What unique aspects of HCI does Nutanix provide that other HCI solutions do not?

If you have multiple workloads that requires high performance you should also consider DataCore's hyper-converged solution. Its management to snaps in well with hyper-v and is hypervisor agnostic. Works on both fiber channel and iSCSi network protocols and you can scale up on storage via DAS or even leverage existing storage on the network. It's robust and I know of situations where an end client put it in their environment to handle the bigger enterprise workloads that a few other HCI were not able to provide the performance needed for.
You can start from 2 nodes and scale from there. Your storage mix can be straight SSD, HDD or hybrid with 10% SSD. Check their website for detailed features and capabilities

We looked at EMC VXrail, Simplivity and a custom-designed solution based on EMC ScaleIO but Nutanix came on top as we wanted a cost effective solution that will give us the ability to manage any workload and allow us to do box-to-box replication. Prism (Nutanix's management interface) played a big part in the assessment as well and everyone in the team just love it. Our solution is based on CISCO UCS hardware and Nutanix Ultimate license. We have large clusters on Hyper-V, VMware and Xenserver since 2010 and we had no second thoughts when opting for Acropolis hypervisor (AHV). We choose AHV as we wanted to move all files to AFS (Acropolis file system). We are currently moving our VDI infrastructure to Nutanix as well and so far have 300 Windows 10 VMs running without any performance issue. Our Nutanix HCI project is without doubt the best technological investment we have made in a while. And as regards to Nutanix support, they are very quick to respond and with a resolution time of less than 30 minutes.

There are a lot of players in this space and the market should make all of them competitive. Most of the time the cost of the hardware is minor compared to warranty agreements, advanced functions, and support. Nutanix doesn't have the same education buy in that VMWare has, but you really don't need a lot of expertise with these solutions, especially in a smaller department or company. You really can own your IT environment without having to keep a lot of experts on staff to manage it.
Unless you are dependent on Hyper-V for licensing(using enterprise server versions to stack Windows VMs), then Acropolis(KVM) on Nutanix OSCetnos() should give you a solid experience for provisioning machines, which you then manage as Windows systems. I don't think having a competitor running on a competitor is a good thing(Hyper-V or VMWare on Nutanix). There is too much opportunity for the vendors to shift blame. I feel the same about build your own since your reputation, not the OEMs reputation is on the line.

Hit Lenovo up hard for pricing. They haven't had much success in the Data Center since they were spun off of IBM (Blame it on IBM not wanting to sell Intel and keeping all the sales people with the relationships) and they might be very aggressive on pricing and help standing up the solution. The triangle competitive environment you want is Dell Nutanix vs Nutanix vs Lenovo Nutanix. For Lenovo, call up and ask to talk to the Data Center Technical Sales Rep for Federal/State or for your area. They should be able to give you the competitive info you need and maybe a good price. Also the hardware support for Lenovo is still IBM. For Nutanix, talk to them after Dell and Lenovo come back with proposals. That is when the fun begins!

Also, don't think that you need one huge infrastructure. If they give you a better price with smaller blocks, build your virtualized Windows infrastructure on smaller Nutanix blocks. You might want to look at having Nutanix from Dell or Lenovo for some roles and straight Nutanix for others.

Finally, make sure that there are no restrictions on who you can purchase from. Some bureaucrats think the brand label on the outside of a "made in China" box means it is more secure. That is not the case, but there are sometimes legal issues that come up for some government sales.

Nutanix is the most mature product among all the hyperconvered solutions out there. That being said, it has further incorporated a lot of features, functionalities and third party support from different vendors.

In the roadmap, Nutanix is being developed as a software only platform which means you can buy any server with the recommended configuration and you can purchase it as a software.

It is also gearing towards cloud integration (with Google Cloud). They are coming up with a solution that enables you to replicate to cloud, Nutanix to Nutanix for DR, no need for VM conversion.

