Nutanix Database Service Reviews

We use the solution for managing SQL databases within an organization. It facilitates tasks such as creating clones of production databases for various purposes, including software development and reporting. These clones provide a sandbox environment for development teams to work on without impacting the production database. Additionally, they serve as data sources for reporting functions, ensuring that analytical processes can be conducted without disrupting the primary operational database.

The solution allows quick setting up of new development environments and ensures the use of the storage more efficiently. It manages to create new clients to be utilized for development or reporting.

We have been experiencing significant performance issues with Nutanix Database Service, primarily due to our many clients. While the product is designed to scale effectively, we have encountered performance limitations when handling many clients. These limitations have impacted our business operations, highlighting the need for further optimization and improvement.

We are also overwhelmed with the quality of technical support associated with the product.

I have been using Nutanix Database Service as a reseller for two years.

I rate the solution’s stability an eight out of ten.

Nutanix Database Service offers scalability, but there are limitations regarding the number of clones created due to hardware resource constraints. This can pose a challenge as the hardware may not have sufficient CPU resources to support extensive cloning. 

I rate the solution’s scalability a three out of ten.

Nutanix has really good technical support capability. However, they were not very helpful in resolving performance issues associated with this product or providing a suitable conclusion on problem resolution.

The solution is easy to deploy. We have three or four people to support deployment.

Nutanix provided a couple of different licensing options. They were pretty flexible in how we could structure the licensing. Initially, it was a bit confusing, but their flexibility made up for it.

There are quite a few competitive products out there that offer similar features. I could say that Nutanix performed very well when competing against these other products regarding feature sets; Nutanix came out on top. 

Nutanix Database Service requires significant hardware resources to perform.

Overall, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

The primary use cases for our clients are storage and data management.

What I like about this solution is that it's more reliable compared to other solutions.

The downside of this solution is that it's more expensive than its competitors. 

The other thing is that the scalability part of this solution should be improved.

I have been working with this solution for about four years.

I would rate the scalability of this solution a nine, on a scale from one to 10, with one being the worst and 10 being the best.

I would rate the technical support of this solution a seven, on a scale from one to 10, with one being the worst and 10 being the best.

Neutral

My impression is that the initial setup process is a bit complicated but manageable. It's a good product and it's easy to manage. The deployment time depends on the amount of data the client is gonna be storing. 

Usually, it will take one or two people to carry out the deployment.

I would rate this setup process an eight, on a scale from one to 10, with one being the worst and 10 being the best.

My impression is that this solution is really expensive. The licensing is based on a yearly basis since a monthly basis is hard to maintain.

Overall, I would rate this solution an eight, on a scale from one o 10, with one being the worst and 10 being the best.

I sell this solution to customers. The use case is for database provisioning from the snapshots. We are using the latest version, 2.0.

It's deployed on-premises.

Requests come from the application team, and they need to have yesterday's data to give to the analysis team. We need to restore the databases, which is a time-consuming process. AI has been deployed within Nutanix. It's very easy to provision the machine within minutes of the application orders. They can hand those over and work along with the AI team to get the data available quickly for business analysis.

It should be able to be consumed by other customers because only the enterprise cloud customers are able to buy this software.

From an architecture perspective, Era cannot be deployed onto any other platform apart from Nutanix.

More databases should be integrated quickly. If any VM is running on the Nutanix platform, like Oracle or SQL, and we right click that VM, from there we should be able to add the database into Era rather than go on the no-Era console.

I have been using this solution for more than two years.

It's stable.

It's scalable. The software depends upon Nutanix. If you have the resources, like memory, then it's definitely scalable.

Technical support is slow sometimes. Because the talent is not available in India, sometimes we need to accelerate calls to the US or another region, which takes time.

I would rate technical support two out of five.

Setup is very simple. The amount of time it takes to deploy depends on the requirement. If it's a Microsoft SQL database, it doesn't take more than a day to deploy. 

One person is more than sufficient for deployment and maintenance.

Not everyone can afford it. It's a bit expensive, so the price has to be improved.

I would rate this solution six out of ten.

We are using the Nutanix Era solution for managing our Microsoft SQL Server, which hosts a database that is approximately five terabytes in size. We also use Nutanix Era with a PostgreSQL server.

