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Dell vSAN Ready Nodes vs Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) comparison

Dell Technologies and Nutanix are both solutions in the HCI category. Dell Technologies is ranked #12 with an average rating of 8.5, while Nutanix is ranked #3 with an average rating of 8.5. Dell Technologies holds a 2.6% mindshare in HCI, compared to Nutanix’s 8.4% mindshare. Additionally, 93% of Dell Technologies users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 94% of Nutanix users who would recommend it.
Dell vSAN Ready Nodes
Read 17 Dell vSAN Ready Nodes reviews
  • 2,548 Views
  • 2,030 Comparison Views
93% willing to recommend
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructur...
Read 197 Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) reviews
  • 12,656 Views
  • 5,694 Comparison Views
94% willing to recommend
 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 31, 2024

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) and Dell vSAN Ready Nodes are competing solutions in the cloud infrastructure market. NCI has a competitive edge due to its more feature-rich platform and better customer support.

Features: NCI is known for its one-click upgrades, data locality, deduplication, compression, scalability, and disaster recovery. Dell vSAN Ready Nodes emphasize storage solutions with features like storage auto-tiering and redundancy, along with a distributed file system and scalability.

Room for Improvement: NCI could enhance integration with software-defined networking, improve cloud feature offerings, provide better pricing transparency, and add support for external storage solutions. Dell could benefit from improvements in automation capabilities, further scalability, pricing flexibility, and better cloud environment integration.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: NCI offers versatile deployment options with on-premises, hybrid, and private cloud environments, backed by a responsive and knowledgeable customer support team. Dell vSAN Ready Nodes focus on on-premises and private cloud deployments but receive mixed feedback on deployment ease and customer service consistency.

Pricing and ROI: NCI pricing is premium due to its extensive features and excellent support, leading to significant long-term ROI through reduced operational costs. Dell vSAN Ready Nodes are perceived as expensive with less flexible pricing but both solutions report positive ROI by improving storage and hardware maintenance cost-efficiency.

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To learn more, read our detailed Dell vSAN Ready Nodes vs. Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Report (Updated: March 2025).
Buyer's Guide
Dell vSAN Ready Nodes vs. Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI)
March 2025
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Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Dell vSAN Ready Nodes
Ranking in HCI
12th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
17
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructur...
Ranking in HCI
3rd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
197
Ranking in other categories
Software Defined Storage (SDS) (3rd), Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) (1st), Hybrid Cloud Computing Platforms (5th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the HCI category, the mindshare of Dell vSAN Ready Nodes is 2.6%, down from 3.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is 8.4%, down from 8.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
HCI
 

Featured Reviews

Niraj Shah - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers good performance and is easy to use
The product's price is an area of concern where improvements are required. The price of Dell vSAN Ready Nodes could be lowered. Dell's competitors offer many products at very good prices. I face some issues with the stability of the product, making it an area where improvements are required. In the future, I want to receive technical support directly from the vendor.
Read full review
MahendraPanchotiya - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers a unified platform, reduces downtime, and simple updates
Nutanix offers a unified platform for managing databases, virtual machines, and applications. This simplifies management by consolidating everything into a single interface. While Nutanix may have a higher upfront cost compared to other hypervisors, it can significantly reduce the resources needed for infrastructure management. With our previous hypervisor, we needed nearly ten IT personnel. Nutanix has allowed us to streamline our team to just three members. We use a combination of database technologies, including SQL databases and web servers such as IIS, BHP, and NGINX. Nutanix features helped our organization reduce downtime. I don't recall the last time we had downtime related to Nutanix because it is such a stable product. Nutanix, a reliable product, helps us streamline our processes, which in turn improves company revenue. We began to see the benefits after two years, with a 40 percent reduction in operational costs. We migrated 200 servers from AWS to Nutanix. Nutanix may not consolidate applications, but it helps us run them more efficiently on its platform. Updating is simple with one click. I would rate the updating processes 10 out of 10. Adding compute and storage on demand is not difficult. However, we need to factor in the existing and new firmware and software requirements.
Read full review