You can also replicate to a smaller frame if

It has also integrated a low cost back-up called HYCU from Comtrade, you can replicate to an external NAS or File storage solution for your back-up requirements at minimal cost.

Third party support for back-up is also being provided by Comvault, Rubrick and VEEAM for Acropolis Hypervisor.

Development cycles are also fast, meaning you get updates and enhancements almost every quarter.

You also get a hypervisor solution from baremetal, this hypervisor (called Acropolis) is constantly being updated and I wouldn’t be surprised if it surpasses VMWare in the near future because it is being integrated into the Nutanix infrastructure. You only pay for your Nutanix yearly maintenance which to maintain the updates and support.

This same hypervisor is being given a 25% performance boost as it bypasses the virtual network layer and making the system directly communicate from processor, memory to ssd/hdd.

Nutanix is also integrating a workload automation software called CalmI/O into the Acropolis package. What this does is that you can automate your workflow on the applications within Nutanix (if you have any workflow requirements from ERP, CRM and BI applications this is a plus factor).

Most of the enhancements they are doing is geared towards Acropolis and its good you are looking into this solution.

As you can see Nutanix has pulled away from a hyperconverged infrastructure into the only infrastructure you may need. It is being integrated to industry standard applications like SAP, Oracle, Citrix and Microsoft platforms more and more and development for features and functionalities is gearing towards application centric since it has already bypassed the infrastructure stage.

I hope this input helps you in your decision, you can’t go wrong with choosing Nutanix though one caveat is to size the solution properly. Auto tiering is critical to its function (moving data from ssd to hdd) and the performance of the machine is dependent on ssd so make sure to have the Nutanix team size data usage properly.

If you can afford it, I would recommend going all flash if you see high I/O requirements for your system. If not, go for the higher capacity SSD drives for Hybrid configurations.

What you’ve listed is correct. If the plan is to use anything other than ESX as a hypervisor, that eliminates VXRrail & VSAN right off the bat. Nutanix’s largest selling point is their ease of use and vision for the future. There is a reason that Nutanix owns over 50% of the hyper-converged market and simplicity and dependability are high on the list. Nutanix has a user net promoter score of over 98%, that speaks volumes.

Hi,

I performed a VDI environment to AB-Inbev last year using Nutanix because it has a unique feature that allows for distributed caching of virtual disks across different Nutanix nodes.

The result of enabling Shadow Clones is lower latencies on reads for workloads such as VDI, Cloud and Dev/Test.

If you really need help, please reach me using my contacts below and I’ll be help to share my lesson learned of this project.

I think that you are in the right way, We have customers with Acropolis and
it’s perfect. VXrail is great if you are considering stay in VMWare forever
and regarding the feedback from different customers may be it’s not the
case and could be a little more confuse for customers if you think that may
be Vmware will be offering VSAN, uff, hard to explain that.

My recommendation is go ahead with Nutanix, look like they have some years
ahead on this field (Data Locality, Multi hipervisor, Cloud, simple, etc..)

Nutanix is so much more than a Hardware/Software-Solution.
You can add the following to the equation:

Superior Support (I mean it! Nutanix has one of the highest ratings for support)
Agile Development with new features without additional payment ( e.g. just released SMB-3-Support for integrated Fileserver)
One-click features: change your hypervisor (one-way) within an hour

There are a lot of features that others have as well.
But the Nutanix implementation is mostly smoother and better thinked through.

