in our data center as part of our compliance.

I would rate Nutanix Database Service a nine out of ten. 

We used to use Oracle ODA and it was difficult to provide test and development database snapshots for the whole Dev team. It's easier with Nutanix. We switched to Nutanix because of its scalability and simplicity. 

Oracle is fantastic but it's really difficult to deploy. With Nutanix, I can deploy an image and I can replicate it to my Dev team. All of my servers have the same CPU, RAM, disk, and cloning. Nutanix is much easier than Linux or Oracle ODA. 

Snapshots take up a lot of disk space in Oracle. My team and I really like that Nutanix duplicates the size of the snapshot.

My organization has improved with Nutanix because now, the Dev team can use CI/CD. Before, it was a monolith application and now Dev cut the application into microservices and began to deploy with continuous implementation, continuous development, and quality assurance. This was impossible with Oracle ODA, it was a monolithic application.

The API and monitoring features are good. Nutanix is good for my use case. I don't see the need for it to improve.

Our developers use Nutanix to provision and refresh databases directly from their development environments. It affects developer productivity. They're a lot faster. They can create all Dev databases on demand. When they want something, they execute the code and they have the environment, clean, fresh, and usable.

With Oracle, it took around one hour to refresh the database and now, with Nutanix, it takes a quarter of that time. 

Nutanix has helped to automate tasks. I schedule a refresh for a clone every morning for the team for troubleshooting purposes. 

It has simplified my life. It simplified tasks. 

I can check the status of my database from my monitoring tool, the report teams can refresh the database with API, and close the database with API. It's very useful and powerful.

I have been using Nutanix Database for two to three years. 

Their support is great. 

It's expensive but it's a good price. We have a regular license program because it's really expensive. 

We run Nutanix on HPE hardware because Oracle is only one vendor with one CPU. Oracle's licensing model is a CPU model and Nutanix's hardware is multiple CPUs. 

I would rate the solution a ten out of ten. 

It's a cost-effective database and Unix solution.

It helps in automating things and in reducing costs. Overall, it is helping improve the productivity of the team. We have eliminated traditional tasks, such as manual backups, manual restorations, as well as manual scripting that we used to run. Now there is automated scripting and a large level of automation that we have put in place with the Nutanix DBaaS.

When it comes to reducing downtime it has given us good reliability. We can patch the databases without much downtime, so that has had a big impact. We also have the snapshot backups available and that has also improved on downtime. However, there is still a lot of migration happening. Once we have it in use as a full-blown solution, I think the benefits will be greater.

Our availability standards have risen to at least 99 percent. Previously, with the other platforms, it was 95 or 96 percent; there was more downtime.

Also, with this stable platform, the number of incidents has decreased. Our problem management has improved a lot, as there have been no recurring incidents. We are still further consolidating it, but even now, it has helped us free up IT staff. We have been able to do away with at least two different platforms. The skill sets that we required for both, for 24/7 support, were immense. That has come down significantly and we have reduced 25 percent of the staff.

This is a very well-integrated setup that has made an immense difference. With individual estates, what happens is that there are too many dependencies on multiple people. If a major incident happens, you need to call an application and a database person. Here, it is an application plus the Nutanix person, that's it.

One of the most valuable aspects is the operations perspective. The features are suitable, especially on the database side, as our operations and upgrades on databases have improved a lot. You can also allocate storage to it easily.

The data analytics are also good along with the data reporting. We report certain IT data on a weekly and monthly basis, and it helps a lot with that, giving us consistent data.

It is also a single platform, all in one place, and that is the reason we went for this solution. Earlier, we had multiple platforms, the database and the OS, but this is a single platform that helps us with what we are doing.

Overall, it is easy to use, but up-scaling was important. We are well-versed in virtualization, Oracle Databases, et cetera, but even when Nutanix DBaaS was a new product for us it was still very effective.

There is room for improvement in the automation. It is customizable and we can create our own solutions, but if there were a central repository of automation scripts that we could use, that would be good.

Secondly, the graphical user interfaces could be much more user-friendly. They are already user-friendly, but they could be simpler so that we do not need L3 staff to handle them. If they were simpler, we could also have some command center or L1/L1.5 associates do some housekeeping activities on it.

