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NetApp HCI [EOL] vs Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

NetApp HCI [EOL]
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
5.6
Number of Reviews
32
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructur...
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
199
Ranking in other categories
Software Defined Storage (SDS) (5th), HCI (2nd), Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) (1st), Hybrid Cloud Computing Platforms (5th)
 

Q&A Highlights

Miriam Tover - PeerSpot reviewer
Service Delivery Manager at PeerSpot
Oct 31, 2019
 

Featured Reviews

MB
Chief Information Officer at Lucart S.p.A.
Crashed continuously, complex to deploy, and bad after-sales support - NETAPP FIXED the problems in 2022
Their after-sales support, SLA, and third-parties availability should be improved. NetApp's support is very difficult to engage. We have an SLA of onsite support within 24 hours. but they don't respect the SLA. Its stability was very bad. It has been crashing continuously. In one year, we got three crashes, which is unbelievable for an appliance that is guaranteed for 10 years without any crashes. In 2022, NetApp Italy, driven by the country manager Davide Marini, fixed all our issues and added additional computation power for free. This is a great example of customer care. They could have done it right the first time of course, but admitting the errors and putting in place such a remediation plan has been a very professional behavior.
JD
Dsi at OFFICE PUBLIC DE L HABITAT DE ROUEN
Hyper-converged storage has improved performance and now supports high redundancy for our VMs
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) was transparent because we were on a regular infrastructure before. We went on NCI and were able to improve performance, but it did not really change how things worked. The performance was really better for applications and access times to the data. I regularly looked at the analytics to see what was going on in my servers and what it was saying to optimize performance. It was pretty interesting because it could analyze and give insights on how to get things working better. In the latest versions, the Prism interface has been replaced by Prism Central. This requires another machine to be deployed to manage the servers.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The ease of deployment is a positive feature that allows us to scale easily."
"The most valuable feature is the software design storage that really provided a faster, agile, easier to scale up and out storage path."
"Simple setup and having the storage and compute right on one deployment is the most valuable aspect of this solution. They're able to get set up and ready to go and start having their DevOp team deploy to that environment."
"NetApp HCI has improved our organization by allowing us to put more time into investing in new ideas and spending less time in the administration of the solution."
"The stability is fantastic; in my mind, it's one of the best storage products and the software around it has got to be the best across all different storage environments."
"The multi-vertical aspect is what is most valuable for us. The main reason we wanted a multi protocol was because Amazon was not able to provide us with access to the same data as we could get from Linux and Windows lengths. That was our value proposition for this solution."
"It has reduced our hypervisor footprint by around 20%."
"The initial setup was straightforward; it was easy and fast to deploy, and NetApp Cloud Manager made getting up and running with Cloud ONTAP amazing, easy to use, simple, and it basically did everything."
"I valued the high performance I/O and the high availability (HA)."
"We now increase the capacity of our datacenter without having to add more square footage, while increasing its horsepower, allowing us to run more servers utilizing less space than before."
"We like that the size of the box is 1U or 2U only, and all the servers are fit into that box. The ease of operation is there. All the servers and the SAN storage are inside the box."
"Its low maintenance is a key feature, and it is easy to install, upgrade, and scale by adding more blocks, with compute analysis taking hours instead of days."
"The HCI environment itself is very intuitive. Everything is centralized under one solution. And, they also have fast server built in in addition to a network analyzer."
"The most valuable features are simple management and one-click upgrades."
"Nutanix provides a level of scalability and flexibility that you don't get with any other solution on the market."
"The stability of the product is excellent."
 