You mentioned a lot of features and functions but I'm curious about what is your application workload, which RPO/RTO are you expecting from replication. This should drive the final decision. I think HCI is a great innovation inside the datacenter but is not the Panacea. As correctly pointed out by RaziSharir HCI is great for VDI and stateless applications, or even with statefull apps but with some points of attention.
Nutanix is a great product and they put the hype on "Data Locality" but the question is does it really matter for your application ? The average response time of a "healthy" SSD is between 0,5 and 1 millisecond and the latency for a "healthy" 10Gbe if between 5 and 50 MICROSECONDS (0,005 / 0,050 milliseconds) does this 1% gap really impact your application ?
In my opinion the beauty of HCI is the scale-out concept, where you increase the performance adding nodes, and system is self-balanced with a well distributed use of all resources (Cpu, RAM, Disks, Network) across the "cluster".
I will also evaluate if Hybrid HCI is still valuable for the business case. Storage tiering is cpu consuming and it gives you benefits tipically if your application works with 80% of IOPS on 10-20% of data. With new TLC high density SSD (16TB widely available) + dedup and compression features storage tiering/hybrid storage make sense for specific workloads or Petabyte range capacity.
May be I'm not updated with latest release but beware also of Nutanix RPO which is 30 minutes on async replication and RTO which is 5 minutes on sync replication.
Back to your initial question IF you need storage tiering, IF you need "data locality" and all the features you mentioned probably the best fit is Nutanix.

Surely it stops with the fundamental requirement “DO NOT want to pay for VMWare”

The other solutions run on VMware only….not sure why further embellishment is required?

For the record I really like both solutions, both work well, both are rapidly increasing IT market share. But….as you ask.

Nutanix locality I think is over played somewhat (10Gb Ethernet network latency is 5-50 μs (0.005ms to 0.05ms), Ethernet latency is 100x to 1000x lower than SSD read latency)
as is vSANs counter that the Nutanix CVM becomes a hotspot. The CVM is doing a lot of work so needs the appropriate amount of resource, 24-32GB mem). I see many happy Nutanix customers and personally I believe software defined is the future direction of travel for internal IT with either route.

For the record I like HyperFlex ability to support FibreChannel, but has scale limitations compared to the others it also has a resource hungry controller VM, 64GB of memory.
Architecturally it should be able to support multiple hypervisors, but last time I checked just VMware.

VxRail can be overpriced for the extras you get compared to straight vSAN,(10TB cloud tiering, RecoverPoint for VMs, and management software), it depends on the technical ability of the staff and if those additions are worth it in your case.

vSAN Hybrid, does not have dedupe and compression, therefore potentially more nodes leading to more license and subscription costs, more hardware, more networking, ultimately more CapEx and OpEx. The vSAN SSD caching tier is just that, for cache, Nutanix Hybrid SSD is used for permanent data too. With vSAN Hybrid you should allow 30% slack space headroom, at 80% capacity automatic rebalancing kicks in, consuming resource, and therefore does impact sizing. I can usually provide an All Flash vSAN configuration at a lower TCO than a Hybrid vSAN, with obviously the benefit of far more performance.

Some other Nutanix plus points….

1. Nutanix has the ability to mix both SSD and Hybrid nodes in the same cluster

2. Flexibility to add storage only nodes in case that requirement grows at a different rate to compute

3. Easy future migrations and one click upgrades

4. I like the ABS and AFS functionality, seems a step ahead of vSAN

5. I like Calm
https://www.nutanix.com/calm/

6. I like Prism, with the trending/runway analysis

If I needed Metro or RoBo I would consider vSAN over Nutanix, underneath the hood the process is slicker at the moment.
Native replication also used to be an issue for Nutanix with a 1 hour RPO for asynchronous, though this is now down to 1 minute, compared to vSANs 5 minutes.

HI Nick,

Here’s my response:

Nutanix unique differentiators:
1. Multi-hypervisor support: Nutanix support the following: VMWare ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix Xen Server and Open KVM
2. Data Locality
3. Support for inter-mixing of different node models in one cluster
4. One-click firmware updates
5. One-click hypervisor update
6. One click software update
7. Intelligent Distributed Data Tiering
8. Acropolis Block Services (ABS) - ability to share iSCSI lun or disk to physical server
9. Acropolis File Services (AFS) - native file services via SMB protocol

