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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 In the latest versions, the Prism interface has been replaced by Prism Central.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 most valuable feature is the convergence."
"HCI has helped with storage persistence across private and hybrid clouds for the last year. It's faster and more reliable with minimal downtime, as it doesn't require any maintenance."
"The best thing about the product is this is the only appliance in the market that separates control of storage from compute."
"It offers the ability to scale on demand which is important to the burst capability of scaling up and scaling down."
"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."
"I like how the solution gives you the ability to basically grow compute and storage separately, and there is no compute processing used for storage IO so that means that the compute is purely satisfying user workloads."
"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."
"The ability to size the available space in a way that matches our company's needs is most valuable. For instance, you can decide if you want 80/20, 70/30, or 60/40 space. Redundancy depends on your needs without changing the appliance. You just add space and decide the percentage of space that you need free and the percentage of space that you need for backup. It is all automatic, and you don't have to do anything. You just add space, and the system automatically configures itself with the chosen option."
"Acropolis AOS's networking concept is excellent."
"My experience with the Nutanix Acropolis is good from both a reseller and end-user experience."
"Compression, deduplication, and erasure coding have improved storage usage by almost three times."
"SRM capabilities for replication have been proven reliable and very useful for our organization."
"It's the only solution that can scale properly — there is no limitation on the number of nodes that a customer can have in the same cluster."
"The initial setup was quite straightforward."
"We couldn't have chosen better, as we were able to reduce our data center footprint by two-thirds, reduced the management tools and teams, eliminated the SAN complexity, increased the IOPS metrics, and increased the overall performance by 40%."
"Single click actions is definitely the most important. They were not even aware that they wanted this."
 

Cons

"The price should be lowered. It's a little expensive."
"HCI has not enabled us to consolidate workloads or break down silos and has not increased application performance. It has also not resulted in more efficient use of compute resources."
"The product needs better support for installing the operating system on the machine."
"Unfortunately, the solution has not reduced our hypervisor footprint."
"There have been some drive type of issues where we have to apply a new code level. Storage nodes kick certain drives until they act as though they have failed when really they haven't. You just have to reinsert them, then they go on about their happy way. It's sort of a bug."
"The vCenter keeps crashing, meaning that there is no stability in our environment."
"I'm not a fan of how they don't log you out properly from some of their web tools for management."
"If you want to have a really dense data center then it's hard to have a big chunk of cabling going through everything."
"Nutanix Acropolis AOS which was integrated with Dell was not running well. What was running well was less than 50%, and the other updates have failed because of issues between the firmware, the server, and the system."
"I'd like to see an improvement in the notifications because it's not very useful as it is now and it's quite difficult to find out what the problem is when something goes wrong."
"The product requires a lot of resources."
"Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) has really become very expensive."
"The product needs improvement in the areas of SAN attachment for high capacity and high I/O profile workloads."
"Regarding third-party backup solutions, the only agentless option is Commvault, which is expensive, complex, and requires intensive vendor training."
"The improvement needed is for elastic clusters, meaning the ability to depart and join nodes in an automatic way."
"Nutanix licensing and pricing is premium compared to other hyperconverged infrastructure vendors."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"All the licenses are included when you buy the program."
"Where we lost nearly 75 percent of our infrastructure due to a malicious attack and were able to recover two and a half hours into it due to the integration, it saved us and all of our customers. Because we were able to recover so fast from the attack, the solution paid for itself right there."
"This solution reduced our maintenance costs. We were going to have to pay one to two million dollars to put in compute nodes. We are avoiding those costs."
"Its price is comparable to the competitors in the market."
"Its price is aligned with the market. In addition to the standard licensing fees, there is an integrator cost."
"The price of the solution is okay but could improve."
"Its pricing is lower than our previous solution."
"The licensing fees are renewed annually."
"In terms of the solution's licensing, it's quite comprehensive."
"The initial cost is affordable but the renewal fees are high."
"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."
"We got the renewal done recently, and there was no cost involved."
"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 pricing is quite good in comparison with HPE SimpliVity, Nutanix Scale, and even traditional architecture."
"Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure's core licensing needs to have an upper limit since processors are coming out with incredible numbers of cores on them."
"The basic license that comes with the box allows basic virtualization features but advanced automation features would require an upgrade of licenses."
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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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Have you received reliable help from Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure's support when you contacted them?
NCI is one of the best out there. For any software, no matter how good it is, technical support makes it or breaks it for me. You may have an amazing product but if there is not anyone to help you ...
 

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.