Also, something we are not very clear on with Nutanix is whether it is also integrable with cloud platforms like Azure and AWS. Right now, we are using it more for traditional infrastructure. But tomorrow, if we have other components, can we also get a hybrid view? That is something that we need to look at.

It's important to have a hybrid cloud environment. At any point in time, you're going to have on-premises and different public cloud environments in use and, at times, a hyper-converged infrastructure. A hybrid environment offering is something that would work well in the future.

We have been supporting it for the last one and a half to two years. We did a PoC with it and then we started using it for one of the customers that we support.

It is a really stable product.

It is scalable.

We are planning to use another Nutanix product for our end-user computing space where we would use virtualization. We are doing away with the legacy middleware and legacy integrations and moving to more hyper-converged infrastructure solutions.

The technical support is effective. The tickets we raise with them are addressed within the SLA that we have. There are two types of tickets: one is informational, and they have a good knowledge base as well, and the other is a priority ticket and they handle them in a timely way.

The knowledge base could be strengthened. Also, more L3 teams would be useful.

Neutral

Prior to using Nutanix, our virtualization layer was VMware. On top of it, we had our OS and the database. Now, we have been able to eliminate the OS database and have it under one platform.

We switched because of the amount of overhead we used to have. Linux would go out of support and we would have to upgrade it. That meant we also had to upgrade the hardware. Now, we have this appliance over the existing hardware and that has helped us in eliminating costs.

We were involved in the proof of concept as well as the final deployment of the solution. We did need assistance from Nutanix at the time. It was a collaboration. The setup was complex because it involved working with a new set of technologies and because the ways you work with Nutanix, as a product, were very new for us. We did not have too many case studies or references. But now, after having used it for some time, the teams are comfortable with it.

Our current model is 90 to 95 percent on-prem. We are not into cloud. Going forward, we will have to move into cloud. We have two data centers and the Nutanix environment is set up in primary and secondary modes across them. All the applications that the business users use are pointing to the infrastructure that is present in these two data centers. The estate would be about 2,000 servers.

The deployment was done in phases. The PoC took about a month's time to see the results. We divided the next stage, going into non-production first, and then we took the corresponding non-production environments to production. It took us at least three to four months overall.

The deployment included project managers, two or three architects, and a team of around 10 to 12 associates.

Our IT department, a team of around 12 to 14 people, actively uses and supports the platform. If there are any releases with certain additional features, there is maintenance required, but that doesn't necessarily require downtime or impact services. It is easy to upgrade the solution. You test it out in the dev environments and then do a release in the production environment.

In house team

Our business case includes a return on investment. In terms of what we expected, we are not there yet, but we have achieved 65 percent of what we intended to do. We thought that, out of a few million, we would save X amount. On that, we have achieved 65 percent. Probably, if we leverage the estate for all our environments, the ROI will be better.

The pricing is competitive.

We also looked at an HPE platform at the time, but from a cost perspective, Nutanix was ahead.

I would recommend this product for any medium to large enterprise. It's not that relevant for a small enterprise because of the cost.

With the enhancements and the features that have been added in the new releases, it's getting much, much better.

At my company, I use Nutanix Database Service to set up and version machines, install and configure precomputed machines, and establish connections between databases and application services.

The most valuable features of Nutanix are its robust infrastructure management tools, including a powerful firewall, analytics for system performance, and convenient automation. 

There is room for improvement in the pricing structure, especially given the complexity of our business model involving multiple data centers and a variety of services. While the user-friendly GUI and branded plug-ins for HPI solutions make management easier, there is still a need for simpler operational tasks.

I have been using Nutanix Database Service for two years.

Nutanix's stability is excellent. It has consistently performed well over time, supporting multiple operating systems without any significant issues. It aligns smoothly with our company's varied use cases. I would rate the stability as an eight out of ten.

I would rate the scalability as an eight out of ten.

My experience with Nutanix technical support has been great Whenever I have contacted them directly, there have been no issues, and the support provided regarding mechanics has been very effective. I would rate the support as a nine out of ten.

