Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) Reviews

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.

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.

My use case is quite complicated because in our society we need to know how to integrate Nutanix products and we need to understand how to integrate technical products. Nutanix is a bit more challenging to use, start, administrate, and deploy, but overall a very stable solution and quite a good tool.

All of my clients are secret clients for military use or industrial use and, in all cases, we are on-premises.

There is room for improvement in the solution's customer service.

I have been using this solution for two years.

My opinion is that this solution has very good stability. Maybe it's better than, for example, DataCore, because there are more servers. So you can move your data easily to a different server. When it comes to moving data, it's better than DataCore.

When it comes to scalability, it's not as easy as, for example, DataCore, but it's scalable. When you have a lot of storage to add, it's pretty good. When you have small storage to add, it's more complicated than DataCore.

Customer service is more difficult to call and they do not responding as much as, for example, DataCore. It's not the same level of satisfaction compared to DataCore. Responses could be faster.

I would rate their customer service a seven, on a scale from one to 10, with one being the worst and 10 being the best.

Neutral

The license is paid on a yearly basis and they're quite expensive.

I would rate their pricing plan an eight, on a scale from one to 10, with one being the worst and 10 being the best.

I would recommend Nutanix for people that can manage their computing infrastructure. Because when you have Nutanix, you need some expertise in computing science, because it's not very easy to use and administrate.

We only have about three clients on Nutanix.

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 are a managed services provider, and we customize solutions for every use case. For example, we have a client who built up file servers on Azure and found it very cost prohibitive. Thus, they wanted to move back into Nutanix Unified Storage to reduce costs. Our clients have seen a 7% to 10% reduction in storage costs. We have been able to achieve a 4:1 compression using Nutanix Unified Storage.

We have one client who is currently doing a POC with Nutanix Data Lens.

We have been able to improve efficiency metrics such as performance, dedup, and energy savings by using Nutanix Unified Storage.

One of our clients has 14 different locations, and having a single pane of glass with Nutanix Unified Storage would be a great help for them. We would not have to create 14 different consoles.

Nutanix needs to improve their cybersecurity options at the storage level.

We've been working with this solution for a year.

We have not seen any issues with the stability of the solution.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. With a few clicks, you can stand your storage up. It reduces the overall life cycle of deployment within the ecosystem.

We have seen an ROI. When we build a solution for a five or six-year contract, we factor in the total cost of ownership. The total cost of ownership for Nutanix is very competitive.

Compared to other solutions, Nutanix Unified Storage is cost-effective and efficient. It also has good performance.

I would recommend Nutanix Unified Storage and rate it a ten out of ten. You will be able to bring in scalability and flexibility. 

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.

The solution helps our organization to store very critical data.

Implementing Nutanix Unified Storage has resulted in a reduction in the number of storage nodes by 13%.

Nutanix Unified Storage is a stable solution that provides good storage and efficiency.

I have been using Nutanix Unified Storage for three years.

Nutanix Unified Storage is a very stable solution.

The solution's technical support is good. We opened some cases on the website, and the support team responded very quickly.

Positive

The solution’s initial setup is easy.

We implemented the solution through an integrator company, named Microdata.

The solution's pricing is better compared to other products.

Before choosing Nutanix Unified Storage, we evaluated other solutions. We chose Nutanix Unified Storage because of its quality.

Overall, I rate Nutanix Unified Storage a nine out of ten.