


Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct and Nutanix Unified Storage compete in enterprise storage solutions. Nutanix Unified Storage seems to have the upper hand due to its advanced features offering compelling value for price.
Features: Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct has robust scalability, advanced resilience with automatic failover, and dynamic provisioning. Nutanix Unified Storage offers a unified platform with integrated data services, customizable workflows, and broader edge-to-cloud deployment capabilities.
Room for Improvement: Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct could improve in customer service consistency, user interface intuitiveness, and expanding comprehensive backup and recovery features. Nutanix Unified Storage has room for improvement in initial deployment complexity, pricing structure flexibility, and enhancement of native monitoring tools.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct integrates with Windows Server, making deployment straightforward with extensive documentation, though customer service can vary. Nutanix Unified Storage offers a hyper-converged infrastructure for seamless deployment, praised for responsive customer service and streamlined support.
Pricing and ROI: Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct offers competitive pricing, especially for organizations within the Microsoft ecosystem, providing a favorable ROI through reduced infrastructure costs. Nutanix Unified Storage requires a higher initial investment, justified by its comprehensive feature set and long-term operational efficiency, leading to significant ROI through enhanced data management capabilities.
It does not require much management once you set up correctly, so it saves time, allowing an admin to focus on other work.
While our systems will be out of life in a few years, I believe that in that time, the payback from Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct will save us money on virtualization and storage costs, making it extremely beneficial after six years of use.
I see some ROI in Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, such as saving time and money, and I estimate these savings to be about 30%.
For me, the biggest return on investment when using this solution is that we do not have to have much support staff to run it.
The scalability challenge with previous systems is lessened with Nutanix since we can expand by adding new hardware without needing migrations.
We are saving approximately 20% to 25% compared with the competition.
I would rate them an eight out of ten.
The support is done through email and is not that great, making it a very problematic area I've been dealing with for over four years.
Their technical support has been perfect lately, so I would give it a 10.
There were issues that the Microsoft team could not pinpoint, leading to delays in finding solutions.
Microsoft focuses on Azure as a cloud service.
They come on the call, start troubleshooting immediately, and resolve issues effectively.
They are very knowledgeable, and if they can't solve the problem, they find the answer within a day or so.
I would give the customer service and technical support a ten out of ten.
Pure Storage FlashBlade is scalable.
There are between 5 and 10,000 people using it in our organization.
The scalability of Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct has been extremely good, allowing for both vertical and horizontal expansion.
It has limitations; it's configured for eight servers per site but can be scaled to 16 servers.
The scalability of Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct is limited.
This means you don't have to buy everything upfront; you can buy what you need and add more as you grow, which is advantageous.
These three components utilize scalability tools, enabling storage addition to nodes and supporting independent, linear performance growth.
I find the scalability of Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) to be excellent, and I would rate it a ten based on my clients' requirements.
In case there is any issue with any blade, the data is moved to another.
Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct has been incredibly stable as long as it is configured correctly; incorrect configurations lead to surprises, which is common with any product.
Storage Spaces Direct is stable enough, however, there can be some glitches.
We have not experienced these issues with Nutanix, which I attribute to the all-flash technology, the quality of their platform, and the responsiveness of the hyper-converged infrastructure.
Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) is very stable.
It automatically triggers tasks, causing performance issues.
Technical support definitely needs significant improvement.
Its configuration should be easier.
One way Pure Storage FlashBlade can be improved is by having more compatibility between the FlashArray and FlashBlade.
The licensing for Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct could be improved to be clearer, as calculating license requirements requires significant expertise; even Microsoft resources do not provide the full picture needed for licensing, leaving gaps that become evident once we move to deploy solutions.
One year ago, I had a problem, and it was difficult to identify and solve due to a lack of tools.
The performance of Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct is challenging when trying to support both NVMe and SATA SSDs, and there are problems regarding performance that need to be addressed.
The main concern is pricing, which could deter some customers; addressing this would enhance its appeal.
The system should move towards AI-driven optimization and enhance S3 object storage capabilities.
System downtime can disturb the entire ecosystem and impact all applications.
The pricing of Pure Storage FlashBlade is expensive compared to other products I used from other companies in the past, but one benefit is that they have built-in ransomware protection.
Regarding pricing, it is okay; we needed exactly this in size, and the price was a lot lower than competitors, making it good for us.
I find the Azure Local to be a bit expensive, especially due to hidden costs associated with additional tools needed for monitoring and alerting.
Pricing is an advantage of Storage Spaces Direct.
Compared to buying three or four vendor solutions, it is much cheaper.
The cost has doubled for the same amount of data, which was a challenge when presenting use case justifications for the increased cost.
Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) has definitely helped reduce our total cost of ownership.
We can plug in many blades, and we can have data up to one terabyte.
The best features of Pure Storage FlashBlade include better throughput and better performance.
Pure Storage FlashBlade's scalability is one of the most valuable features, and importantly, it always works, allowing for seamless upgrades.
The redundancy and fault tolerance features of Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct have helped maintain data integrity and availability in my company by providing multiple copies through three-way mirroring, delivering hardware performance needed for our applications, which is crucial.
For caching, I use disks with more total bits written, which protects the main storage because writes are combined.
The price performance is the best advantage of Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct.
Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) is appreciated for its fault tolerance and redundancy at the cluster level, which ensures reliable storage of files, folders, and other information accessible on the client side.
The cybersecurity features of Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) when dealing with unstructured data, such as ransomware threats, provide the ability to detect and back up block-based storage, allowing me to restore repositories or sets of block storage with one button click, which is automatic.
My experience with using Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) for data-intensive workloads is that we have many SQL Servers and they perform much better than they did when we used hybrid converged previously.
| Product | Market Share (%) |
|---|---|
| Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) | 4.1% |
| Pure Storage FlashBlade | 3.3% |
| Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct | 6.1% |
| Other | 86.5% |



| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 11 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 11 |
| Large Enterprise | 21 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 8 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 1 |
| Large Enterprise | 3 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 26 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 30 |
| Large Enterprise | 64 |
FlashBlade is the industry’s most advanced scale-out storage for unstructured data, powered by a modern, massively parallel architecture to consolidate complex data silos (like backup appliances and data lakes) and accelerate tomorrow’s discoveries and insights.
Storage Spaces Direct uses industry-standard servers with local-attached drives to create highly available, highly scalable software-defined storage at a fraction of the cost of traditional SAN or NAS arrays. Its converged or hyper-converged architecture radically simplifies procurement and deployment, while features like caching, storage tiers, and erasure coding, together with the latest hardware innovation like RDMA networking and NVMe drives, deliver unrivaled efficiency and performance.
Nutanix Unified Storage offers seamless scalability and high availability with a user-friendly interface, supporting multi-protocol operations while integrating effortlessly with cloud platforms. It enhances performance and security with features like ransomware protection and advanced data management.
Nutanix Unified Storage streamlines storage management by consolidating infrastructure and optimizing virtualization. It reduces operational complexity and enhances performance across diverse workloads. Despite feedback on integration challenges and suggestions for improving pricing, API capabilities, and security, it remains a key choice for dependable storage solutions. Calls for streamlined implementation and enhanced AI capabilities reflect its potential to better support evolving organizational strategies, driving cost efficiency and data accessibility.
What are the key features of Nutanix Unified Storage?In industries, Nutanix Unified Storage is deployed to centralize storage needs, improve database efficiency, and enhance file sharing and security. Organizations use it to consolidate infrastructure, support virtualization, optimize costs, and facilitate virtual machine hosting. It's instrumental in scalable object storage, ransomware protection, integrating legacy systems, and catering to critical applications.
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