One major advantage that Nutanix has (compared to VSAN based Vxrail) is that Nutanix is hypervisor agnostic. A single PRISM central (Nutanix management app) instance can see and manage Nutanix cluster in HyperV, AHV and ESXi. One advantage of that would be, if you just need a storage node, you can add a AHV node to existing ESXi cluster or HyperV cluster. You do not have to pay licensing fee and Nutanix can handle multiple hypervisor cluster all together.
The other advantage would be , if you loose a storage drive Nutanix start to build the redundancy immediately. All host shares the rebuilt process and hence less noticeable. Some other HCI solution are RAID based and rebuild process depends on whether drive is pulled or not and can be in non-complaint mode for long time. Rebuild process is also depends on single node and hence more noticeable
There are other point that can be mentioned. If you need more info, please contact me

The strenght in Nutanix platform is being hypervisor agnostic. So you can choose whatever suits your company. If you have Hyper-V licenses and support, you can use it or start using Acropolis from the beggining. It is already embedded and is very useful despite not having all features VMware has.

Financially speaking, using Acropolis you can save lot of money and only Nutanix can do that (with support). I think it is reason enough to adopt this technology.

Just clearing, I don't work for Nutanix. I work with several HCI products and what I see in the field is Nutanix getting better than other vendors no matter hardware is in underlying.

Hi

Thanks for your inquiry.

So I do have several items of interest that you can feel free to use, in your justification.

First, your summary highlighted below is very correct and certainly is well known and well used on many of our clients justifications.

I, as a former Nutanix client for local government, bulleted my justifications as follows: (starting with your summary at the top of the list.)

• Data locality
• Multi-Hypervisor support ( in my opinion, it still is necessary to note that all hypervisors are supported, as I have seen clients start off with Hyper-V, and 2 years later, a new CIO comes aboard who loves VMware, and starts bringing this in. By noting that all these are supported, you justify a very long and flexible roadmap. Additionally, I had another government client who hosted VMs for a smaller organization that had VMware, and with the Nutanix was able to do migrations from VMware in Production to Acropolis in DR and then back to VMware in Production, all seamlessly).
• Integrated backup and DR
• Native Hybrid deduplication automated
• Independent scaling
• Single pane of glass Mgmt
• Network Visualization (with Acropolis, this really takes off and goes into more depth)
• High NPS score
• Follow the sun support. This is very critical: Nutanix support is that you are speaking with a Tier 1 person from the start, that can solve any issue with you. If it turns out that it is a Microsoft, Oracle, or some other manufacturer that is at fault, the Nutanix support get the respective owner and solves the problem with you. There is no “I’m sorry, but the system is good you need to call Microsoft, or Oracle or VMware, etc”, Nutanix stays with you until your issue is solved.
• Great ROI and low TCO – it is quite typical to get an ROI of over 300% in 3 years. By the time you factor in savings on:
o AC
o Power
o Footprint (data center real estate)
o Cabling (copper and fiber)
o Fire Suppression
o Training (no need to get personnel with certifications, literally a ‘caveman’ can run this)
o Troubleshooting and maintenance (the system immediately grants you visibility into every VM, Storage, Usage, Operations, everything that you can possibly want to see, is right there on the screen. Help desk calls on issues solved in minutes not hours.)
o OPEX
o No single point of failure
o Installs in hours (a single 3-node system is installed in less than an hour, it sometimes takes longer to rack & stack)
• PRISM: Product Management
o APIs
o Instant search
o Customizable dashboard
o Intelligent operations
o One-Click upgrade (this is amazing, I have done this while production is running and the system first tests the upgrade on a node while production runs on the others. Then when this is passed and verified, it starts swapping. If anything occurs during this the entire system is unaffected as Prism notes all states and this is resumed).
o Just in time forecasting – predictive capabilities on planning your needs ahead of time

SO what is unique about Nutanix, it is the only HCI system that includes all that you can possibly ask for, under the hood, and no strings attached. Since this system is designed from the ground up and includes all that is required, other than a power outlet and network port, Nutanix rolls out upgrades that instantly modifies and adds new features during your ownership. For example, my first Nutanix was a Hybrid (flash and Disk) and at that time (2013) I was told that if I wanted all flash I would have to build a separate cluster. Now with the latest software release, I can mix and add all-flash systems in. So having this capability is akin to Captain Kirk asking Scotty for more “warp drive” and Scotty getting a software upgrade from Starfleet, while the Enterprise is in deep space, no need to return to port and change any parts.

