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Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) vs VMware Software Defined Storage comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 5, 2024

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

Everpure FlashArray
Sponsored
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
211
Ranking in other categories
All-Flash Storage (4th)
Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS)
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
117
Ranking in other categories
All-Flash Storage (7th), Software Defined Storage (SDS) (2nd), Public Cloud Storage Services (4th), File and Object Storage (3rd), NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays (4th)
VMware Software Defined Sto...
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
7
Ranking in other categories
Software Defined Storage (SDS) (14th)
 

Featured Reviews

Sowjanya MV - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Lead at Wipro Limited
Has improved performance for mission-critical workloads and enabled seamless non-disruptive upgrades
The availability is 99.99%, which is the main factor any customer would need because their data should be available whenever they want to access it. This is one main critical thing. It is very easy to upgrade since Pure Storage FlashArray handles it well. Everything is non-disruptive now; previously, there were forklift shifts, but now that is not the case. Pure Storage FlashArray says no to forklift upgrades. Usually hardware requires downtime, but Pure Storage FlashArray has improved their footprint so that they are not asking for downtime; everything is just a non-disruptive activity, which is why customers are more inclined towards Pure Storage FlashArray. Customers want more of the models in their environment due to the performance they are giving, and everything is in one Pure1 Array console where we can view all the models on one page or just an orchestration tool. You don't miss anything; you have replication, notifications about replication, and details about which host groups replication is happening in and if that replication is successful or failed. On a daily basis, our purpose is to create volumes for infrastructure; our daily activities include creating volumes and mapping them to the host, doing any migrations from a VM, clearing the data stores, and carving the volumes to those VMs. One key factor is the data compression with a ratio of 5:1, focusing on space efficiency, inline deduplication, and the compression Pure Storage FlashArray works on; that is a major factor we can suggest to any customer. Analytical capabilities are crucial. Daily, we check the throughput and consumption, and Pure Storage FlashArray provides predictions for one year regarding usage. This prediction helps plan updates well ahead. For support, we just raise a case, and they follow up and get it done. There is also AI readiness, but with the model R2, we don't have much of that AI readiness. For others, we do have AI readiness that predicts capacity based on daily or monthly trends, enabling us to analyze how much space we need or if we need to expand the disk shelf. From an operational point of view, a good feature is that if you accidentally delete a volume, it will be retained in the destroyed state for the next twenty-four hours, which is not the same with any other vendor. I have worked in this storage domain for the past fifteen years, and this option is remarkable, benefiting any L1 or L2 engineer. Additionally, from a compliance perspective, Pure Storage FlashArray has REST APIs enabled. I have not explored automation much, but from a security standpoint, it is strong with encryption data. If you want to automate, you can easily integrate with all clouds and explore Pure Cloud for scheduling workloads, including volume creation. Customers find benefit in Pure Storage FlashArray's single management pane of glass due to the dual controller and active-active setup. If one of the controllers goes down, all workloads automatically shift to the other controller, ensuring their data is safe and accessible at all times. This is a highlighted feature that any customer desires because their data should always be accessible. For SAN workloads, we use Pure Storage FlashArray because for SAN FC fiber channel, we don't use it; we use NetApp for NAS activities. We have clearly split this, so SAN is for mission-critical applications, while network-attached storage handles file systems. This architecture helps us maximize the benefit from Pure Storage FlashArray due to the significant workloads from this giant retail client. From a footprint and energy consumption perspective, you can see energy consumption from the Pure1 storage portal on a daily basis, and it is very compact. The three models we use consume only three units, which is quite low. From a footprint and data center perspective, it doesn't occupy much space. As everything moves to cloud, there are requirements to avoid excess spending on data centers, and Pure Storage FlashArray is efficient in energy consumption and is environmentally friendly.
Amarnath Charugundla - PeerSpot reviewer
System Engineer at Tata Consultancy
Unified management and cost-effectiveness lead to positive experiences and future savings
Improvement is necessary wherein the memory or storage should not breach 90%, because if breached, it becomes unmanageable. We have to set alerts or CPU triggering for 95% for the first warning. Other activities on nodes or file systems should be properly maintained. We must monitor the dashboard for P1, P2 alerts in the Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) file share system including SMB, NFS, objects, and blocks. Attention should be maintained for any alerts such as CPU, memory, and RAM alerts, as exceeding these creates issues within teams. If triggered to 95% and forgotten, it crosses the SLA breach, causing disturbances to application, web, and platform teams. Continuous monitoring on the Nutanix dashboard is essential. Even a highly experienced person in Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) cannot provide a 10 rating out of 10 because it is a vast system. I would rate it eight from my perspective.
Mohammad Jundiah - PeerSpot reviewer
Solutions Architect at QDS
Data security and performance excel but integration and licensing need improvement
I used Nutanix for its hyper-converged infrastructure capabilities and VMware Site Recovery for disaster recovery.  Additionally, I worked with VMware Software Defined Storage both internally and with partners to consolidate servers into one solution The most valuable features of VMware Software…