Cons

"Because of the repeated failure of the motherboard that we experienced, we have doubts about the stability of the solution, but I'm sure that in the near future it will be a great, reliable solution for us."
"If you want to have a really dense data center then it's hard to have a big chunk of cabling going through everything."
"The product needs better support for installing the operating system on the machine."
"The price should be lowered. It's a little expensive."
"At the moment, I am not looking for new features. Quality of Service (QoS) and capacity efficiency are the two things that I want to resolve in my customer's environment. QoS improves the performance of each tenancy, and with capacity efficiency, the customer can achieve more capacity as compared to the normal capacity."
"We went with a different solution and having run that for a while, I would say that there is a lot more than they could do to make it more streamlined."
"I would like to see a better upgrade process, like the one that ONTAP has."
"The NDE Engine needs to improve because it will suddenly crash and I need to call the support and take a look at that."
"Nutanix now supports four hypervisors but they are not all at feature parity."
"We did have some integration issues. We did have a problem with a Veeam integration."
"Regarding third-party backup solutions, the only agentless option is Commvault, which is expensive, complex, and requires intensive vendor training."
"The hybrid solution we tested showed a big performance reduction after intensive work on the system, due to the caching mechanism that fills the SSDs (typical of low level Hyperconverged appliances)."
"The technical support is not great, but it's good."
"To have internal stability, we needed to network the solution ourselves. Performance depends on the application. Performance could be the lack of IOPS, memory and CPU and configuration issues."
"The initial setup can be a bit difficult."
"It would be fantastic if there was a built-in layer, in Nutanix, that acted like a cloud interface. So far, we need to integrate a cloud interface on top of Nutanix for billing the usage for specific customers' domains. It would be great if a cloud gateway was built-in, inside Nutanix."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price of the solution is okay but could improve."
"Its price is aligned with the market. In addition to the standard licensing fees, there is an integrator cost."
"This solution saved our organization time (35 percent) and money. We have a hefty group of developers, and if you multiply that by 30 to 35 percent, that is quite a bit of money."
"You still have to pay for the licensing for VMware and Red Hat licenses separately. It's not all inclusive at this point."
"Licenses run on a yearly basis, and there aren't any additional fees other than the standard licensing fee."
"The licensing fees are renewed annually."
"Its price is comparable to the competitors in the market."
"There are the overall infrastructure costs. Even though the initial costing was higher, we calculated for year-to-year for five years. That brought us into a position where we decided, we have to go for HCI rather than having distributor systems."
"The price of the license for Nutanix Acropolis AOS is less expensive than the competition. There is a favorable cost saving. Having only the need to deal with a single vendor, the management of the customer's entire stack is cost-effective."
"Our Nutanix license is for five years. There is a support arrangement there, but that aspect is more or less taken care of during the initial installation. With HCI architecture, whenever we do any kind of auto scaling or scaling of servers and resources, there is a significant amount of software licensing involved."
"The one disadvantage is relative, financially Nutanix Acropolis AOS is a little bit more expensive than the old solution."
"Extra features should not be so expensive. We would love to be able to use or even just try some of the extra features without having to buy them. Buying those features is just as expensive as buying vSphere licenses, so the cost savings is nullified."
"Pricing for Nutanix Acropolis AOS is higher. This is one of the reasons why we were looking into other options."
"I don't feel that I am receiving the performance which I am paying for."
"Its price is fine. I can't really complain about that."
"Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure could be cheaper. It's costly to upgrade the solution. There are no additional costs aside from the license."
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Comparison Review

it_user244362 - PeerSpot reviewer
Managing Consultant with 51-200 employees
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…
 

Answers from the Community

Miriam Tover - PeerSpot reviewer
Service Delivery Manager at PeerSpot
Oct 31, 2019
Oct 31, 2019
The biggest difference is the ability to scale compute and storage independently. NetApp can scale up the storage without the need for extra CPU (and hence VMware licenses for ESX). Nutanix does have a storage node, but it has limitations. Another key difference is the NetApp uses an inbuilt method for the central storage plane and doesn't use VSAN which saves on licensing. Cost wise, Nutanix i...
2 out of 15 answers
AG
Regional Manager at VAD
Mar 13, 2019
it depends on your needs NetApp Is Very Good , but expensive as it's All Flash , based on SolidFire Storage . It will support only VMware but Nutanix can be ALL Flash or Hybrid , also can work with Hyper-v , VMware or Nutanix AHV
it_user951444 - PeerSpot reviewer
Solutions Architect with 5,001-10,000 employees
Mar 13, 2019
The biggest difference is the ability to scale compute and storage independently. NetApp can scale up the storage without the need for extra CPU (and hence VMware licenses for ESX). Nutanix does have a storage node, but it has limitations. Another key difference is the NetApp uses an inbuilt method for the central storage plane and doesn't use VSAN which saves on licensing. Cost wise, Nutanix is almost always more expensive than alternative solutions.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
23%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Marketing Services Firm
9%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Outsourcing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise9
Large Enterprise19
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business93
Midsize Enterprise76
Large Enterprise88
 

Questions from the Community

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Also Known As

No data available
Nutanix Acropolis AOS, Nutanix AOS, Nutanix Acropolis
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

American Showa, Children's Mercy, Coca-Cola, Consultel Cloud, Evangelische Landeskirche in Wurttemberg, Imperva, Surface Mount Technology
St. Lukes Health System, the City of Seattle, Yahoo! Japan, Sligro, Empire Life, Hyundai AUS, and many others.
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, Nutanix, Broadcom and others in HCI. Updated: July 2026.
908,858 professionals have used our research since 2012.