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The most valuable feature of Dell vSAN Ready Nodes is the flexibility of the nodes. Additionally, if there are any critical issues they update us through emails. The issues are taken care of remotely on the system."
"The solution immediately expands storage area when you add nodes."
"vSAN ReadyNodes offer easy scalability, which has proven beneficial for storage needs."
"No concerns regarding the footprint in the data center."
"I rate vSAN ReadyNodes as a nine out of ten."
"The most beneficial feature is the consolidated storage which is the vSAN. It handles most of the heavy work."
"We find the initial implementation process simple and straightforward."
"The most valuable feature is the set of user tools that are available."
More Dell vSAN Ready Nodes pros
"The most valuable feature I have found to be the Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV)."
"The solution offers impressive performance."
"Acropolis' main advantages are high performance and availability."
"The interface is very good. Before we used this solution, we had separate storage and switches, but with the hyper convert, it's all in one."
"It supports multi-cloud integration that includes AWS, Google, and Azure."
"Performing a Nutanix software upgrade is a very simple and non-disruptive process."
"It has solid performance and provides data locality."
"It is less expensive than VMware products. It is also a little bit more flexible, but it really comes down to price for us."
More Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) pros
 

Cons

"Scalability is an area that could be improved. We are looking at a maximum of 32 nodes now in a cluster, but going to 64 or 128 would be a major advantage."
"Although vSAN ReadyNodes work well, a faster firmware lifecycle with the release of validated firmware catalogs more quickly would be a desired improvement."
"We have experienced some issues with performance."
"The deployment is done by doing it one by one and could be simplified."
"Dell EMC vSAN Ready Nodes is a great hyper-converged system that is a perfect platform for supporting any kind of workload. The only workload that it's not designed to support is big data."
"This product is not sufficiently scalable."
"Dell vSAN Ready Nodes doesn't perform as well as IBM. There are significant limitations, especially with scalability and flexibility over time. For example, adding drives can be problematic if the specific drives aren't available with older nodes that are four or five years old. Unlike IBM, Dell vSAN Ready Nodes isn't as flexible and doesn't scale easily. Additionally, while present, features like deduplication and compression don't perform as efficiently as they do on IBM. Our experience shows that the tool isn't as robust or flexible as advertised."
"Compatibility with other hardware nodes needs to be improved."
More Dell vSAN Ready Nodes cons
"The documentation could be improved."
"Native File-Services are under heavy development and Container Services just came out."
"The initial setup can be a bit difficult."
"As of now, Acropolis and VMware cannot talk to each other. Until we have some kind of interface, it would be much better for Nutanix if they built an interface which can talk. Otherwise, if I have a VMware stack and I already have a Nutanix stack, I create containers, I create clusters on VMware, I create clusters on Nutanix. All of these clusters cannot talk to each other. Then it has to be then subverted as a parallel execution. What happens then is that I have to work in two different environments within my data center. Practically, they are two different data centers but physically and logically, they are one. If they cannot talk to each other that creates a lot of issues. That is something which Nutanix has to develop because for Nutanix it is very simple. For example, Oracle is using a function called GoldenGate. They have a feature called GoldenGate which allows them to talk to various different environments which must really help."
"The reporting feature isn't very good."
"NCI's pricing is expensive."
"The storage and back-up facilities could be improved. We need day-to-day encrypting of the database."
"Regarding third-party backup solutions, the only agentless option is Commvault, which is expensive, complex, and requires intensive vendor training."
More Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) cons
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"My company makes yearly payments towards the licensing charges attached to the solution. The solution is expensive."
"Comparing the price of Dell vSAN Ready Nodes to other solutions it is not expensive."
"The tool's pricing is competitive compared to others. The tool's licensing is based on annual subscriptions."
"There is a problem, which is the lack of an integrated price structure."
"The price of the solution was reasonable."
"The solution is more expensive than a traditional array. The prices are skyrocketing."
"We have a four-year contract to use Dell EMC vSAN Ready Nodes."
"Able to grow with smaller, more linear increments of investment"
"We are aware of the pricing since we renew every year, at almost $100,000 per year."
"Many of my customers have issues with Acropolis' licensing model because they are charging the customers based on two things— the CPUs and the capacity in the solid stack disk — and that's a problem. Nutanix's competitors are not licensing that layer, so this is something that they should change. They should abandon this licensing model because it's too complex. Technical support is bundled with the subscription."
"If they could further reduce the cost, that would be great. I would like to see the cost be less than the equivalent three-tier architecture."
"We have a three-year license for the use of this solution."
"The basic license that comes with the box allows basic virtualization features but advanced automation features would require an upgrade of licenses."
"Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure is expensive."
"NCI is quite expensive compared to other products. It would help us if Nutanix considered affordability when releasing new products. We have an annual license and are considering extending it for another year."
More Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) pricing and cost advice
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Comparison Review