No other manufacturer has this set of combined advantages that altogether makes up a certified HCI solution. Every one of those others that are mentioned do have some areas that are similar, but not this winning combination.

Finally, you mentioned that you must purchase on a State Contract, I do not know what state you are in, but in Florida, we sell Nutanix on GSA 70 State Contract, actually below the costs of the GSA 70 pricing, as Alturna-Tech.

This is why many State, Federal and Local agencies have already adopted Nutanix, and why one agency in particular has the largest (over 50,000) VDI deployment on Nutanix. Why the US military has Nutanix.

Also, the ROI/TCO is the final justification piece that Nutanix qualifies by doing a deep dive into your project and works out the actual numbers on a 3 to 5 year roadmap.

After being a client for 5 years, I left and started consulting and hosting events, and became quite successful as I proved over and over that once you past the established and legacy 3 tier mindset, it becomes clear as day that these new technologies are long overdue, and that in fact we have all played it too safe with costly and temporary solutions.

Test Drive Nutanix at www.nutanix.com/testdrive

Please also take a look at PLEXXI – Hyperconverged Networking. This is the last remaining frontier of the infrastructure that is being transformed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkmKVX_8J9s

If you are migrating off your current Hyper-V, it is no longer required as you could migrate to the native hypervisors of either Acropolis or Scale Computing HC3, which are KVM-based. Hypervisors are a commodity now so no reason to pay a premium for VMware licensing.

Nutanix Acropolis and Scale Computing HC3 are similar but HC3 is designed for greater simplicty and lower TCO. Sounds like you've already been looking at Nutanix but give Scale Computing a look before you make your final decision. They have quite a few customers in local government.

While HCI is a good option for VDI use cases, I’d be reluctant to assume they also do everything else equally as well or at all :-(
In fact, regardless of the virtualization used (vmware, hyper-v, kvm or even openstack), this technology by design is not really optimized for stateful use cases, ie.. Big-Data, Databases, composite apps, distributed and/or clustered apps.
HCI has almost been defined and only optimized for VDI. Given the latest and greatest from Docker (container technology driven by Google K8s), you would see more HCI vendors making claims and attempts to adopt this tech.
It is easier said than done, next to impossible when stateful use cases are involved and mostly applicable too stateless where the added value of HCI is questionable…

I have been looking into a lot of different HCI vendors including Yottabyte, ZeroStack, Simplivity, Vmware Vsan, Datrium, Scale, Nutanix, Nutanix on Lenovo, Scale on Lenovo, Starwind, Nodeweaver, and OpenStack. Our environment is too small to justify running OpenStack so I ruled that one out.

We are mainly a windows shop so either Hyper V, Vmware, or kvm would work for us.

Simplivity looks great with the data dep/compression being offloaded to a card, thus reducing the workload on the CPU and allowing you to theoretically cram more vm's per core. Budget wise though it looked like it was designed for bigger environments than ours. They claim up to 40:1 dedup/compression and a 1 TB VM restore in 60 seconds.

Scale is simple to manage. It's easy to use, take snapshots, failover, etc. But you pay per year per node for license, support. Nodes are retired when you are done paying licensing.

Nutanix - annual maintenance and licences fees quoted at around 9% of price paid. I found limitations with the starter license that would be solved with the next tier, but the price jump was a lot.

Nodeweaver is an open source product that combines open nebula and a few other projects. The software is licensed per node per year. If you are the roll your own type, take a look. Had way more options to configure and items to setup than Scale or Nutanix.

ZeroStack - software only - looked good, but the price was more than I wanted to spend any more time looking into.