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 the FlashArray is Pure One, which provides a comprehensive overview of our entire storage environment."
"Pure Storage FlashArray simplifies maintenance and management with its intuitive GUI, making storage allocation and other processes easy to understand, even for beginners."
"The speed of the Pure FlashArray is very, very fast and nothing in the market can compare to it."
"Technical support is excellent. I've had very good responses from technical support. We had a couple of cases where we needed support. Some of the communications were purely over email and some has been an actual call to the service desk."
"Pure Storage is seen as a visionary company with leading edge technology."
"The performance of the storage is just unbelievable."
"My rating of Pure Storage is a ten out of ten because of the price for performance and footprint - the overall value."
"The first set up we had was really straight forward and simple."
"What I appreciate most about Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) is its user-friendly nature."
"In the beginning, when they sold us Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS), they told us the performance would be 30%. Then we came to them and said, 'You are a liar. It's not 30%, it's 800% increase.'"
"Offers high performance, full control, and strong security for mission-critical workloads."
"The most valuable feature is that it is highly available, solving the pain-point of delaying updates to Windows-based file servers during production hours. And then the second one would be ransomware protection and analytics. It gives you great visibility and protection on your file shares that are otherwise the most common sources of vulnerabilities."
"We have been able to save local disk space by using Data Lens. We upload 18 GB to the cloud and are able to save 20% to 25%."
"It is unified. This is the best thing that Nutanix gave to the world. You can do everything from one point."
"The solution's most valuable features are its support and speed."
"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."
"The most valuable features of VMware Software Defined Storage are scalability, high availability, and performance."
"The solution is simple to configure and provides good performance and less footprint."
"The single management panel is the main feature that is wonderful for the customer."
"VMware Software Defined Storage gives higher availability against data corruption."
"The most valuable features of the solution are that it is easy to deploy and the support is really good."
"The most valuable features of VMware Software Defined Storage are scalability, high availability, and performance."
"This is an easy-to-use product for adding flexibility to your storage solution."
"The best part of the solution is that you can actually scale up to a large number of operating systems without additional hardware."
 