Positive

I have worked with various products from different vendors before Nutanix, including Cisco's UCS, IBM's Internet, and HPE servers. When choosing Nutanix over other solutions, the decision was based on the HCI features, especially for edge computing with one to three nodes.

The initial setup was incredibly quick and straightforward. It took just a matter of minutes to deploy and prepare Nutanix for usage.

Overall, I would rate Nutanix Database Service as an eight out of ten.

We are using the Nutanix Era solution for managing our Microsoft SQL Server, which hosts a database that is approximately five terabytes in size. We also use Nutanix Era with a PostgreSQL server.

This product simplifies the deployment of multiple database engines, which is important to us because we are in an environment where we cannot rely only on a single database engine. We have a large demand for different databases including PostgreSQL, MongoDB, and Microsoft SQL Server. When we receive a request to deploy a database server, it's very easy for us and in that way, Nutanix Era is very useful.

We manage workloads for both PostgreSQL and Microsoft SQL Server, and the performance is good. It is flexible in this regard because it simplifies both the deployment and administrations of workloads from these different databases.

As part of our operation in production, we have to be able to replicate our SQL database. It is approximately five terabytes in size. One of the ways that Nutanix Era has helped is that with a single click, we can clone the database in less than 30 minutes. This clone can easily then be pushed to our development environment. In general, it has reduced our deployment times.

We save a lot of data in our production database and using Nutanix has improved the performance. We are able to create different clones and work with them separately. Also, copying and synchronizing the logs from clones is something that is very easy to do. The impact of the boost in performance has been good and everybody is happy with it.

Using this solution has decreased the time that it takes us to clone or take a snapshot of a database. We can clone a large database in between 10 and 15 minutes, whereas a snapshot can be created in less than five minutes.

Nutanix has helped to reduce the time required to manage our database workloads, although it is difficult to estimate by how much because I did not use another solution for the same purpose. I can only say that overall, we have spent less time on database management, and it has helped to reduce off-hours work. Because everything is working fine, we do not need to work on the database during our off-hours.

As we have needed to spend less time concentrating on database management, it means that we have been able to spend more time on other IT services. We can work on other things, which leads to better overall performance for the IT department.

Nutanix has increased the team's ability to troubleshoot issues. Because it is easy to manage, we can quickly see whether there is a problem in our operations. When we find out which operation has the problem, we can resolve it using the information available in the log files. The use of the log makes it easy for the team to conduct the troubleshooting process, and this has a positive impact on our business because we can solve problems quickly. In turn, we can readily get back to other operations in the IT department or more generally in the organization.

The Time Machine is the most valuable feature for us. Using it means that we don't have to take regular snapshots, yet we are still able to restore the database quickly in the event of a problem.

We use Nutanix Era to perform in-place backup and restores of our databases. Taking about one hour to complete a restore, this product has reduced our overall downtime.

We are able to create multiple backups during the day without affecting our production workloads, which is important because we receive and manage sensitive data, including personal information, and when we have a problem we can easily restore the previous backup. The RTO is very short.

The creation of multiple daily backups is also good in terms of limiting the amount of possible data loss. This is good for our operations because when we do have a problem, we don't lose any data.

Managing databases can be done through a single pane of glass, which means that we don't have to make use of many interfaces to manage different database engines. From a single place, we are able to see what's happened in our environment.

The updating of the database engine is something that can be improved. For example, assume that we are using PostgreSQL out of the box, and it is version 10. If we want to migrate to version 11, 12, or 13, then it is not very easy to do that using Nutanix Era. This is an area that I would like to see improved because I have had many problems with it. In one situation, I was trying to deploy PostgreSQL version 12 and it was very difficult to achieve. If this were improved then it would be very good for the solution.

The problem is not tied directly to how long it takes to perform updates. Rather, it is not easy to do. Database engines differ in this regard because Microsoft SQL is easier to update than PostgreSQL. With PostgreSQL, for example, upgrading the software profile requires several steps. You have to manipulate too many things, create VMs, import them into Nutanix Era, and deploy a new cluster. If the process were automated by the software then that would save a lot of time.

