Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) Reviews

We have two major use cases for Nutanix Unified Storage. For the first use case, we use the solution to provision volume for our Kubernetes cluster, which is used for telecommunication. If you buy an iPhone 15, the eSIM is downloaded from a Nutanix Karbon AHV, and the volume is provisioned by Nutanix Unified Storage. The second use case I have is with volume, which is also part of the NUS. In some cases, we use Nutanix Volumes for a third volume.

The solution has helped our organization the most at an operational level. Before using Nutanix Unified Storage, we were manually provisioning volume for Kubernetes using heavy technology. We had to do a lot of tasks to provision one basic volume. Now, we are giving big volumes. The solution provides good stability and high availability, which is not the case in the previous version of my volume.

The console and volume management for Kubernetes are very nice and easy to use. The product is good, easy to upgrade, easy to use, and user-friendly.

The solution's monitoring and security features could be improved. Nutanix Unified Storage is not easily managed by the command line.

I have been using the solution since the beginning of Nutanix. We installed the first clusters in 2016 and have been using Nutanix Unified Storage since 2017.

Nutanix Unified Storage is a very stable solution. I have been using it for seven years and have never had a problem with stability.

Nutanix Unified Storage is very easy to scale. You just need to go into the tool's console, click on update, add some memory or CPU, and update. You can also use the solution's console to monitor your performance live.

The solution's customer support is very, very good. I am very satisfied with the support. Nutanix Unified Storage has very good customer support compared to the other tools I use.

Before Nutanix Unified Storage, we used different solutions. We used VMware volume for the Kubernetes clusters. We also used basic NFS on Linux machines, which did not provide resilience and high availability. That's why I was very happy to have Nutanix Unified Storage. It provided high availability, resilience, and performance, which was very good for me.

The solution's initial setup is very easy. First, you have to install Prism Central. Then, you get your file console with one click, deploy the volume, give a name, and give an endpoint.

The biggest return on investment has been the operational time for my team.

I'm very happy with the solution's pricing. I'm using iOS Pro licensing. I'm really happy because I have the benefit of getting one terabyte for free, which is sufficient for my use cases. I'm happy with the cost and licensing because I don't have big volumes. I have a little bit of volume to consume without added cost. So, it's perfect for me.

The throughput or latency of Nutanix Unified Storage for data-intensive workloads works well because we have good infrastructure and networking. Since the networking is recent, we have good bandwidth. We're using little volume, but we don't have a lot of traffic. I have never had issues or struggles.

I have 15 clusters, and I'm using only one terabyte free. I can't see the efficiency of data reduction because I don't have big volumes. Since I don't have a great volume, I can't say that I have ten terabytes, and deduplication has helped me to reduce one node.

I'm the infrastructure manager of our data center. We propose Nutanix Unified Storage. We deliver our volumes, and then the integration team consumes them. I don't know which kind of data is structured or unstructured. We use Cassandra databases for some purposes and Oracle for other use cases.

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

I'm using the solution for profile storage, home drive, Citrix VDI implementations, and containerization.

Nutanix Unified Storage is adding features for easy migration of files to Microsoft Azure. That's helping us to get old data out of the data center somewhere in cheap storage. That's helping us quite a lot. The solution provides highly available file servers.

The most valuable feature of Nutanix Unified Storage is SMB file sharing. We use that feature for our use cases, including the home drive.

The analytics part of Nutanix Unified Storage is too big and should be made smaller and less resource-hungry. I don't use the solution's object storage because I find that part too complex.

I have been using Nutanix Unified Storage for four years.

The solution provides good stability.

Nutanix Unified Storage's scalability is similar to other products. If we need more resources or capacity, you can easily scale out to have more performance.

There's no better support than the one provided by Nutanix. I had one issue. The customer wanted to switch their data centers. We moved the old cluster to the new data center, which worked fine. However, switching back to the original one didn't work. We contacted the support team, but they couldn't help us.

One of the engineers of the NUS team came remotely into the cluster and fixed the issue after spending 13 to 14 hours straight on it. If the support team cannot help us, they will ensure that someone from their company will assist us.

