Nutanix Unified Storage Reviews

The primary use case is to offer a highly available Linux-based file server to eliminate the security vulnerabilities of a Windows-based file server and the pain point of having a single file server, which means you can reboot it during production hours. Besides the general performance and security improvements, it also adds analytics audit trails and, most importantly, ransomware protection. For example, it’s not uncommon for a client to migrate their Windows file shares to Nutanix Files and then File Analytics detects and blocks dormant ransomware files.

The most valuable feature is that it is highly available, solving the pain-point of delaying updates to Windows-based file servers during production hours. And then the second one would be ransomware protection and analytics. It gives you great visibility and protection on your file shares that are otherwise the most common sources of vulnerabilities.

We would love to see the analytics and ransomware protection extended beyond just file servers to virtual machines, but they have a different product that covers that.

I have been using it for a few years. 

As the solution is highly available, it's infinitely more stable than a single file

server.

It is a super scalable solution.

The customer service team is most excellent, and a primary factor when choosing Nutanix.

Positive

It requires a bit of understanding of how Nutanix works. If you're familiar with Nutanix or a Nutanix partner, integrating is fairly straightforward.

For clients running Nutanix, the licensing cost for Files is a small add-on cost.

It does not require extra maintenance than any other software product. One needs to patch it periodically. Every client we've migrated from Windows file server to Nutanix file servers has said, I wish I'd done this sooner. I recommend exploring this as soon as you read about it. It solves issues left out in the wild by Windows file servers that no one is addressing and does so in a super powerful way.
I rate it ten out of ten.

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.

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.

Nutanix Unified Storage will mostly be used for home folders and departmental shares. We do a lot of research, and we use this solution for research storage. There are several instruments that generate a lot of data, and we needed a place to store this data during analysis. We needed long-term storage as well.

Our previous system was a large lake of storage, and it worked well for shares and home folders. One of the things the researchers wanted to do once the file sets were placed was to analyze the data. We mounted those volumes on a server to be analyzed, and it wasn't performing enough. It couldn't keep up with it. With Nutanix Unified Storage, however, we can tailor different file servers for different workloads.

Nutanix Unified Storage will allow us to be more agile when deploying storage for the different use cases that we need. Also, with DR, the failover and failback between the two clusters are very simple in Nutanix Unified Storage compared to most solutions. You click, answer a question, and let it go. In other systems, you have to do a lot of reconfiguring and synchronization, which can take hours or days depending on the length of time that you need to fail back from. However, with Nutanix Unified Storage it's very simple. It makes life a lot easier for us.

One of the things that really sold us on Nutanix Unified Storage was File Analytics and Data Lens. We could always tell how much storage we were using, how many files we had, and even the age of the files, but we could never get a good handle on who was doing what with them. This has been a huge issue for us. For example, if someone moved a folder, we would not be able to tell who did it. We did not have a good way of auditing what was going on with the systems. This could become an issue in a ransomware attack. It would make it more difficult to figure out when we got infected and where we need to roll back to in order to recover. Nutanix File Analytics and Data Lens give us that information. In addition, Data Lens has a mechanism built in to prevent a ransomware attack from getting a foothold on the system. It can shut it down before it does a lot of damage.

Nutanix Unified Storage does a very good job of unifying our organization's block, file, and object storage. It puts it all in one place. From one platform, we can deploy S3-type buckets. We can provide iSCSI-level block storage if we need to. It does a great job with home folders and departmental shares, which is what we mostly use Nutanix Unified Storage for.

We can manage and run its storage from any location. Nutanix Unified Storage does a really good job of that, especially with the newest version of Files, 4.3. You can run it on NC2. That opens up a whole new possibility for us down the road when it comes time to do a refresh on the hardware. As our data centers age, it also gives us another option. We would have to decide whether we want to spend millions of dollars updating our data centers or looking at a cloud-based solution. NC2 provides a lot of advantages over just a standard native AWS or Azure deployment.

As part of our organization's ransomware protection strategy, our security department has a number of ransomware appliances that do scanning. We have antivirus running on the various shares and workstations. What's really exciting for us with Nutanix Unified Storage is that we get another tool to help prevent a ransomware attack. In case something gets through the security's appliances or something slides in through the back door, we have an additional tool to look for that ransomware attack and recover from it quickly.