it_user244362 - PeerSpot reviewer
Aug 30, 2015
Nutanix vs. VMware EVO:RAIL vs. FlexPod
Originally posted at www.storagegaga.com/dont-get-too-drunk-on-hyper-converged/ I hate the fact that I am bursting the big bubble brewing about Hyper Convergence (HC). I urge all to look past the hot air and hype frenzy that are going on, because in the end, the HC platforms have to be aligned…
Read full review
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
14%
Government
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Educational Organization
36%
Computer Software Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Dell vSAN Ready Nodes?
If I consider the overall product, I would say that it is an excellent solution that offers very good performance and stability.
See all answers
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Dell vSAN Ready Nodes?
There is no specific licensing model for vSAN ReadyNodes as it is linked with Broadcom VMware's solutions rather than Dell's. As a group under Comcast, we receive very good pricing from Dell due to...
See all answers
What needs improvement with Dell vSAN Ready Nodes?
Although vSAN ReadyNodes work well, a faster firmware lifecycle with the release of validated firmware catalogs more quickly would be a desired improvement.
See all answers
What is the biggest difference between Nutanix Acropolis and VMware vSphere?
We found the reduced power consumption with Nutanix Acropolis AOS a very attractive feature. We also like the interface that allows you to talk directly to your VM from the present software. We fou...
See all answers
How do I choose between Cisco Hyperflex HX Series and Nutanix Acropolis AOS?
Cisco HyperFlex HS series vs Nutanix Acropolis AOS Cisco HyperFlex gives extended hyper-convergence functions from core to edge and multi-cloud environments. It helps IT and OT teams deploy hyper...
See all answers
Which would you choose - Nutanix Acropolis AOS or VMware vSAN?
We found the reduced power consumption with Nutanix Acropolis AOS a very attractive feature. We also like the interface that allows you to talk directly to your VM from the present software. We fou...
See all answers
 

Comparisons

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Compared 14% of the time
Dell PowerFlex vs Dell vSAN Ready Nodes Logo
Dell PowerFlex vs Dell vSAN Ready Nodes
Compared 9% of the time
Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series vs Dell vSAN Ready Nodes Logo
Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series vs Dell vSAN Ready Nodes
Compared 8% of the time
Dell XC Appliance vs Dell vSAN Ready Nodes Logo
Dell XC Appliance vs Dell vSAN Ready Nodes
Compared 2% of the time
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VxRail vs Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Logo
VxRail vs Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI)
Compared 8% of the time
VMware vSphere vs Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Logo
VMware vSphere vs Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI)
Compared 6% of the time
Dell PowerFlex vs Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Logo
Dell PowerFlex vs Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI)
Compared 6% of the time
HPE SimpliVity vs Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Logo
HPE SimpliVity vs Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI)
Compared 6% of the time
Hyper-V vs Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Logo
Hyper-V vs Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI)
Compared 5% of the time
More Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Competitors
 

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide
Dell vSAN Ready Nodes
March 2025
Dell vSAN Ready Nodes reportDownload Dell vSAN Ready Nodes product report
Buyer's Guide
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI)
March 2025
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) reportDownload Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) product report
 

Also Known As

vSAN Ready Nodes
Nutanix Acropolis AOS, Nutanix AOS, Nutanix Acropolis
 

Overview

Dell EMC vSAN Ready Nodes are pre-configured building blocks that reduce deployment
risks with certified configurations, improve storage efficiency by up to 50%1
, and can help
you build or scale your vSAN cluster faster.14 Whether you're just getting started, and/or
expanding your existing VMware environment, Dell EMC is here for you every step of the
way with consulting, education, deployment and support services for the entire solution.