We have been using Nutanix Era for two years.

The stability is very good and this has a good impact on the IT department. We can rely on this solution to create snapshots and clones, easily restore databases, and update software.

Scalability-wise, it is very good. We can upgrade easily and Nutanix is always creating new solutions to solve problems related to databases.

We have two users with administrative roles, although, for deployment and maintenance, one person is enough. It certainly doesn't take many people to maintain this solution. I am the IT Manager and I have a system admin, as well.

We have more than 10 database workloads and we are planning to add more databases in the future. With that, our usage of Nutanix Era will also increase.

The technical support is very good. When we have had to communicate with them, in perhaps less than an hour we've gotten a response and been able to resolve our problem.

In general, the support is able to address problems easily and solve them quickly, which is very good.

In addition to Nutanix Era, which we have to back up and restore our databases, we use Veeam as our general backup and restore solution.

The initial setup is straightforward and the deployment takes less than an hour.

When we deployed Era, we had everything saved inside of it. All of the software profiles and computer profiles are saved. You can either create a new one or modify an existing one. Everything is in place so all that we have to do is deploy to our server and after that, it is easy to deploy the database.

We used an integrator to assist with deployment. Their name is Exxoss and our experience with them was definitely good. They assisted us very well and everything works. It was a good experience.

Our return on investment comes from the fact that we don't need very many people to manage or administer the platform. Essentially, our costs have been reduced because we used to have different people working on different databases. For example, we have not had to spend extra on a person to administer our Microsoft SQL Server. One or two people can manage a large number of databases.

In terms of time savings, this has allowed the teams to concentrate on other subjects, rather than spend time troubleshooting and resolving other database-related issues.

Overall, our return on investment is very good.

There are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees.

We did not evaluate other options but this is because originally, we planned only to use a single database engine. We did not plan on using a solution to manage different database engines. Once we heard about Nutanix Era and how it worked, we were very happy and went straight to it.

My advice for anybody who is looking into using Nutanix Era is to go ahead and implement it. This is a good solution that will help the IT department to manage and troubleshoot the database workloads. It reduces the time needed by teams for troubleshooting, deploying a cluster, or deploying a single-node database. It makes life easy for database management and it is one that you can rely on.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from using Nutanix Era is that it makes the job of our IT staff very easy.

In summary, this is a very good product but perfection does not exist, so there is always room for improvement.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

The primary use cases for our clients are storage and data management.

What I like about this solution is that it's more reliable compared to other solutions.

The downside of this solution is that it's more expensive than its competitors. 

The other thing is that the scalability part of this solution should be improved.

I have been working with this solution for about four years.

I would rate the scalability of this solution a nine, on a scale from one to 10, with one being the worst and 10 being the best.

I would rate the technical support of this solution a seven, on a scale from one to 10, with one being the worst and 10 being the best.

Neutral

My impression is that the initial setup process is a bit complicated but manageable. It's a good product and it's easy to manage. The deployment time depends on the amount of data the client is gonna be storing. 

Usually, it will take one or two people to carry out the deployment.

I would rate this setup process an eight, on a scale from one to 10, with one being the worst and 10 being the best.

My impression is that this solution is really expensive. The licensing is based on a yearly basis since a monthly basis is hard to maintain.

Overall, I would rate this solution an eight, on a scale from one o 10, with one being the worst and 10 being the best.

We propose this solution to our customers to integrate part of their databases into Nutanix Database Service to manage and provision the database.

Management and provision are the most important features of Nutanix Database Service.

The solution can increase its database compatibility and backup options.

I have been using Nutanix Database Service for one year.

Nutanix Database Service is a stable solution.

I rate the solution’s stability ten out of ten.

Our customers for Nutanix Database Service are small and medium-sized businesses.

The solution can be deployed in two days.

On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing a five out of ten.

My customers don't use the solution's automation features. DB as a service solution is new to my customers, who don't know the solution. Our goal is to increase the knowledge of our customers.

I would recommend the solution to other users because it's a new solution that has more functionalities. It's similar to a cloud solution but can be deployed on-premises or in the cloud according to the customer's needs. With this solution, the customer can recreate a cloud environment in their private cloud, and it's really interesting.

Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

We ran testing for Microsoft SQL and MySQL. For Microsoft SQL, the test case was to do multiple database schema deployments on a single host. Then we had single database schemas on multiple hosts, and we also tested high availability clusters for Microsoft SQL on four host nodes.

The performance and flexibility of non-Nutanix workloads are quite good because from a working perspective or a load perspective, scaling of the system is very straightforward. Since we're running the hosts on the normal Nutanix infrastructure, we were able to scale the loads according to what we need and it's really easy to scale up or down as needed.

The big advantage that we found was because we run development processes as well, we can actually generate development, testing, and production databases on the fly without us influencing production. This is one of the big time-saves because, in the past, you would normally have to take a backup of production, sanitize the data, then put it on a test machine. This is something that Nutanix Era makes very simple to do.

This solution has helped to save us on Tier 1 storage, which is important to us because we do a lot of systems in-house. Storage clusters are quite heavily used and they have a large footprint. Being able to save storage space for non-production tasks is significant because, for testing, we have a group of five testers working there. On dev, we have two or three developers that would work there constantly. Saving on that storage means that we can grow our production environments more effectively because we don't have to pay for test and dev storage separately. This means that the cost of ownership is a lot less, which saves us on having to purchase more storage as the system starts crowding.

If you think about it, if we run dev, test, and production all with production data, because that's what they need to do the development and testing on, we would need three times the data every time we deploy it. If the system then grows to two terabytes, that's six terabytes that we have to pay for. With Nutanix, we basically save four terabytes, which is a lot of money.

We have been able to simplify database deployment across multiple database engines. We tested with MySQL and Microsoft SQL. With MySQL, you can also use the APIs to automate that type of deployment. We have not tested the Oracle or the PostgreSQL deployment engines since we don't have those. However, with respect to the two that we tested, it simplifies them both to a large extent.

Using this solution has made the task of cloning databases much simpler and much faster. Previously, it would take us two to two and a half hours to do a clone or a snapshot. Now it's five, six minutes. It's a lot of time that we save.

We have tested the backup and in-place restore of databases but we haven't finally signed off. Once we complete the pilot, we hope to sign off on those. What we did see is that the way Nutanix Era works with the Microsoft backup system is much easier, and it appears to be more stable. This is mainly because on the Microsoft backup side, if you have a load issue, your backups will normally fail. With Nutanix Era, the backup system sits separately from the performance of the database. This means that even if you have a load issue on the data database system, the backups will still go through. Specifically, this is because Era backs up from the storage device and not from the Microsoft database. It is very technical, but as I understand it, the backup will still go through, even if the database is under strain.

We expect that once this system is in production, it will reduce downtime. One of the main selling points for us was that it will reduce update and patching downtime because it manages those updates and patches internally. Even if you deploy Microsoft SQL patches, you can manage and maintain them from the Prism interface, which should reduce downtime. They save the users downtime, and we haven't actually seen that yet, but we expect the pilot will show us that.

We tested the ability to make multiple backups per day and assess the impact that it would have on our workloads. In fact, we were able to make differential backups continuously without affecting the performance of the database engine. We were also able to schedule the backups at different times to make full backups and we couldn't see any impact or load on the database performance while we were doing this.

This will definitely help to limit data loss because we can use a continuous differential backup. We should not see any data loss as long as there's no data corruption. But if there's data corruption, and we can pinpoint the point in time, we should be able to go back to that point.

The ability to do this is very important for us. We have a series of data profiles that we have databases for. We are a university and our systems include everything from financial systems right through to medical systems that they use for the academic hospitals and the veterinary hospital.

When it comes to data management, I can see how Era will help to reduce the time spent on operational database workloads. Since we haven't used it in production for an extended period, I can't really say how much time we've actually saved. During the PoC, we only played around with it and we set up the scheduled tasks that we normally do manually.

Since we can automate a lot of things, we can skip it and schedule it. This should replace a lot of our off-hours work such as patching, upgrades, and similar tasks that can be scheduled so that the reboots can happen automatically. We don't have to sit there and babysit the whole time.

