Nutanix Database Service Reviews

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.

I sell this solution to customers. The use case is for database provisioning from the snapshots. We are using the latest version, 2.0.

It's deployed on-premises.

Requests come from the application team, and they need to have yesterday's data to give to the analysis team. We need to restore the databases, which is a time-consuming process. AI has been deployed within Nutanix. It's very easy to provision the machine within minutes of the application orders. They can hand those over and work along with the AI team to get the data available quickly for business analysis.

It should be able to be consumed by other customers because only the enterprise cloud customers are able to buy this software.

From an architecture perspective, Era cannot be deployed onto any other platform apart from Nutanix.

More databases should be integrated quickly. If any VM is running on the Nutanix platform, like Oracle or SQL, and we right click that VM, from there we should be able to add the database into Era rather than go on the no-Era console.

I have been using this solution for more than two years.

It's stable.

It's scalable. The software depends upon Nutanix. If you have the resources, like memory, then it's definitely scalable.

Technical support is slow sometimes. Because the talent is not available in India, sometimes we need to accelerate calls to the US or another region, which takes time.

I would rate technical support two out of five.

Setup is very simple. The amount of time it takes to deploy depends on the requirement. If it's a Microsoft SQL database, it doesn't take more than a day to deploy. 

One person is more than sufficient for deployment and maintenance.

Not everyone can afford it. It's a bit expensive, so the price has to be improved.

I would rate this solution six out of ten.

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 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.

I use Nutanix to provide managed services for one of the biggest telecom providers. 
We proved managed services to the customer, including the platform and service as well as VM as a service.

It's a vast solution, so it depends on what the customer needs. We provide the Kubernetes cluster, and if you want a particular server, we provide the files. We use Karbon, Era, AHV and Prisim Central. We are also now in the process of testing out the VDI feature as well.

They recently came out with a new version, so there are some new features that I still need to try. So it's hard to say what should be improved. Also, I don't have any essential databases that I'm managing with Era, so I'm not really close to the DBAs and don't know what they need or where there is still room for improvement. The best ones to answer this question are the DBAs because Era is basically designed for the databases. 

I've been using Nutanix Era since 2012, so almost nine years.

Era is a stable solution.

Era is scalable.

I would rate Nutanix technical support eight out of 10. I think they're helpful, but maybe they need more technical staff. Their response was slow once, but that was the only time it happened, so I'm not sure. I don't want to judge them. Maybe I'm wrong.

On the Nutanix side, it's very easy. They can enable a section in seconds or minutes. But on my side, I have some network dependency here and there, it took longer for me. My environment is a little different, so it took me longer. But from Nutanix itself there isn't much to do.

I would rate Nutanix Era eight out of 10. I would recommend it to anyone who is considering it. It has some very good features. It really works with multiple silos in terms of infrastructure, database updates, and migration. So many things are easy with Era. You really don't need to follow the cycle that DBAs usually follow. It's really fast also. It really speeds things up. 

When there are multiple teams, there are frequent new requests for copies of production databases. The load is usually on the DB team to create and maintain the copies. We can optimize the process and make it more efficient using the solution. It is one of the main benefits.

We have seen an improvement in the platform management. The effort required to manage a cluster is reduced. It is our main benefit. The skill level needed to manage a Nutanix cluster is less than that of a vSAN cluster. We can have a less expensive resource managing a Nutanix cluster.

The solution enables us to speed up the creation of new instances. A DBA might take a day or two to do it, but the solution can help us do it in half an hour. The snapshot feature is useful.

The tool cannot be sold without a Nutanix platform. There is a dependency. We can sell the product only to a Nutanix customer. Convincing a customer to choose Nutanix is a huge project. It might take two years. We faced some performance issues with Nutanix. Nutanix has limitations. We worked with the support team to overcome the limitations.

I have been using the solution for four years.

The support is pretty good.

Positive

The initial setup is complex. Moving a database to Nutanix and convincing the stakeholders takes time. Validating the business case and realizing the benefits is a very time-consuming process.

The tool is expensive. We need to work more on the business case. It's not a solution for everyone. It has its own niche market. The product is available as a bundle.

I recommend the solution to medium and large enterprises. It makes sense if a customer has multiple instances and has internal dev teams. It will not make any sense if it's just a production database. The product is suitable if an organization has a CI/CD pipeline to develop new functionality. Overall, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

We use Nutanix Database Services to maintain the entire life cycle of the database. We use it to back up, clone, upgrade and deploy the database. We're providing the DBA on a multitenant infrastructure, where we can complete database management and deploy the database.

The automation and ease of using the solution are great. It saves us time.

The solution should provide more integration with more databases.

We have been using this solution for about a year and a half. It can be deployed both on-premises and cloud, and we are using the latest version.

It is a stable product.

It is a scalable product.

They have very good technical support and knowledge. I rate the technical support an eight out of ten.

Positive

The initial setup is very straightforward, and it took about one hour to deploy. I personally completed the deployment as a consultant. We have five users using Nutanix Database Services. We only require one staff for deployment and maintenance.

I rate this solution an eight out of ten. I recommend this solution to others because it saves operation time and day-to-day tasks. This is a big deal because if you're managing a big infrastructure, the operation time is critical, and with the use of Nutanix Database Services, resources can be better utilized.

This is a very useful solution for database management. 

This solution could be improved by integrating with more database providers. 

I have used this solution for three years. 

This is a stable solution. 

This is a scalable solution. 

The customer support for this solution is excellent. 

Positive

The initial setup was straightforward. 

This solution is reasonably priced. 

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.