Nutanix Database Service Reviews

We are a service provider for Nutanix using a cloud platform to deliver Database as a Service to our customers to compete with AWS and RDS.

We deliver databases as a service, so the Nutanix Database Service makes scaling and deployment simpler and more agile for our customers. It has reduced the time needed to provision a database by 40 percent. 

The ability of Nutanix Database Service to automate database admin tasks has helped lower the cost of DBA operation through a simple and efficient deployment. Lower personnel costs mean lower operational costs of services and support. We also make a passive income with this product, so it affects us positively. 

I like how easy it is to implement MySQL, SQL, and open-source database platforms.  Our developers use Nutanix Database Service to refresh databases directly from their development environments. For instance, we can upload more than 500 databases with just twice the CPU load. 

We use MariaDB enterprise versions. It has simplified our work and enabled us to deploy customers who use these solutions.

It would be helpful if Nutanix added a billing system for databases. We need to automate this with a separate solution. We are service providers, so it would be easier for our customers if there were a built-in system that we could use for billing.

We have used Nutanix Database Service for two years.

Nutanix Database Service is stable.

Nutanix Database Service is scalable.

I rate Nutanix support nine out of 10.

Positive

We have been Nutanix customers for eight years. It was a simple procedure since we have used Nutanix services for so long. We didn't use any specific strategy for deployment or any third party.

We make passive income using the Nutanix Database Service, so the financial return was very good for us.

I rate Nutanix Database Service nine out of 10. It isn't perfect and still requires some development. 

Nutanix Era is used for multiple databases where there are a lot of compliance requirements, including backdated restore points for applications. This is particularly useful when the application team needs to be restored quickly. In normal scenarios, this setup would take a day. With Era, it takes minutes. Additionally, the solution simplifies the deployment of various supported databases for UAT service, easing the workload for infrastructure and database teams.

Nutanix Era significantly reduces operational overheads for the IT infrastructure team, backup team, and application team.

Nutanix Era effectively reduces operational overheads by streamlining the application team's implementation of multiple environments. The solution provides databases for audit or analytics services, which are crucial in operations. It supports fast database cloning, enabling quick responses from the application team for product launches without accessing production databases. Proper use reduces errors from infrastructure teams and improves time to market efficiently.

Era should be compatible with various environments, such as VMware and Red Hat, to be hypervisor agnostic. Due to increasing adoption among enterprise clients, integration with Kubernetes platforms is also needed. Furthermore, the product can benefit from improving its understanding of architectural setup and communicating its limitations to users and partners.

I have been working with Nutanix Era for more than four years.

With Nutanix on-premise, I rate the stability as eight out of ten. However, for hybrid platforms, I would rate it lower due to limited functionality.

Scalability is an inherent function of Nutanix Era and works well both on-cloud and on-premise, deserving a high mark.

Technical support from Nutanix has room for improvement. There seems to be a lack of understanding of system limitations and architectural specifics, resulting in deployment challenges.

Neutral

The initial setup of Nutanix Era is straightforward, maintaining Nutanix's reputation for simplicity and ease of installation.

The pricing for Nutanix products is on the higher side, and more flexibility in the licensing model, such as a GB-based license, would likely increase adoption.

I rate Nutanix Era five out of ten. The core-based licensing model is restrictive, and I would recommend that consideration is given to use-case-based license models to improve adoption. I have recommended Nutanix Era to others after increasing awareness of its functional limitations and support challenges.

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.

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.

We use the solution for managing SQL databases within an organization. It facilitates tasks such as creating clones of production databases for various purposes, including software development and reporting. These clones provide a sandbox environment for development teams to work on without impacting the production database. Additionally, they serve as data sources for reporting functions, ensuring that analytical processes can be conducted without disrupting the primary operational database.

The solution allows quick setting up of new development environments and ensures the use of the storage more efficiently. It manages to create new clients to be utilized for development or reporting.

We have been experiencing significant performance issues with Nutanix Database Service, primarily due to our many clients. While the product is designed to scale effectively, we have encountered performance limitations when handling many clients. These limitations have impacted our business operations, highlighting the need for further optimization and improvement.

We are also overwhelmed with the quality of technical support associated with the product.

I have been using Nutanix Database Service as a reseller for two years.

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

Nutanix Database Service offers scalability, but there are limitations regarding the number of clones created due to hardware resource constraints. This can pose a challenge as the hardware may not have sufficient CPU resources to support extensive cloning. 

I rate the solution’s scalability a three out of ten.

Nutanix has really good technical support capability. However, they were not very helpful in resolving performance issues associated with this product or providing a suitable conclusion on problem resolution.

Neutral

The solution is easy to deploy. We have three or four people to support deployment.

Nutanix provided a couple of different licensing options. They were pretty flexible in how we could structure the licensing. Initially, it was a bit confusing, but their flexibility made up for it.

There are quite a few competitive products out there that offer similar features. I could say that Nutanix performed very well when competing against these other products regarding feature sets; Nutanix came out on top. 

Nutanix Database Service requires significant hardware resources to perform.

Overall, I rate the solution a seven 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.