This product has helped us to reduce our database footprint because it gives us the ability to deploy Microsoft SQL instances as MySQL instances on the same host, without actually having to reconfigure or do anything. This means that we can consolidate our database service.

We can also scale them the way we need them and we can, if we really want to, move away from the one database per server type of instances that we have now into a more economical database model where we have multiple database instances on a single host, which does reduce our footprint quite a lot.

At this time, when we provision a database, we do so for a specific server. We assign the memory, CPU, and storage for that specific machine. For about 50% of the lifetime of that database, those resources are never actually utilized, whereas with Era, we can provision those as instances on the same host, and we can scale the host to cater to all of those. This gives us the opportunity to better manage how many resources are sitting idle because we can ramp them up and scale them back as needed, which will save in the long run.

More generally, using this solution will definitely improve the service delivery for our department within the organization. It's going to make it possible for us to cater to more user-centric services and needs. Because of the time-saving and the resource-saving, we'll be able to provide our users with a bigger variety of database services that they might require.

One feature that is very good is the backup and validation process that's built into Era. It saves a lot of time and gives you some kind of assurance that when you actually pull a backup, it is done correctly and you will be able to restore it. In other backup systems, because they are not database-aware, that validation process is not as easy because you have to actually restore the backup to see that it worked. With Era, it actually validates on the fly so you know you'll be able to restore.

The deployment process is a lot easier, due to the fact that with Era you can actually script a deployment. If you have a lot of deployments of the same type, say for instance you have a user request coming in to say they need a basic database schema, you can just run that as a deploy script and it automatically sets up everything. It takes about five minutes and the users have access to their database. In the past, we had to go through a whole setup and deployment process, which for us, took about half a day. That's a lot of time that we save.

Setting up a development test and production environment is quite easy and it saves a lot of storage because the dev and test databases are non-data clones of production, where only the changes are saved. For example, if you have a two-terabyte production database then it saves a lot of space because you don't have to have a two-terabyte test database as well.

If there were data integration services included with the platform then it would be interesting, and it would help us a lot.

We completed a short PoC using Nutanix Era last year to see if we want to do a pilot. We haven't actually implemented it yet, and we're in the process of organizing the pilot program. In total, we used it for about three months.

The stability of our PoC system was very good, but as we were only four people working on it and benchmarking it, there were not a lot of connection issues. I think the first thing we would want to do during the pilot is to simulate application connections and see how well it takes it. When you get that scenario of an application having database runaway connections, kind of simulate that and see how it handles it. But for the PoC, no stability issues whatsoever.

At the moment, we're waiting for approval so nobody is using the solution. However, if we go for the final implementation, the plan is to have two permanent Microsoft SQL DBAs, and then have an automation system that does most of the provisioning.

The DBAs will be there for monitoring and optimization purposes, but we intend to have the provisioning system fully automated so that users can request short-term or long-term data storage as they require. That will be provisioned automatically from our ticketing system.

I think the only limiting factor on scalability is licensing. Licensing costs will be the main scalability problem. If you have a large environment already licensed, scaling the resource allocation according to your performance needs is very easy.

We didn't make a lot of use of the technical support after the initial setup, so I can't offer too much about our experience. However, what I can say is the solutions architect was very good, very well informed, and able to return answers to our queries within a few minutes.

Prior to using Nutanix Era, we used VMware to create a service, and then we used to deploy by installing a SQL server.

Our PoC was deployed on the Nutanix hosting cluster.

If you have experience as a DBA, the setup is very straightforward. If you haven't had any database administration experience before, this is definitely going to be easier than doing it from scratch on your own, thanks to all of the guidelines that they add for you. My database set up in Era is mid-tier. It's not as complex as doing it from scratch on your own, and for a DBA, it makes it a lot easier.

Our initial setup for the different scenarios took us about two days, and that was rolling out 14 databases on nine servers. The implementation strategy for the PoC was basically to first set up all the server hosts that we would need with the different resources, and then deploy using the Era tools for each one of the different scenarios.

