Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Reviews

Scalability is the most valuable feature because it is easy to scale-up and scale-out without impact in performance since it is always online.

Improves the management of our virtual infrastructure in a unified point and with unified support team.

Cloud integration, automation and orchestration need improvement.

I have used Nutanix for six months.

We have not had any stability issues.

We have not had any scalability issues.

I rate support 8/10.

I didn’t have a previous solution. I tested different solutions for my customers, such as Nutanix, VSAN, HPE VSA, etc, and evaluated them, but the solutions are for my customers. Also, I test all solutions in our infrastructure.

Setup was very easy. With a few steps and a nice wizard, you have your infrastructure up.

Is not a cheap solution, compare with competitors, but you must consider all variables in the environment to calculate the TCO. You have pre-sales tool Nutanix Sizer to calculate the TCO.

I looked at VMware vSAN, and HPE VSA.

Use the sizing tools in order to design the infrastructure properly.

The solution's performance and high density are most valuable.

It was a PoC, so we did not test it in a production system. Rather, we prepared a near identical environment and compared its performance to the customer's old SAN solution (NetApp Fas 3220 with full magnetic disks). This comparison showed us how far this technology went: same storage of the half rack old system and many times faster in response.

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).

We used this solution for three months.

We did not encounter any issues with stability.

We have not had the opportunity to test its scalability.

We did not test the technical support in a real situation, but only to ask some configuration questions without an SLA.

That was the first Hyperconverged system we tested, so we did not switch to this solution from a different solution.

Setup was simple, but we did not prepared the appliance (it was configured by our partner).

Licensing is good if you choose to use the proprietary OS (which is free).
Pricing is good if your enviroment can take advantage of the Hyperconvergence paradigm.

We did not evaluate other solutions.

Hyperconvergence gives a faster implementation than the "standard" solutions, and a high density architecture.

Others should see if their requirements can be fulfilled by this technology. I think it is good in enviroments like business intelligence (data mining and big data analytics).

• Service portal
• Self-service restore
• Single pane of glass for management.

We are a Managed Service Provider and these capabilities make our platform agile and easy to use for our customers.

• Less IT admin
• More performance
• More resiliency
• More protection of data (lots of storage SnapShots with no performance impact)

In order to replace massively Install base of VMware vSphere, they need to expand their ecosystem with ISVs (i.e. F5, PaloAlto, Citrix, TrendMicro etc.) in order to provide a wider range of solutions running as a virtual appliance (vApp), just like VMware did years ago. There is currently an ecosystem, but I think it is around 30-40 providers.

So they should expand the eco-system for Virtual Appliances with Acropolis. Network Segmentation is also a must with AHV.

We have used the solution for about 18 months.

We have not encountered any issues with stability.

We have not encountered any issues with scalability.

Technical support is the best.

We previously used legacy infrastructures: EMC, NetApp, and IBM.

The initial setup takes about one hour and then you are done.

I don't have anything special to advise about licensing and pricing.

We evaluated VMware vSAN.

Don't be afraid of Acropolis Hypervisor. It is stable and powerful, just as vSphere is.

It has built-in advanced analytics and powerful operations, Self Service Portal and components for DevOps included, managed by a single pane of glass (Prism) via HTML5 and it is free of charge – This is why Nutanix is so advanced and revolutionary.

• Data protection in its various flavours.
• Overall performance of the platform.
• Scalability.
• Ease of implementation.
• Great GUI.

We can test even the most storage-performance-hungry workloads on our Nutanix blocks.

Pricing transparency: Software and hardware should be separate items.

I have used it for 12 months.

We have not encountered any deployment issues.

We have not encountered any stability issues.

We have not encountered any scalability issues.

Customer service is a perfect 10.

Technical support is a perfect 10.

We currently use several HCI solutions.

Initial setup was straightforward.

An in-house team implemented it.

The consolidated storage: no need to use central storage that has a performance penalty. For example, while using central storage that enables file-sharing NAS services & SAN services, when one VM had an IO overload, all the VMs in the same data store in the VMware environment on the same LUN suffered from I/O latency. Now, in the new consolidated storage, this does not happen.

We can deploy VM as a service & we can perform updates on the nodes without downtime in a very simple, direct way.

The improvement needed is for elastic clusters, meaning the ability to depart and join nodes in an automatic way. We have a laboratory that needs to perform bare metal tests and therefore needs to unjoin the nodes from the cluster and later on join them back.