Datrium - not exactly HCI, but rather keeps a copy of the vm on the compute host it's on a commodity SSD (850 evo for example). Then the writes are replicated to the Datrium DVX node. Like a traditional 3:2:1 architecture but instead it's only the writes that get pushed to the DVX (SAN).

Nutanix or Scale on Lenovo - awaiting quotes to look into further. If Nick is right and this can be run on refurb'd hardware with a warranty - that would be a good fit for our environment. Hard drives fail, but cpu, ram, mobo, and power supplies, not so much.

Starwind Virtual SAN - need to look into further - but has promise.

per 1 AUG 2017, Nutanix already sold SW only, customer could purchase their own HW, I had closed a few deals for SW only, this even leverage the choice of server, like Fujitsu, UCS, HP DL380& DL580, as long it comply with Nutanix software matrix, to ask for the matrix please contact partnerhelp@nutanix.com

note:
for Nutanix apliance or NX series there is a gurantee support could be renewed min 6 years,
because Nutanix flow is annouce End of Sale than next year annouce EOSupport, from annouce EOSupport its 5 years before it's really end the support,
For license pro or ultimate there is a lot of choice from 1 year-5 years or one time purchase only also available,
I had seen a lot of Customer very happy with the deployment and after sales,

personaly I had seen a lot Happy Nutanix Customer,
1 customer is my highlight because they move from HP HC250 only after 4 months buying because that product cause more problem than what it could deliver.

We investigated Nutanix and were very close to considering it as an addition to our environment. In our environment, we leverage Cisco UCS and NetApp SANs and run VMWare. For an organization supporting 3500-4000 employees with approx. 2800 desktops, 600+ servers, this configuration provides value and HCI is only an awareness consideration.

The key drivers that I was interested in are:

* Self contained, small implementation – With our existing infrastructure, leveraging it to use on the smaller sites is not cost effective
* Alternative to Hyper-V and VMWare – Although we are a VMWare shop, I consider it on the higher end of the cost spectrum. We have not invested in their add-on value propositions like Mgmt, Cloud or NSX as they are too highly priced. We leverage SolarWinds for Application and Infrastructure monitoring and alerting as well as VMWare usage assessment. We aim to maximize our utilization of this infrastructure.
* Automation – I also found their system management automation offerings to be very intriguing. One of our adjacent City’s is leveraging a Nutanix implementation for a Fire Hall. Their comment was basically there is nothing to manage, it just runs. That was compelling in my opinion to consider.

They do have a unique way of looking at things, it just didn’t quite fit with some of the internal views, and the cost benefits would be realized in the operations effort area which is much more difficult to put $ values on. In the end, the costs were on par with how we can deploy to a SAN and VMWare infrastructure even to a small site. It was only marginally less expensive and operational concern won out in the decision. We will keep them in mind going forward.

Mark

Have just been through a similar exercise as yourself. Also work fro a small "state agency" am faced with similar constraints, though we didn't have to put hyper-v into the mix. We went through a selection process weighing up what we needed in a solution, the cost of the solution. As of right now Acropolis just didn't cut it as a hypervisor ready platform. They release often though so maybe not to far away.
Once we crunched the numbers, looked at suitability, mangeability and functionality VMware/VSAN still came out on top as we run it on highly configurable and supportable Supermicro server hardware. It was by far the cheapest, and ticked all our boxes. If state run, like us, we get a good deal form VMware which made it an even better proposition.

for me as a principle I don't like to get locked by this kind of Black Box technologies Nutanix or anything equivalent because they all have certain limitation like what Hypervisor they support and what Hardware platform they support both provides me the restriction hence we built our own Hyperconverged systems using EMC ScaleIO what any Hardware that suits the Bill and SLA

with Nutanix you could mix the type of hardware different proc or base model server.

there is capacity forecast in license PRISM PRO, this is very effective one day once the cluster size reach over 100 nodes, another feature which I like is multi tenancy, with that feature you could create a few account for different departement or user which they could only see and modified their VM in Nutanix,
basicly with this feature Nutanix become the most simple private cloud deployment ever.