Other than testing Nutanix Data Lens, we haven't gotten into it yet. However, it looks very promising. We're very excited about it, and so is our security team.

In terms of removing silos in our organization, Nutanix Unified Storage does a good job. My team manages the virtual infrastructure, and that was one of the reasons why we went with Nutanix Unified Storage over some of the other competitors. We're familiar with Nutanix and the platform. It's easy to deal with, and it makes managing a large system with a small number of employees a lot easier.

The current hardware is not as dense as it could be. In our deployment, we have 2 PB per site, and we have to have 24 nodes. That's a lot of cabling and network ports that we use up. More dense nodes would be better.

We tested Nutanix Unified Storage for a couple of months before we purchased it. Last week, we spun up the clusters, and we're starting to deploy the file servers in the shares right now. We're in the very early stages of deployment.

The solution scales pretty well. Once it gets denser nodes, it'll scale better. There are options when you hit limits, especially using objects. You can scale that out, and they have excellent tiering options as well. I'm pleased with it.

Nutanix's technical support is excellent. That was one of the drivers in picking Nutanix. I would rate their support a nine out of ten.

Positive

We used a large lake of storage, and it did well for us. However, as technology moved on, we found that it wasn't meeting all of our needs. Nutanix Unified Storage gives us more flexibility to provide better solutions for our users. We evaluated other solutions and went with Nutanix Unified Storage because of the analytics that it provides and Data Lens. The simplified DR failover was a big factor as well.

With Nutanix Unified Storage, you can deploy file servers either vertically or horizontally. For a large departmental share, we can size it, scale it out, and have a large number of servers so that you can have thousands of users on it. If we're doing an export or a share that's going to run on an analysis server and more speed is needed, we can scale vertically and add more CPUs to add more memory to the file server. This is something we couldn't do with our previous system.

Once we had Nutanix Unified Storage racked, stacked, and everything cabled up, the actual deployment went very smoothly. We deployed 24-node clusters in about three days. We were ready to start building file servers and sharing on them. I was really pleased with how well it went.

Our partner, Choice Solutions, helped us with the deployment.

At this point, it's too early to tell, but I think we will see an ROI. We will probably see a reduction in support costs. We will be able to provide better resources for our researchers, which is the main driver. They're the primary users of the storage.

It's not the cheapest solution. It's in line with other solutions, but it offers features that the competitors don't have at any price point, especially with regard to analytics and ransomware prevention. No one else has any sort of object-based storage available. Nutanix Unified Storage is a lot more feature-rich. This is a situation where you get what you pay for.

My advice, if you're looking into Nutanix Unified Storage, is to definitely do the test drives. Do the research, and compare Nutanix Unified Storage with some others. Look at File Analytics and Data Lens, and compare how well DR works. Take a look at the various options that Nutanix Unified Storage provides and compare them to those offered by other solutions.

I haven't had enough time to really get a good feel for it, but from what I've seen so far, I'm pleased with Nutanix Unified Storage. Thus, I would rate it a nine out of ten. 

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.

We use it for daily operations, primarily to store our enterprise data.

In the beginning, when we first started using Nutanix, we wanted a single solution that could handle both file and block-level data. So it's a single platform, and we also needed inbuilt ransomware protection.

So, we found that Nutanix was the best solution for that. We also researched the deployment process and found it to be quite easy. 

Additionally, we had a POC with them and saw that the interface is user-friendly, making it possible to use it without extensive training.

Nutanix successfully adapts to difficult or challenging life experiences

When it comes to resiliency, Nutanix has built-in redundancy. We can create snapshots with detection, de-duplication, and completion of all the data. So, it's very easy to have replications of free data. If any attacks happen, we still have the data with us.

We are able to store a large amount of data without needing multiple solutions. Nutanix can be scaled for storage and computing independently, which makes us more cost-efficient.

It also simplifies data management operations, giving the speed and flexibility to build more modern applications in on-prem, cloud, and edge environments.

It also protects unstructured data from ransomware and other cyberattacks.

Unified Storage has a remote feature that allows you to manage data from various geographical locations.

Our sales representative can direct us to the appropriate resource, whether it's a PSC, an SE with the system, or someone else who can help. Additionally, if we create a ticket directly with their support team, they have very good product knowledge and are really helpful.