This product simplifies the deployment of multiple database engines, which is important to us because we are in an environment where we cannot rely only on a single database engine. We have a large demand for different databases including PostgreSQL, MongoDB, and Microsoft SQL Server. When we receive a request to deploy a database server, it's very easy for us and in that way, Nutanix Era is very useful.

We manage workloads for both PostgreSQL and Microsoft SQL Server, and the performance is good. It is flexible in this regard because it simplifies both the deployment and administrations of workloads from these different databases.

As part of our operation in production, we have to be able to replicate our SQL database. It is approximately five terabytes in size. One of the ways that Nutanix Era has helped is that with a single click, we can clone the database in less than 30 minutes. This clone can easily then be pushed to our development environment. In general, it has reduced our deployment times.

We save a lot of data in our production database and using Nutanix has improved the performance. We are able to create different clones and work with them separately. Also, copying and synchronizing the logs from clones is something that is very easy to do. The impact of the boost in performance has been good and everybody is happy with it.

Using this solution has decreased the time that it takes us to clone or take a snapshot of a database. We can clone a large database in between 10 and 15 minutes, whereas a snapshot can be created in less than five minutes.

Nutanix has helped to reduce the time required to manage our database workloads, although it is difficult to estimate by how much because I did not use another solution for the same purpose. I can only say that overall, we have spent less time on database management, and it has helped to reduce off-hours work. Because everything is working fine, we do not need to work on the database during our off-hours.

As we have needed to spend less time concentrating on database management, it means that we have been able to spend more time on other IT services. We can work on other things, which leads to better overall performance for the IT department.

Nutanix has increased the team's ability to troubleshoot issues. Because it is easy to manage, we can quickly see whether there is a problem in our operations. When we find out which operation has the problem, we can resolve it using the information available in the log files. The use of the log makes it easy for the team to conduct the troubleshooting process, and this has a positive impact on our business because we can solve problems quickly. In turn, we can readily get back to other operations in the IT department or more generally in the organization.

The Time Machine is the most valuable feature for us. Using it means that we don't have to take regular snapshots, yet we are still able to restore the database quickly in the event of a problem.

We use Nutanix Era to perform in-place backup and restores of our databases. Taking about one hour to complete a restore, this product has reduced our overall downtime.

We are able to create multiple backups during the day without affecting our production workloads, which is important because we receive and manage sensitive data, including personal information, and when we have a problem we can easily restore the previous backup. The RTO is very short.

The creation of multiple daily backups is also good in terms of limiting the amount of possible data loss. This is good for our operations because when we do have a problem, we don't lose any data.

Managing databases can be done through a single pane of glass, which means that we don't have to make use of many interfaces to manage different database engines. From a single place, we are able to see what's happened in our environment.

The updating of the database engine is something that can be improved. For example, assume that we are using PostgreSQL out of the box, and it is version 10. If we want to migrate to version 11, 12, or 13, then it is not very easy to do that using Nutanix Era. This is an area that I would like to see improved because I have had many problems with it. In one situation, I was trying to deploy PostgreSQL version 12 and it was very difficult to achieve. If this were improved then it would be very good for the solution.

The problem is not tied directly to how long it takes to perform updates. Rather, it is not easy to do. Database engines differ in this regard because Microsoft SQL is easier to update than PostgreSQL. With PostgreSQL, for example, upgrading the software profile requires several steps. You have to manipulate too many things, create VMs, import them into Nutanix Era, and deploy a new cluster. If the process were automated by the software then that would save a lot of time.

We have been using Nutanix Era for two years.

The stability is very good and this has a good impact on the IT department. We can rely on this solution to create snapshots and clones, easily restore databases, and update software.

Scalability-wise, it is very good. We can upgrade easily and Nutanix is always creating new solutions to solve problems related to databases.

We have two users with administrative roles, although, for deployment and maintenance, one person is enough. It certainly doesn't take many people to maintain this solution. I am the IT Manager and I have a system admin, as well.

We have more than 10 database workloads and we are planning to add more databases in the future. With that, our usage of Nutanix Era will also increase.

The technical support is very good. When we have had to communicate with them, in perhaps less than an hour we've gotten a response and been able to resolve our problem.

