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. 

Our primary use case was turnaround time from server deployments, patching, and database restoration. Our main approach was turnaround times on new deployments, patching, and restoring of databases. We can restore a 2TB database in about 45 minutes, if that. It used to take days to do a restore for our warehouse refresh. Now, it is literally taking under an hour, which is a drastic improvement.

Our patching went down from about 40 hours a month to automatic schedules, so we don't spend a lot of overtime anymore from a patching perspective. Also, we have reduced the turnaround time for server deployments from an always-on availability group perspective from about four days to one hour.

Nutanix Era has helped optimize database performance to an extent. When we moved to the full Nutanix stack, we saw about 70 percent performance enhancements, going from the old physical to the Nutanix stack.

It has saved quite drastically on space. We have saved about 4TB just on one database, looking at the DR copies.

The strain that Nutanix Era backups make on the system is basically zero. So, it is quite nice to use Nutanix Era from a transactional log backup perspective.

The patching is the most valuable feature. We spent a lot of time and effort on the patching of our SQL instances after hours. With Nutanix Era, you can schedule and automate them during your normal operational hours (during the day). You schedule all the patching, then everything happens automatically with minor tickets from the engineer. So, our patching, which took four hours, went down to an hour for the engineer. This is much better for us from a return on investment perspective.

From an always-on availability perspective, it has simplified the process quite extensively. While this is not such an important feature for us, it has simplified things as a centralized access point to all our instances.

With all the advanced logging that takes place within Nutanix Era, it definitely has increased the visibility of our team into the actual processes which are running, what are being consumed, long-running queries, etc. Within Nutanix Era, it is a simple view.

I have been using it for four or five months.

Once it is set up and configured, it has brilliant stability.

Scaling has been quite easy, making changes to the actual VM was very simple. Based on the requirements, you can adjust it at any given time without having a major impact.

We have a DBA team of four engineers who all work on it. Hopefully, going forward, we can push it more towards the developers so they can roll out the database refreshes by themselves, because it is that simple. That should hopefully take quite a substantial load off my team in the near future.

We are still incorporating all our processes into it. At the moment, we literally just started up. We are migrating all our servers onto Nutanix Era. I think it will take another three to six months before we are entirely running on it. After that, we will start introducing it to the business to get the developers to do their own database refreshes, but that is something that we are planning going forward.

Deal with the technical consultants directly, because they are the guys who roll everything out of the way to support you.

It was all on the physical hardware, and that was very bad. That was the old way of doing things. We are modernizing it now, which is why we looked at the full Nutanix Era stack.

The initial setup was a little tedious and complex. If they could make the setup slightly more user-friendly, then that would definitely be beneficial. If they could give a clear indication of what ports are required across the business and multiple VLANs, then your prep work can be done beforehand and before you do the actual installation. Because the documentation that was provided was not 100 percent accurate, so we had to do a lot of custom firewall rules after we deployed Nutanix Era.

We first deployed it in DR to determine the workload, usage, etc., because we have quite a big environment. So, we deployed it to the office, then did all the test cases, proof of concepts, and everything within our DR space. Once we were happy with that, we rolled it out to production. The rollout to production went very fast. We figured out all the issues beforehand when deploying to DR.

Getting everything configured took about two weeks, with a few troubleshooting sessions with Era's technical team. Even when we were experiencing issues, it was quite pleasant. The support structure that they have is excellent. They have skilled resources who can assist with every single query that you have. It is the same with post-deployment issues.

For the turnaround time that it takes to troubleshoot issues, it definitely makes the process of coming back to business much faster. So, it definitely has increased the turnaround time on our normal queries that we have had from a database perspective.

We did a return on investment justification. We could get rid of our current backup software and consolidate that into the actual licensing cost. We should see a return on investment within three years and start making our money back.

Era is quite expensive. The thing that will be a showstopper for them in the long run is if you look at it from a technical perspective on what it provides and weigh it up against consolidation of multiple other software suites. 

We looked at IDERA from a performance perspective and Redgate from a monitoring perspective. However, I don't think, for the entire solution that Era provides, that it has much competition. It is a single solution that provides you new deployments and monitoring as well as everything in one bucket. 

If you look at the monitoring for long-running queries, it has given us good visibility of where the problem areas lie within the big databases. This gave us a good indication/direction to fix indexes and look at performance bottlenecks.

It is a great product. I would definitely give it a 10 out of 10. With the technology that it provides and the simplicity of the actual solution, there is no one who can compete with it.

We needed to migrate all of our Oracle databases to comply with Oracle licensing requirements. That's what led us to get Nutanix hardware because it's an all-in-one: storage, compute, everything. Oracle accepts that. You only have to license the CPUs within that hardware cluster. Since we were going to have to provision all of these new servers and all of these new databases, it seemed like a great time to automate that. That's what Era brought to the table, the automation of server and database provisioning.