I have used it for two years.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

I have not encountered any scalability issues, but we are about to add another node to the cluster and it should be a very simple task .

Technical support is very good, and good with responsive time.

We were using central storage and suffered from bad performance latency.

Initial setup was straightforward.

At the time we checked, this solution was unique.

Perform resizing. Check the needs and deploy only what is needed. Check the memory DIMMs and make sure for the price you get, you have free DIMMs.

We Added a dedicated switch for this cluster so that all layer 2 networking will be in this switch and separate from the main routers.

Our company was in a high growth period, tripling in size within 30 months. Our demand was outstripping our ability to provide additional capacity.

With traditional converged infrastructure (Vblock), the length of our acquisition cycle (analyze, predict, design, justify, procure, manufacture, deliver, install, configure, and provision) was in excess of six months.

We were able to respond to demand more quickly and with less hysteria with Nutanix.

When I left the company, we had decided to use Nutanix to build out our non-production development environment and use the Vblocks only for production and bare metal.

• Speed of acquisition and ease of deployment
• Shorter timeline from PO, to delivery, to operation than converged infrastructure solutions like Vblock
• Able to grow with smaller, more linear increments of investment

Performance was not bad, but it could be better. I never fielded complaints from developers or users, but benchmark testing indicated that workloads did slightly better on our Vblock by a few percentage points.

This wasn’t a major concern, as our stated use case for Nutanix was purely non-production.

We did not encounter any significant stability issues that I was aware of at my level.

It scales nicely if your workloads are predictable and you build for the right mix of storage and compute.

I had no complaints from my engineers with regard to the technical support.

We previously used Vblocks for nearly everything, production and non-production, and we were in a high growth phase.

The large incremental purchase cycles of Vblocks in terms of cost and lead time were causing significant distress.

We had also struggled through some difficult RCM upgrades on the Vblocks. Nutanix was just so much easier to manage and deploy.

We were in the process of migrating non-production to Nutanix and keeping only production on the Vblocks when I left the company in early 2016.

My engineers raved about the ease of setup and configuration, especially when compared to a Vblock.

I wasn’t directly involved in the original purchase. My initial reaction was that we either overpaid or Nutanix was overpriced.

But our experience with the product was very positive and subsequent pricing from the VAR seemed more reasonable. Competition is a good thing.

The team that did the evaluation was not my team so I can’t speak about the specifics. I know they looked at SympliVity as well and there was some lively discussion around the merits of both products.

The market for hyper-converged is competitive and rapidly changing. Take a look around.

Prism and Clustering.

It can help my customers achieve their business goals in the simplest way. It’s simple and reliable.

Nutanix needs more development on DRC solutions embedded in Acropolis.

We have used this solution for five or six months.

For now, it is stable enough.

The scalability is great and simple.

Technical support is good.

The installation was straightforward.

Pricing and licensing are good.

We have tried VMware solutions: vSphere, vCenter, vSOM, and SRM.

• Compression, deduplication, and erasure coding
• Central management using prism
• Capacity management and planning using prism central
• One click upgrade to the Nutanix OS as well as for hypervisor
• Easily scalable with no downtime
• Provides WAN optimization for replication to remote sites

• Centralized monitoring of infrastructure
• Easy and quick deployment of VMs
• Single SME for all domains like storage, OS, and hypervisor
• Compression deduplication and erasure coding have improved storage usage by almost three times
• Protection domain allows you to compress data and transfer over WAN and helps you to move a VM to DR with a single click
• Centralized management helps you monitor storage and compute resources at the cluster and VM level in a single plane

I would like to see improvements in monitoring parameters, RTO, and access control. Currently, memory utilization does not show as per the actual. This is in pipeline for the next release. The current RPO for DC-DR is high due to the limitation of the replication strategy which will be fixed by next quarter.

We have used this solution for three months.

I did not encounter any issues with stability.

As of now, we haven’t required support, but it is good.

The installation is simple. You can more or less plug and play.

Depends upon what OEM you factor for hardware and the relationship between them. The software license seems to be pretty simple.

We evaluated Cisco HyperFlex and SimpliVity.

You can have optimal results from ROI and the infrastructure deployment perspective if the solution is designed properly. I would suggest that you spell out your requirements clearly before Nutanix starts building the solution.