Cons

"There's always an opportunity for new feature functionality."
"Part of our company works on Dell EMC because Pure Storage did not have synchronous applications when we were purchasing our products."
"I would like to see active replication. I know that it's available now but I haven't tried it yet. I hope that it works."
"I have been primarily working with storage and have not fully explored other areas, but there is some room for improvement when it comes to performance reporting."
"There was some complexity in the initial setup."
"In some cases, we get into very in-depth conversations around movement of specific data and, what's more, chunk sizes. The documentation lacked any description or information on that."
"This product has only two active controllers, whereas other solutions can have more. This is something that needs to improve."
"It took us a year to get it to stabilize and to get the best out of Pure."
"Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) needs improvement, particularly for firmware upgrades, as sometimes updates take a whole day and it can be unclear whether the issue is with Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) or the hardware, requiring us to reconfigure everything, which is a main point we want consolidated into one solution."
"Lowering the price would improve this product."
"Areas for improvement in Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) include more redundancy to ensure no data loss, and balancing the workloads is very important to maintain managed workloads throughout the year."
"Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) can be improved in the area of big data workloads, as we still need to improve performance there."
"There are some processes, like if I like to change the data storage to another place, I have to use CLI, and I don't like it since I believe that it could have been simpler in GUI."
"Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) needs improvement in compatibility with Windows solutions."
"It would be beneficial if there were a migration tool for the new way of syncing data for data protection. Currently, we have 30 days' worth of snapshots going back and forth for data protection. A migration tool to transition to better syncing for DR would be valuable, as otherwise, we lose 30 days because of the storage requirement."
"There are some techniques that need to be improved because sometimes, during processes, it gets stuck on the console, requiring command line interventions, indicating gaps between the GUI and command lines."
"It doesn't have the ability to be deployed on any kind of hardware and network connectors."
"The license model of the product is an area of concern where improvements are required."
"The performance is not as good as some competing products and reporting can be improved."
"I'd like to see improved hardware compatibility"
"The solution has some limitations in terms of replication to remote sites or cloud infrastructure, which need improvement."
"VMware Software Defined Storage should include a shared database on a standard version."
"There is room for more integrations and plugins into more storages."
"Simplifying the licensing model and making it cheaper would improve the solution."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The license for Pure Storage FlashArray includes the support and there are no additional payments that are needed. This is not an inexpensive solution, you need to understand the value of your data before you use a backup solution."
"The price is very reasonable when compared to other solutions."
"When we bought the unit, we bought per capacity. So, the licensing is per capacity, and the only thing that we have to buy every year or every three years is maintenance. Included in that maintenance is the upgrade of the controllers every three years at no cost to us."
"We have seen a reduction in the TCO, because Pure Storage is partnering with Belfrics. This partnership reduces our latency and space."
"I would rate the pricing of Pure Storage FlashArray a five out of ten. It is expensive but not too much."
"There is an annual or perpetual license required for this solution."
"Dell and Pure Storage offer competitive pricing, but Pure Storage might have a slight advantage."
"We would like them to improve the pricing, so we could put them to use some more product, like backup or long-term storage. In the future, if the price goes down, then we could buy different types of products."
"The price can always be improved. As a customer, you always seek reasonable solutions within your budget, and they give us little to do a lot. My IT team always has to justify that we are choosing an optimal solution, so the price could be a little lower Maybe the prices could be a little bit lower."
"It's competitive and attractive for moving things to it and then prioritizing those newly freed up resources for something else."
"It's definitely a lot cheaper than buying a new EMC array. We bought a five-year commitment on all the hardware and software. I don't know what the cost was back then, but I do remember it was cheaper."
"It is very good. It is much more competitive than a dedicated storage platform."
"While the price may not be the most affordable, I believe it offers good value for the benefits it provides."
"The pricing of Nutanix is generally higher compared to other vendors, which is a common observation, but it provides value through its support and features offered to customers."
"Nutanix is very competitive."
"Nutanix Unified Storage was cheaper than other solutions we evaluated."
"VMware Software Defined Storage is a slightly expensive solution."
"A single socket costs you around US $6,000 for three years. At a minimum, you have a three load cluster for a medium or enterprise-scale company. It can get quite expensive because you're likely to need four to six sockets on the other side. It comes to around $30,000."
"The product is quite expensive and is among the most expensive for this type of solution."
"The solution is very expensive."
"I believe there is a yearly licensing fee of around $2000 - $5000. I don't think there are additional costs above that but it depends on the type of infrastructure you're booting."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
6%
Computer Software Company
18%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
6%
Comms Service Provider
5%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business63
Midsize Enterprise36
Large Enterprise143
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business27
Midsize Enterprise31
Large Enterprise67
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Large Enterprise6
 

Questions from the Community

Which should I choose: HPE 3PAR StoreServ or Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform F Series?
Both are great platforms, but if you are considering all flash solutions, I would recommend you to consider Pure Stor...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure Storage FlashArray?
I don't really know much about the pricing for Pure Storage FlashArray in terms of the absolute cost. Regarding Everg...
What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashArray?
Despite liking Pure Storage FlashArray, there is room for improvement in automation. Pure Storage FlashArray needs to...
What do you like most about Nutanix Unified Storage?
Nutanix has excellent product documentation available on their portals, written in simple, easy-to-understand language.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Nutanix Unified Storage?
Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) helps to reduce the total cost of ownership in general. However, I am getting complaint...
What needs improvement with Nutanix Unified Storage?
I hope Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) will improve the clarity of the licensing uses and enhance the reporting and ana...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for VMware Software Defined Storage?
The price of VMware Software Defined Storage is on the pricey side, rated four out of five in cost. There is room for...
What needs improvement with VMware Software Defined Storage?
There is room for more integrations and plugins into more storages. More automation, such as using Playbook on Ansibl...
What is your primary use case for VMware Software Defined Storage?
I used Nutanix for its hyper-converged infrastructure capabilities and VMware Site Recovery for disaster recovery. Ad...
 

Also Known As

Pure Storage FlashArray
Nutanix Files Storage, Nutanix Volumes Block Storage, Nutanix Objects Storage
VMware SDS
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Nielsen, Lamar Advertising, LinkedIn, Betfair, UT-Dallas
JetBlue, International Speedway Corporation, Volkswagen SAIC, Brighton and Hove City Council, Foresters Financial, Janus International Group, Cloud Comrade, Serco
Helse Nord, Sky
Find out what your peers are saying about Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) vs. VMware Software Defined Storage and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
884,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.