Positive

We previously used Windows file servers or NFS file storage. We switched to Nutanix Unified Storage because it gives us better performance and requires less maintenance work. Implementation is easy, and it comes with Nutanix's lifecycle management. To upgrade the tool, we do our life cycle management in a couple of clicks.

The solution’s initial setup is easy.

We implemented the solution through a consultant.

If a company has five system administrators, the solution can reduce the number of system administrators because the product is very easy. The solution provides a return on investment by lowering costs on the company's system administrators.

I don't see any issues with the solution's latency for data analytics.

Implementing Nutanix Unified Storage has not reduced the number of storage nodes. The solution's implementation removes the legacy file servers we're using. It doesn't matter if we have Nutanix Unified Storage or traditional file servers.

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

The first use case, we mainly want to use it for our Citrix profiles. So that will be the main usage of files and maybe also other applications. 

Before, we had the classic Windows file server. Because Windows file server is just that, one alone, and we want to be able to replicate, recreate it, etcetera. So we tried to use Nutanix Files. Our use case is also that we can then fulfill files replicated on Rubrik.

We also use it for objects, because we can't back it up on a Rubrik, we have another cluster, which then functions as the backup for the object storage.

We haven't already seen the benefits because we're still in the engineering phase. The main focus is that we have failover in place. We always have access to the data, and we're not blocked in case of that.

The best feature is that it's on Nutanix itself. In comparison, if Windows file server gets killed, then all the data is gone but for Nutanix, it's on another layer. 

It gives more security that the data isn't going to get lost. 

The replication is better solved if we have Nutanix Unified Storage because one file site storage solution has at least three VMs. If one VM doesn't work, it gets replicated on the other two, which means we always have access to the data in comparison to Windows File Server.

It's a little bit slow because there's so much in the underlying layers that even after talking with Nutanix support, I couldn't really grasp it. 

There's still a little bit of a learning curve, but the support was really helpful.

We only started engineering with it this year. Our project is now in the phase where we engineer Nutanix Unified Storage, mainly files, but also a little bit of objects.

We have issues with stability sometimes. I found one specific issue kind of bizarre where in one of our clusters, the underlying inode was full.

I thought, for example, the inode, after some time, would delete all data so that it doesn't get full. But in that case, it was full. Then, the whole cluster shut down. It also deleted one of the other files that Nutanix needed to work. Even the support guys didn't under how it happened but they were able to fix it. 

The tech support is very good. One time, I didn't have the Zoom session on my computer. So the guy I talked with told me what I had to do, and I could also ask questions about the template, in terms of how it works or what it is exactly. 

It was really helpful to be able to show the person on the other side what exactly was happening when I asked questions. They were helpful.  

Positive

Initially, we deployed everything through Prism Element, where it functioned perfectly.

Our Nutanix partner told us to do it over Prism Central because if you do it over Prism Elements, then it's tough. You have problems managing it from Prism Central. 

Our focus is not on detecting and blocking ransomware because the Nutanix cluster we are building doesn't have access to the Internet. To be able to go to the server itself, they have to overcome a lot of clogs or boundaries.

I had to do with the licensing for Nutanix Objects Storage (NOS). While NOS comes with one terabyte of free space, if you actually want to use it, even just for development reasons, we have to buy some terras, or otherwise, it wouldn't work.

Overall, I would rate the solution a seven out of ten. With the migration from Prism Element to Prism Central, some things don't really work, but they are always trying to modify it and make changes.

We have a practice of testing different solutions and we completed a POC of Nutanix Unified Storage. 

The capability of Nutanix Unified Storage to store unstructured data is impressive. We have CCTV camera footage from each office location, and we can efficiently manage all the instructional data from a single interface. This is in contrast to Cisco, which represents a more complex system to manage.

Nutanix Unified Storage demonstrates resilience. The solution has the capability to duplicate data across multiple node storages, ensuring that if one node fails, the data remains accessible.

Having the capability to consolidate our storage through Nutanix Unified Storage gives us the assurance that we can oversee all our data under a single management team, rendering it more dependable.

We can utilize mixed storage block-sized objects and combine various databases within a unified interface. 

We can scale up or out without causing any interruptions to our service.