In general, the support is able to address problems easily and solve them quickly, which is very good.

In addition to Nutanix Era, which we have to back up and restore our databases, we use Veeam as our general backup and restore solution.

The initial setup is straightforward and the deployment takes less than an hour.

When we deployed Era, we had everything saved inside of it. All of the software profiles and computer profiles are saved. You can either create a new one or modify an existing one. Everything is in place so all that we have to do is deploy to our server and after that, it is easy to deploy the database.

We used an integrator to assist with deployment. Their name is Exxoss and our experience with them was definitely good. They assisted us very well and everything works. It was a good experience.

Our return on investment comes from the fact that we don't need very many people to manage or administer the platform. Essentially, our costs have been reduced because we used to have different people working on different databases. For example, we have not had to spend extra on a person to administer our Microsoft SQL Server. One or two people can manage a large number of databases.

In terms of time savings, this has allowed the teams to concentrate on other subjects, rather than spend time troubleshooting and resolving other database-related issues.

Overall, our return on investment is very good.

There are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees.

We did not evaluate other options but this is because originally, we planned only to use a single database engine. We did not plan on using a solution to manage different database engines. Once we heard about Nutanix Era and how it worked, we were very happy and went straight to it.

My advice for anybody who is looking into using Nutanix Era is to go ahead and implement it. This is a good solution that will help the IT department to manage and troubleshoot the database workloads. It reduces the time needed by teams for troubleshooting, deploying a cluster, or deploying a single-node database. It makes life easy for database management and it is one that you can rely on.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from using Nutanix Era is that it makes the job of our IT staff very easy.

In summary, this is a very good product but perfection does not exist, so there is always room for improvement.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We needed to migrate all of our Oracle databases to comply with Oracle licensing requirements. That's what led us to get Nutanix hardware because it's an all-in-one: storage, compute, everything. Oracle accepts that. You only have to license the CPUs within that hardware cluster. Since we were going to have to provision all of these new servers and all of these new databases, it seemed like a great time to automate that. That's what Era brought to the table, the automation of server and database provisioning.

In addition to that, we were very interested in the one-click patching solution. And to automate things, you have to have a standardized offering of templates for the software, the servers, and the database. We were also looking for that standardization.

Era has helped us to cut deployment times. It used to take 10 days if we had to get a new server, and I can now do it in two hours, and that includes provisioning the database.

We have an enterprise-level backup product that we're required to use, so we don't rely on Era's version. But occasionally that other system goes down and I wouldn't have any automated backups except for what I have with Era. For us, it's a great fallback, but for other companies, it could be an awesome first-line backup. It's very elegant the way they designed it. It's quick and it doesn't take up nearly as much storage space as traditional backups. It would definitely help to save on tier-one storage. For other companies, that would be a big selling feature.

When it comes to performance and flexibility with Oracle workloads, it's excellent.

The patching should be a one-button function. Also, it works about 80 percent of the time, but 20 percent of the time it requires manual intervention. And sometimes, until you understand the technical underpinnings of that process, you can't fix it. I thought we would move past that. In the last version, they broke a big chunk of that for me, and that's why I'm waiting for the new release because they promised me it would fix the problem.

I've been using Nutanix Era since they released it, which was about three years ago.

It's very stable.

Like anything that runs on Nutanix, as a VM, it's a piece of cake to scale it. We've never had to because it was sized properly in the first place. We're not in a growth state for databases, but it's just very simple to scale either way, up or down, which is great.

For our databases that run on Nutanix hardware, which is almost all of our Oracle databases—the ones that can still be patched—we use Era. We use it for all databases except for two that are still running on Solaris for various reasons. The only thing that we haven't done, and have no plans to do, is to expand use of Era for non-Oracle database engines, because we're moving those to the cloud.

Their customer support post-deployment is knowledgeable and helpful. I might have had special access to people because we were one of the first customers and I developed a relationship with them. I feel that I was helping them beta-test some things.

But if you called up and opened a ticket today, especially if you're used to Oracle support, you would find that Nutanix support is excellent.

We didn't have a previous solution. Nothing was automated before we brought on Era. We were looking to migrate, consolidate, automate, standardize, and reduce maintenance costs. 