In addition to that, we were very interested in the one-click patching solution. And to automate things, you have to have a standardized offering of templates for the software, the servers, and the database. We were also looking for that standardization.

Era has helped us to cut deployment times. It used to take 10 days if we had to get a new server, and I can now do it in two hours, and that includes provisioning the database.

We have an enterprise-level backup product that we're required to use, so we don't rely on Era's version. But occasionally that other system goes down and I wouldn't have any automated backups except for what I have with Era. For us, it's a great fallback, but for other companies, it could be an awesome first-line backup. It's very elegant the way they designed it. It's quick and it doesn't take up nearly as much storage space as traditional backups. It would definitely help to save on tier-one storage. For other companies, that would be a big selling feature.

When it comes to performance and flexibility with Oracle workloads, it's excellent.

The patching should be a one-button function. Also, it works about 80 percent of the time, but 20 percent of the time it requires manual intervention. And sometimes, until you understand the technical underpinnings of that process, you can't fix it. I thought we would move past that. In the last version, they broke a big chunk of that for me, and that's why I'm waiting for the new release because they promised me it would fix the problem.

I've been using Nutanix Era since they released it, which was about three years ago.

It's very stable.

Like anything that runs on Nutanix, as a VM, it's a piece of cake to scale it. We've never had to because it was sized properly in the first place. We're not in a growth state for databases, but it's just very simple to scale either way, up or down, which is great.

For our databases that run on Nutanix hardware, which is almost all of our Oracle databases—the ones that can still be patched—we use Era. We use it for all databases except for two that are still running on Solaris for various reasons. The only thing that we haven't done, and have no plans to do, is to expand use of Era for non-Oracle database engines, because we're moving those to the cloud.

Their customer support post-deployment is knowledgeable and helpful. I might have had special access to people because we were one of the first customers and I developed a relationship with them. I feel that I was helping them beta-test some things.

But if you called up and opened a ticket today, especially if you're used to Oracle support, you would find that Nutanix support is excellent.

We didn't have a previous solution. Nothing was automated before we brought on Era. We were looking to migrate, consolidate, automate, standardize, and reduce maintenance costs. 

And there's an additional challenge that all IT departments have now: finding database administrators. Nobody is coming out of school wanting to be a database administrator. In the workforce, I would estimate that the average age of DBAs is at least 55. We can't find people to train or hire and half of our database staff retired within a two-year period. We had hundreds of databases that had to be migrated and Era was really crucial to that effort. The only way we could see to train new people was to make things as simple and automated as possible. 

We chose Era because we were using Nutanix hardware.

On a scale of one to 10, the complexity of the setup was an eight. You need to have a consulting partner from Nutanix to help set it up. A lot of the backend connections have to be created to the Nutanix cluster and that's going to be outside of the skill set of the DBA.

We had all of it set up in two and a half days of working sessions.

We have two Nutanix clusters that are in geographically separate data centers. Originally, we had to deploy one Era per cluster. Then, as part of continuously improving the product, they centralized Era's administration and went to more of a central server with agents. That way, we could have one deployment of Era with two agents, one for each cluster. So we really went through two implementations.

A consultant from Nutanix was part of the purchase. We didn't have to pay extra for it. We had some issues during our deployment, but they were all resolved. It wasn't perfectly smooth, but what deployment ever is? On the whole, they are dedicated and knowledgeable and they were there for us until it was right. I couldn't have asked for more than that.

I don't think it saves time on the patching, but if we had not had this solution to migrate all those databases, it would have cost us at least $1 million in salary for the entire migration. Using Era it cost us only $50,000.

It's priced fairly. It follows the Oracle model based on CPUs or the number of databases. It's not too expensive and it's not inexpensive. It's a good value. Of course, I'm not paying for it, and I'm the one that it's helping by reducing my work. But I haven't heard managers say, "Oh no, we can't get that, it's way too expensive."

When you go looking for something from Oracle that automates things and makes your life easier, it's always going to be a minimum of $500,000. Era's nothing like that. For something that works on Linux or Unix, and Oracle databases, you expect to pay more than you would for something that runs on Windows, but you get what you pay for.

My advice would be to engage with the Nutanix Era team as soon as possible to plan the implementation and to learn what you need to know about it. Make sure you read the documentation and work with the team so that you're comfortable troubleshooting any problems. In addition to the product being good, the support for Era is excellent. Take advantage of that to make it easy on yourself.

We don't use it for snapshots and to clone databases, but if we did I believe it would decrease the time it takes to do those things.

In our organization, there are three people who use the solution on the Unix team, and there are three DBAs who are the primary users.

Overall, I don't know anything else that does what it does and I would give it a 10 out of 10.

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.

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.