The concept of using the Gflag should not be employed in unified storage, as storage is a particularly sensitive domain. Allowing the use of the Gflag compromises the integrity of the Nutanix system and its established standards. While we do employ the Gflag to meet customer requirements, it's important to note that during maintenance activities, it becomes necessary to reset the Gflag to align with the customer's expectations. Thus, on one hand, the Gflag serves to support the customer, but on the other hand, customers become more reliant on the assistance of the Nutanix support team.

I have been using Nutanix Unified Storage for one month.

Nutanix Unified Storage is stable.

With Nutanix Unified Storage we can scale up and down accordingly.

The technical support is good. Our sole concern arises when we require assistance from them on weekends. We've noticed that the engineers' response time is slower during weekends.

Furthermore, when we ask for feedback regarding the nature of the issue and its resolution, we are only provided with a summary. This leaves us reliant on their support. They do not share internal articles with us; instead, they only provide generally available ones. If they could furnish us with detailed steps, we could address the issues independently, thereby saving time and reducing our dependency on Nutanix support.

Positive

The deployment took two days. We had several dependencies related to the required port openings that we had to satisfy while also adhering to our organizational standards during the process.

Normally we would only have two people involved in the deployment but because it was a new solution everyone wanted to be involved because they were eager to learn.

I would rate Nutanix Unified Storage a six out of ten because my experience is limited to the POC, and I haven't fully familiarized myself with the solution.

We also use Nutanix NCI and Database Service.

The POC involved a total of five people. One person conducted the testing, while the other four observed on Zoom through their screens.

I use the solution for user home directories, profiles, and general file storage.

The product is very easy to manage. File Analytics allows us to track who's doing what. We can set up scenarios based on what the product alerts when somebody creates or deletes a bunch of files.

The solution's deployment and scalability are the most valuable features. The solution is simple and robust.

We originally deployed the file server VMs from Prism Element. So now we have to go back to Prism Element to manage them. Since then, Prism Central has gained the ability to manage file servers. It would be great if we could import older file servers into Prism Central to avoid having to manage things in two different places.

We have issues with software updates occasionally. The new features seem to be rolled out before they go through quality control.

I have been using the solution for three years.

The core infrastructure is rock solid. I don't ever have a problem with it.

The solution is extremely scalable.

The support is top-notch. I've never had a problem with the support. Whenever I have an issue, I typically get a federal person right away, and they work with me until the issue is solved.

Positive

Previously, we used Synology, QNAP, and NetApp. We switched to Nutanix Unified Storage because of its ease of management.

The initial setup was super easy.

The product is pricey. The pricing makes sense when running Nutanix Clusters just for files, but when running it to do everything, the per-terabyte limit gets a little pricey.

We use the solution mostly for SMB shares. Our environment was built using Nutanix. Since Nutanix Unified Storage was built into the platform, we decided to go with it.

By implementing the solution, we want to get rid of traditional NAS, consolidate everything into a single platform and alleviate having to run file shares based on regular Windows VMs. The product provides a single platform for file storage. We run our VMs and have our file shares on the same hardware. It's all protected at the same level of redundancy.

Nutanix Unified Storage has made it very intuitive for the administrators to have a simple console to log in and ensure everything's up and running. We have ransomware protection enabled within files. We also have backups. We are a lab, so we don't have any off-site storage.

The solution narrowed the gap between file administrators and Windows administrators. Typically, file shares are managed by Windows administrators. Now, the same admin can manage the virtual infrastructure and the Windows domain infrastructure in the same place.

Overall, I rate the product a ten out of ten.

We use Nutanix Files Storage for sharing and storing critical data with different divisions and for various services within the company.

What I found most valuable in Nutanix Files Storage is its high availability and ability to scale out with many VMs.

Nutanix Files Storage lacks a user access auditing feature, and that's the feature I want to be added to the solution.

Managing other storage infrastructure on Nutanix Files Storage is an area for improvement. In particular, I want to add other forms of storage from different vendors not currently in Nutanix Files Storage, to the file server, for better management.

I've been using Nutanix Files Storage for four years.

Nutanix Files Storage is stable, so I'm rating it as ten.

Nutanix Files Storage is very scalable. In terms of scalability, it's a ten.

The support for Nutanix Files Storage is excellent. When I open a case, mainly when it's critical, I get a direct response at a maximum of four hours. The Nutanix technical support team always has a solution. My company has opened many cases with Nutanix, and it always gets a solution for each case.