Last but not Least, the microsegmented firewall feature also very cool, you could push the policy from the firewall directly to have it right infront of the VM, and with each VM different configuration.

overall Nutanix is so much ahead from its competitor. it's no longer called a Hyperconverge but an Enterprise cloud platform.

I would rec'd looking at HyperV with Starwind Virtual SAN. You can scale compute and storage independently and have a better solution over all for much less money. Veeam will handle your backup and replication. The biggest problem with Nutanix, aside from cost as you will see is that the license dies with the hardware, so guess what? In 3-5 years when you want new hardware you have to purchase the entire solution all over again. Another thing that is a big problem with it is if you want to add a node after the initial purchase, the price will be really high. When hardware and software and not tied together, you will obtain much better pricing. HyperV / VMWare are very mature hypervisors, while KVM (Acropolis) is nice, the ecosystem for 3rd party add-ons is extremely tiny, think about it. You can obtain this solution (hardware and software) directly from Starwind sales with 1 SKU AND buy it with refurb'd hardware to get an even price break with the same Dell warranty. Depending on how many nodes you need, you pricing could easily be 1/3 of what Nutanix would offer you, so you'll look like a rockstar to your boss. I strongly urge you to look at this. I was very close with Nutanix, however once I pulled back the covers and dove into the details, it wasn't so attractive anymore. $100K for 3 nodes of Acropolis was insane!

Fantastic review and comments. Much appreciated!

Nutanix is way beyond traditional hyper converge. The magic is their software that will run on several platforms, not only is simple, scales, but is predictable scaling and analytics , cloud ready with ability to go to and from cloud and determine which and when cloud is best place to run solution.

It has been 15 months since we purchased Nutanix. So I will not try to
compare Nutanix to other HCI solutions, since things may have changed.

I can say that we are happy Nutanix customers, and System Administratrion
efforts are lowered than our previous non-HCI solution.

We are still running VMware. We will try Acropolis at some point in the
future, when we have time.

I think, the summary is OK and it’s by far the best HCI if you want to avoid VMware. For me the integrated Snapshots to another Nutanix box is a DR solution. If you need a backup to a cheap storage box, I would use Veeam or maybe Rubrik. Meanwhile both announced support for AHV. For me the integrated self-service and the support for different hardware is also important.

Here’s a few bullet items but I think

1. Nutanix built a new alternative homegrown hypervisor removing the need for VMWare licenses.

2. Boasts up to 4x performance improvement for any workload with no additional hardware or software license

3. Modular additions for compute, storage or both.

Generally, both options for HCI show promise. Traditional VMware architecture, VX Rails, and Nutanix architectures have pros and cons from what I have seen and heard, but it really comes down to what your needs are your budget as well as your in house skill sets.

Nutanix expansions can be a bit steep I heard. Myself, I would like to see more maturity in the Nutanix product on the overall performance metrics of our applications and how they deal with the overall workload performance using their homegrown hypervisor and features.

I understand ASU currently has a lot of infrastructure built out and applications running Nutanix. ASU is looking to move more production workloads over to the Nutanix architecture. I think his name is Sean. I can send you his contact info if you want to talk to him about his architecture and the overall performance.

Hope this helps.

The hardware platform that all HCI manufacturers are marketing belongs to Supermicro, so there is no advantage or disadvantage in that.

Second, we have Nutanix as a manufacturer whose sole objective is to specialize in Hyperconvergent solutions, all its strengths are focused on HCI.

About the Competition:

We have HPE Simplivity, VXRail, Cisco, VMware and Huawei.

HPE Simplivity is not HCI at all since the software-defined storage for HPE Simplivity is Hardware Defined Storage because it has a physical card that performs all the HCI functions, with this we will not be able to grow at the controller level compared to Nutanix does with CVM we go from 32GB to 64GB or more.