If we are stuck a problem – not necessarily a bug, but just need help navigating something – do we contact our sales representative first, and they can route us to the right resource.

If bugs occur, they work on them and release fixes as early as possible.

First of all, we like the user interface, which is quite easy. And it helps our day-to-day operations very easily; we can do it very easily. 

And afterward, the pre-sales guys are very supportive whenever you get stuck in anything. They will help you on that day. I really have good hands-on experience with the product, and also the support team is very strong.

The flexibility is great. We can easily integrate it with other products as well. Like, it is designed to scale up and scale out easily, allowing the organization to store as much capacity as they need.

We can easily store and manage unstructured data, such as audio and video, in Unified Storage without any extra work.

From a management side, the one thing I would prefer is if it were a bit less expensive for smaller enterprises. It's a bit costly. 

If they provided flexible modules where you could pick and choose features, and only pay for what you use, that would be an improvement.

I've been using it for about two and a half years.

We've observed some occasional lagging when transferring large amounts of data – many GBs at once. This could be due to network factors or something else, but it's not severe. 

For smaller datasets, the transfer happens in real time with no lag.

Nutanix has a good team of people on the technical support side. Usually, when we log a ticket, a support engineer promptly assists us through a remote session or email. 

One thing I want to highlight is that they have excellent product documentation available on their portals, written in simple, easy-to-understand language.

Positive

We used a storage solution from Dell. My company has a policy that requires us to change our security products every five years. 

So, we were looking for a stable and superior product, and after thorough research on the community, we found that Nutanix offered the best solution with its single-platform approach.

We also use the Nutanix Hypervisor (AHV). However, we haven't done the integration because we keep our storage separate.

We had a POC first. During the POC, we worked closely with the sales team alongside the engineers, and it was pretty easy to deploy. 

Once we decided to purchase, the full deployment only took about one or two months. If all prerequisites are ready, it can even be done in under 20 days.

We use the cloud deployment model.

On the Nutanix team, we probably needed around two people. We also had support from our network and security teams, in addition to someone managing the Nutanix deployment itself.

Every product needs maintenance, but with Nutanix, it's mostly about software upgrades. They provide an excellent user interface, and with every release, they resolve issues from previous versions.

It is worth the price. Your investment will be in safe hands. 

The pricing is a bit too high. I would like more flexibility. 

We considered Commvault, but our management and overall team felt that Nutanix was a better solution.

On a scale of ten, I'd give Dell an eight out of ten for security features. And Nutanix a nine out of ten rating.

I'd definitely say go for it. It's a great product. My main advice is to negotiate the pricing with the vendor. Beyond that, it integrates well with your current network environment and should work without needing major changes or disrupting your existing setup.

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

It is a great solution for small enterprises looking for storage options. While it is a bit expensive, the value provided by Nutanix justifies the investment. Your investment will be in safe hands.

Our primary use case is for running an EMR through Citrix.

The reliability and availability are the most valuable features. Reliability is important because it can run my workloads. I need to be able to take advantage of the VMs that are executing on the storage. It has to be reliable. It's also important to have the storage available for scaling VMs on demand. 

We size them accordingly but there's unexpected demand. It's much easier to scale a Nutanix node. Traditional storage doesn't scale so well but Nutanix aggregates it all into one single layer. 

A lot of times we use Golden Images through Citrix and the ability to make those Golden Images available through that entire storage stack is important to us. 

In terms of its ability to remove silos in our company storage, we still need traditional storage but NUS provides availability and single unification. You can scale much more easily versus traditional storage.

I think Nutanix does a very good job with unified storage and they continue to innovate. As they innovate it, there are new features that you can take advantage of. There was something called Shadow Clones that didn't exist with other storages. This feature is relevant for me with what I do with Citrix using the Shadow Clones. It accelerates and makes things more efficient for me.

We don't have issues with the storage. We have had to deal with some infrastructure and general cluster issues but these issues don't impact storage. 

I have been using Nutanix Unified Storage for seven years.

Their support is excellent. They are still engaged even when something isn't their problem. That's one of the biggest asks from a support perspective. I would rate them a ten out of ten. 

Positive

I would rate Nutanix Unified Storage a ten out of ten. We haven't had any problems with them.