As the technical support for Nutanix Files Storage is very good, I'm giving it a ten out of ten.

Positive

It was easy for me to set up Nutanix Files Storage. I didn't experience any difficulty with the initial setup, so setup-wise, it's a nine out of ten.

Deploying Nutanix Files Storage took a few minutes. It's a process of adding a new file server, selecting the number of VMs, and taking care of the local storage, DNS, and the network.

I implemented Nutanix Files Storage. I am NCSC-certified. I am a consultant, so I could implement the solution without help from the vendor.

As an engineer, I don't have information on the pricing for Nutanix Files Storage. A different team handles that part.

I've recently updated Nutanix Files Storage, so I'm using the latest version.

I didn't experience any problems updating or maintaining Nutanix Files Storage whenever there's a new version. My company updates and upgrades immediately.

I recommend Nutanix Files Storage to others because it's easy to install and has high availability. It's one of the most useful solutions.

My rating for Nutanix Files Storage is nine out of ten.

My company is a Nutanix customer.

We store a lot of our R&D-related files in Nutanix Files Storage.

What I like most about Nutanix Files Storage is the way it makes copies of the data. The solution also has high availability, which is excellent.

Another valuable feature of Nutanix Files Storage is self-service, so users won't have to depend on the IT team much. Users can independently work with the solution.

What's missing in Nutanix Files Storage is the support for multiple intranets or VLANs on the same file from different networks and network devices. That feature doesn't exist today, so the Nutanix product team is working on it, as requested by my company.

There's a limitation with using multiple VLANs on the same file. Right now, it's coming from two different network switches, and the product doesn't support it because it expects all VLANs to go to the same physical switch. This isn't tolerable in my company's LAN environment, so Nutanix Files Storage needs this product enhancement or feature.

I've been using Nutanix Files Storage for over two years.

I didn't experience any outage since Nutanix Files Storage was implemented, so stability-wise, it's going well. I'm rating its stability as nine out of ten.

Nutanix Files Storage is easy to scale out. My company had grown, so it expanded the cluster; scalability-wise, the solution is a nine out of ten.

I contacted Nutanix Files Storage technical support about the product enhancement, and the team was proactive and knowledgeable.

I'd rate support as seven out of ten because there was no solution to my issue, though the team took it as a product enhancement request.

Neutral

Before using Nutanix Files Storage, my company used the traditional NetApp-based vFiler solution. There was no self-service feature in NetApp, so you have to always depend on a storage administrator to set things up, versus Nutanix which was certainly easy to set up, configure, and use.

Scaling vFiler was challenging, so you always had extra capacity compared to Nutanix Files Storage.

Nutanix Files Storage is straightforward to set up, so I'm rating it, setup-wise, as nine out of ten.

Deploying Nutanix Files Storage took weeks, but my company had to transfer a lot of data from the legacy system, which took time. Overall, the project went well.

We implemented Nutanix Files Storage through a system integrator, Wipro.

I find Nutanix Files Storage competitively priced, even its feature set. Its price is seven out of ten.

I would advise people new to Nutanix Files Storage to see how often data is being utilized and decide on a storage strategy based on that. If you only need simple file sharing that requires less access, then you have other solutions that can leverage the public cloud, so you won't have to worry about capacity issues. However, if you're focused on latency and performance, then Nutanix Files Storage would be a great fit. The product is self-explanatory and straightforward, so there's nothing to worry about.

Around one thousand people use Nutanix Files Storage within my company.

The solution is heavily used daily.

My rating for Nutanix Files Storage is eight out of ten.

My company is a Nutanix customer and not a partner.

We primarily use the solution for storage. We've migrated all over all file servers and systems over to Nutanix Unified Storage. 

We had 10 VMs with older technologies. I'm happy to use this as it is really simple and complete. 

The high availability of the storage is important. We have some customer data and it's crucial for us to be able to maintain and secure the data. 

It's a complete product. It works well. 

The security is very good.

We use clusters, and these are not only dedicated to storage. We have VMs, containers, and other types of storage.

The performance has been very good.

We were able to save 20% of our time by using this solution. 

I haven't had any issues with the solution so far.

I've used the solution for three years. 