Dell Technologies

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is a top-ranking HCI software, cloud management tool, and Software Defined Storage (SDS) tool that is marketed as the foundation for users' hybrid clouds. It offers a powerful and secure hyperconverged infrastructure to deliver all data and applications at any scale and on any cloud. The solution offers a complete software stack that allows users to unify their hybrid cloud infrastructure. 

NCI’s services include computer, storage and network, hypervisors and containers, and deployment in public or in private clouds. The product also comes with built-in resilience, disaster recovery capabilities, self-healing, and high-security capacities. It provides further deployment flexibility through several software and hardware options and platforms. NCI includes a full set of enterprise capabilities. It can also be deployed on a wide range of servers from popular manufacturers.

The capabilities of the product are categorized into three main groups:

  • AOS storage
  • Flexible and open compute
  • Automated and secure networking

Outside of these categories, NCI also offers other capabilities:

  • Integrated disaster recovery
  • Full-stack lifecycle management
  • VMware with Nutanix
  • Intelligent operations

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Features

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) offers its customers various features and tools in each of the previously mentioned categories. The available features for users currently include:

  • High-performance: This set of features utilizes hardware advances such as NVMe and RDMA to accelerate users' most demanding applications with consistent performance. The tools in this feature category work alongside data locality to ensure successful results.

  • Foolproof resiliency: These Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure features protect data and keep it available by facilitating advanced distributed consistency algorithms. Users can utilize these features to protect their data from issues like bit rot, hardware failures, and even entire site failure.

  • Flexibility: This set of features allows storage to be sized for the needs of each organization and expanded promptly and easily so that the organization and its data can grow. The features offer flexibility to users in terms of applying storage policies logically on a pre-workload basis, instead of being tied to hardware.

  • Hypervisor choice: Users can choose from the leading hypervisors - Microsoft Hyper-V or VMware ESXi. They can also leverage the built-in hypervisor AHV that Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) provides.

  • Integrated virtualization: These features offer simplified automation and AHV streamlined operations. The services in this category are optimized for high performance and reliability.

  • Kubernetes: Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) offers features to build and deploy cloud-native applications on intelligent distributed infrastructure. Apps can be integrated with cloud-compatible storage and both building and deployment can be achieved within the same platform.

  • Microsegmentation: Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) offers features to prevent malware spread and reduce attack surfaces by leveraging machine learning (ML).

  • Virtual networking: This set of features allows users to easily implement multi-tenancy in their environment or stretch networks across clouds.

  • Centralized network management: Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) provides organizations with a way to manage networking configurations centrally. Users can utilize it across their human-computer interaction (HCI) environment with simple virtual switch management.

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Benefits

The product offers various benefits to users who utilize its capacities. Some of these include:

  • NCI reduces technology sprawl and frees up technical resources to allow organizations to focus on other activities, potentially reducing costs for the business.

  • The product allows customers to deploy, scale, and bridge to the public cloud to be able to react in evolving business environments.

  • Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure improves data availability while simultaneously protecting it against several kinds of failures and attacks.

  • The solution offers high-performance, resilient distributed storage for all workloads.

  • Working alongside Nutanix Cloud Platform, NCI offers simple management of data from one console.

  • Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure works by the zero trust philosophy, protecting users' apps and data through specially designed security protocols.

Reviews from Real Users

According to Gerhard J., an IT manager at Q4 Fuel, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) provides serious reliability and stability across the entire system makes for ROI.

A solutions architect at a computer software company describes NCI as a stable, straightforward to set up, and scalable solution.

Nutanix
 

Sample Customers

Rackspace
St. Lukes Health System, the City of Seattle, Yahoo! Japan, Sligro, Empire Life, Hyundai AUS, and many others.
Buyer's Guide
Dell vSAN Ready Nodes vs. Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI)
March 2025
Free Report: Dell vSAN Ready Nodes vs. Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI)
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