I think the only reason that we took two and a half days to do it was so that we could get used to how Era does it. In the final part of the PoC, we were able to remove and redeploy database engines in 15 minutes at the most, and that was for the availability group. There were a few niggles that you have to overcome with availability groups, which Nutanix makes easier, but doesn't completely take away.

We had our Microsoft team involved, which was four Microsoft DBAs. However, if Era is fully up and running for our environment, one person should be enough because most of the time, it's just going to be someone to approve. We're not going to need an entire team. This means it will be one person to maintain, without a lot of overhead.

Initially, we had help from one of the Era solution architects, just to help us get to know the Era system. After the third day, once we understood how the process flow works, we didn't need any third-party intervention at all.

We do expect a return on investment, mainly on the number of people we would need and the number of man-hours that we currently spend, on which we're going to save. Because we are an educational institution we're nonprofit. We are able to provide services but we don't actually ask our users for any money. This means that the return on investment calculations will probably include things like support for research outputs and support for dynamic user requests. But from a costing perspective, it is going to be a little bit difficult to do that.

Currently, we're supposed to have eight people with the number of databases we're running. I think that our team of four people will be able to handle this, plus their other duties. Ultimately, we will not need to utilize the remaining four FTE. It's pretty substantial when you add it up if you look at what a SQL DBA costs these days.

We have yet to implement our pilot program and we're waiting for Nutanix to come back with the pilot quotation for costing.

Licensing costs will be the main scalability problem. If we need to start adding resources in terms of hardware then it's easy but adding software licenses normally causes a problem for us, so it is not as straightforward.

I don't expect that there will be any costs in addition to this because most of our hosting for the Nutanix system is done on-site. Furthermore, we're not going to use a hybridized Nutanix Era implementation. Other than for per-CPU licenses, I don't see any additional costs.

We did not evaluate any competing products. We had done an evaluation of Nutanix for our hyper-converged infrastructure and this suggestion for Era came from them.

The one thing that drew us to Era is the constant improvement cycle that they have with the different database vendors, where they do implement best practices as the database vendors change requirements and change their architectures. Since we started with the POC, we started with Microsoft SQL 2016. We also moved over to Microsoft SQL 2019 during the POC and for both of those cases, they were able to actually help us with implementing best practices according to Microsoft for both of those engines, which do differ quite a lot. The 2016 version has certain prerequisites and storage requirements that 2019 changed to an extent.

For example, in 2016, Microsoft requires that you have a TempDB storage drive dedicated to the TempDB space. In 2019, they changed the requirement to say you should not have more than four TempDB files per drive to ensure that you have enough IOP. It is helpful that both of those scenarios were catered to by Era internally already.

During our PoC, we did the technical side of testing Nutanix, and we did some benchmarking on the performance, but we didn't really get into the performance optimization monitoring and tuning of the databases. Assessing and optimizing database performance is one of the reasons that we plan to do the pilot project.

The delay was that we couldn't put our actual production systems online during the PoC because it's a bit difficult to intermix PoC with production. The plan is that when we go into the pilot, we will select better production databases that fit the different use cases, and then we will do the performance tuning and see how those tools help us.

The one thing that I'm uncertain about that might be important would be the monitoring and performance tuning capabilities. Since we do have a lot of other tools and experience with that, we might find that Era doesn't quite cater the same way, or we might find it actually does better. I'm not sure at this point.

The biggest lesson that we've learned is that being able to automate almost 90% of the provisioning process is something that we never thought would be possible, mainly because there are so many different nuanced things that you have to do when you provision the database server. We tried to do manual scripting with PowerShell, which didn't always go as planned. But with the provisioning scripting that Era gives us, we finally have an option for a tool that will automate a lot of the stuff that we do, which means that in turn, we can focus on the important things.

The one piece of advice I would give for anybody who is considering this product is to look at your data storage profile, and see how many different database vendors and database engines you use. If it's anything more than one then definitely, go for Era. It makes life for managing these different types of database engines a lot simpler.

Because I haven't been using Era for at least a year, I don't really know if there are any issues that we haven't seen that might pop up. So far, everything looks good, but over time, little niggles may appear. Considering this, I cannot say that it's a perfect solution at this point.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.