The solution is really stable. I'm really impressed by the product. 

We've started with three VMs. We now have five VMs in our operations. We have no issues when we try to scale. 

Technical support is good. We've opened cases with them, and my experience has been really good. They are very fast, and they have very good technical knowledge. They come to the calls prepared. 

Positive

We did not previously use a different solution. 

The deployment is very easy. It's no problem to implement it.

I do not have visibility of the pricing and licensing. 

We did look at other solutions. We were able to validate Nutanix against other solutions. It has a complete ecosystem, which is important for us. We wanted more options to extend our environment if we needed to. 

We do not use the solution for AI and data analytics or for preventing and blocking ransomware. 

We have not tried to integrate it with other products. However, I have tried to integrate it with a backup solution, and I didn't have any issues.

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten.

I do not use it myself. My technicians use it for their work. They look at the portal every day. It is open on their desktops all day.

We have time savings and scalability.

It is unified. This is the best thing that Nutanix gave to the world. You can do everything from one point.

It is very easy to use, and we also get the best customer service from Nutanix.

It is a good solution, but every solution can be better. I would like Nutanix to provide a solution for virtual disks. This is the main problem for which we want a solution.

I have been using Nutanix for six or seven years.

Their customer support is great. They provide the best support and service. Nutanix is the best in this aspect.

Positive

I hope that it will stay the way it is. We have seen the changes in VMware and what happened to them. I have heard that Nutanix will raise the prices, but I hope that they will not do that.

When we did the PoC about seven years ago, we found Nutanix infrastructure better for us. It helps us with Kubernetes.

I would rate Nutanix Unified Storage a ten out of ten. We are very satisfied with all the solutions that Nutanix provides us.

My company uses the solution for the filing system purpose. My organization also uses the tool for the application and the APIs installed in Kubernetes to synchronize with the workload services.

The product was useful for my business since it allowed for syncing between the on-premise and the cloud applications, which helped us in a very good way. With the tool, my company was able to have applications that were highly available.

My company has the product installed in a hybrid environment.

Nutanix Unified Storage's throughput or latency for data-intensive workloads, such as AI or data analytics, is good and perfect. The capacities or abilities of the product are based on the configuration and use cases that my company deals with, and I see how the product already works well for us.

Nutanix Unified Storage detects and blocks ransomware threats very well. I rate the tool's ability to detect and block ransomware threats an eight out of ten. The product needs to work a bit more on its ransomware detection capabilities.

In terms of false positives, I would say that I think it is a stable tool that is growing in the right direction. I think that within one or two years, it will be a fully flexible tool.

Implementing Nutanix Unified Storage has resulted in a reduction in the number of storage nodes used in our company, and I think it is possible due to an increased storage capacity per node. With less capacity, the tool can support more applications. In my company, we have been able to save around ten nodes using Nutanix Unified Storage, and such a reduction has been helpful in terms of cost savings.

The solution's most valuable features are its support and speed. In case of any support cases, the tool's technical team provides help seamlessly. The product is very light, so adopting the technology is very easy.

I don't know how the product can be made perfect. Till date, my company has not faced any significant issues with the tool. Considering that my company is already an existing partner of Nutanix, if we plan to scale up, then some improvements are required on the pricing front and the scalability feature offered by the solution.

I have been using Nutanix Unified Storage for two years.

The product is stable.

Scalability-wise, the solution is very nice. The scalability feature of the product is actually available as an add-on which allows users to scale the existing environment by allowing one to put more nodes, more applications, while being able to move it between cloud and on-premises, which is something very great.

In a short period of time, the support team provides a proper solution. I rate the technical support a nine out of ten.

Positive

My company used VMware in the past. We switched from VMware to Nutanix Unified Storage because of the seamless stability offered by Nutanix. Nutanix products are scalable in a nice way, and we can move the tool from the cloud to an on-premises version and vice versa.

The product's initial deployment phase was neither hard nor easy, making it a neutral process for me.

In case, anything happens during the tool's implementation phase, you can open a case with the support team and they can provide a fair resolution.

The solution can be deployed in a span of forty days.

Using the tool, my company has saved around 30,000 USD.

My company did not evaluate any other options against Nutanix Unified Storage.

I rate the tool a nine out of ten.