VXRail is a powerful solution since they are also part of the DELL EMC franchise with VMware, we must add the amount of experience of both physical and virtual worlds, but also the lack of honesty when promoting old products to Latin America, placing little solutions updated at high prices, I think that does not affect your region.

Cisco, of cisco I do not know much in Latin America, I regret not being able to contribute in it.

Huawei owns FusionvSphere that has VMware vSphere Enterprise-level qualities at one-third the price of this VMware, in short FusionSphere is competitive with high VMware solutions at a very low price.
Adding that Huawei has the additional Networking feature defined by Software, apparently others do not have this quality and maybe if at a high cost.

Nutanix has taken most of the necessary features for a company at an economic cost, Nutanix has the following qualities:

Deduction
Compression
Erasure Coding
Location
Snapshots
Clones
Tiering
Resilienci
Cloud Connect
Native Disaster Recovery
Backup to the Cloud
Visionary I have integrated with the Cloud
Supports multiple Hypervisors (cross hypervisor support, cross hypervisor DR)
Metro Availability

World class technical support

Personal Appreciation: Nutanix as the preferred solution is honest, accurate, not over dimensioned, and business-class that meets the essential needs of any Data Center.

Without another in particular, thanks for commenting on my answer.

Thank you very much

Your reasearch looks accurate to Nutanix's value. Believe the differentiation you seek is in how the system updates itself. That's a really nice feature. At least that's what we are hearing from clients. Happy to lend additional guidance. Tim Cullen/champion solutions group

I think it will not be appropriate to give you a specific criteria about Nutanix (as alone SDS SW itself), and this because actually at DELLEMC (of course part of Dell Technologies) we also sell “Nutanix” as our Dell XC Series HCI solution and as part of our HCI Portfolio Options (as OEM into our servers).

Please give a Look at this link: http://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/servers-storage-and-networking/sc/hyper-converged-infrastructure

We sell DELL XC Series since 4 years ago (our PowerEdge servers with Nutanix OEM), now we also sell VxRail Appliances with VSAN (from VCE´s EMC acquisition) also we have our Ready Nodes (our PowerEdge Servers with VMware VSAN OEM), and at the end but not least we sell Microsoft Storage Spaces Ready solutions and also OpenStack SDDC Rack Solution.

What some Internet Market lover doesn´t say is that DELLEMC has the most Complete and Extensive Portfolio for HCI Solutions and they are the TOP OF ART in the HCI World (Nutanix, VSAN, VCE).

Hi,

Maybe this information can help.

https://www.whatmatrix.com/comparison/SDS-and-HCI#

While Nutanix is probably your best bet for core HCI for VDI use cases, I’d be reluctant to assume they also do everything else equally as well or at all :-(
In fact, I’d argue that regardless of the virtualization hypervisor they use (vmware, hyper-v, kvm or even openstack), this technology by design does not really optimize for stateful use cases, ie.. Big-Data, Databases, composite apps, distributed and/or clustered apps.

HCI has almost been defined and only optimized for VDI where they shine. Given the latest and greatest from Docker (container technology driven by Google K8s), you would see HCI vendors making attempts to adopt this tech to replace the virtualization based one. Well..., easier said than done, next to impossible when stateful use cases are involved and mostly applicable too stateless where the added value of HCI is questionable…

Kinda long answer to a short question - bottom line is the HCI in general (and Nutanix in particular) might not be a good option for anything other that VDI or pre-packaged very well configured enterprise apps as ERP or CRM.

Let me know if you need further info, thanks

Razi

Nutanix is the only HCI that has a hypervisor included at no additional cost. All the bases are covered that exclude one vendor for one reason or another.

What State do you work for? I am an expert in this category too and might be able to help there as well.

I am completing a project where the customer went to a SDDC solution. Nutanix for HCI is the best option. Customers are tired of paying for VMWare licenses are they are taking advantage of Acropolis.