And there's an additional challenge that all IT departments have now: finding database administrators. Nobody is coming out of school wanting to be a database administrator. In the workforce, I would estimate that the average age of DBAs is at least 55. We can't find people to train or hire and half of our database staff retired within a two-year period. We had hundreds of databases that had to be migrated and Era was really crucial to that effort. The only way we could see to train new people was to make things as simple and automated as possible. 

We chose Era because we were using Nutanix hardware.

On a scale of one to 10, the complexity of the setup was an eight. You need to have a consulting partner from Nutanix to help set it up. A lot of the backend connections have to be created to the Nutanix cluster and that's going to be outside of the skill set of the DBA.

We had all of it set up in two and a half days of working sessions.

We have two Nutanix clusters that are in geographically separate data centers. Originally, we had to deploy one Era per cluster. Then, as part of continuously improving the product, they centralized Era's administration and went to more of a central server with agents. That way, we could have one deployment of Era with two agents, one for each cluster. So we really went through two implementations.

A consultant from Nutanix was part of the purchase. We didn't have to pay extra for it. We had some issues during our deployment, but they were all resolved. It wasn't perfectly smooth, but what deployment ever is? On the whole, they are dedicated and knowledgeable and they were there for us until it was right. I couldn't have asked for more than that.

I don't think it saves time on the patching, but if we had not had this solution to migrate all those databases, it would have cost us at least $1 million in salary for the entire migration. Using Era it cost us only $50,000.

It's priced fairly. It follows the Oracle model based on CPUs or the number of databases. It's not too expensive and it's not inexpensive. It's a good value. Of course, I'm not paying for it, and I'm the one that it's helping by reducing my work. But I haven't heard managers say, "Oh no, we can't get that, it's way too expensive."

When you go looking for something from Oracle that automates things and makes your life easier, it's always going to be a minimum of $500,000. Era's nothing like that. For something that works on Linux or Unix, and Oracle databases, you expect to pay more than you would for something that runs on Windows, but you get what you pay for.

My advice would be to engage with the Nutanix Era team as soon as possible to plan the implementation and to learn what you need to know about it. Make sure you read the documentation and work with the team so that you're comfortable troubleshooting any problems. In addition to the product being good, the support for Era is excellent. Take advantage of that to make it easy on yourself.

We don't use it for snapshots and to clone databases, but if we did I believe it would decrease the time it takes to do those things.

In our organization, there are three people who use the solution on the Unix team, and there are three DBAs who are the primary users.

Overall, I don't know anything else that does what it does and I would give it a 10 out of 10.

This is a very useful solution for database management. 

This solution could be improved by integrating with more database providers. 

I have used this solution for three years. 

This is a stable solution. 

This is a scalable solution. 

The customer support for this solution is excellent. 

Positive

The initial setup was straightforward. 

This solution is reasonably priced. 

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten. 

I use Nutanix to provide managed services for one of the biggest telecom providers. 
We proved managed services to the customer, including the platform and service as well as VM as a service.

It's a vast solution, so it depends on what the customer needs. We provide the Kubernetes cluster, and if you want a particular server, we provide the files. We use Karbon, Era, AHV and Prisim Central. We are also now in the process of testing out the VDI feature as well.

They recently came out with a new version, so there are some new features that I still need to try. So it's hard to say what should be improved. Also, I don't have any essential databases that I'm managing with Era, so I'm not really close to the DBAs and don't know what they need or where there is still room for improvement. The best ones to answer this question are the DBAs because Era is basically designed for the databases. 

I've been using Nutanix Era since 2012, so almost nine years.

Era is a stable solution.

Era is scalable.

I would rate Nutanix technical support eight out of 10. I think they're helpful, but maybe they need more technical staff. Their response was slow once, but that was the only time it happened, so I'm not sure. I don't want to judge them. Maybe I'm wrong.

On the Nutanix side, it's very easy. They can enable a section in seconds or minutes. But on my side, I have some network dependency here and there, it took longer for me. My environment is a little different, so it took me longer. But from Nutanix itself there isn't much to do.

I would rate Nutanix Era eight out of 10. I would recommend it to anyone who is considering it. It has some very good features. It really works with multiple silos in terms of infrastructure, database updates, and migration. So many things are easy with Era. You really don't need to follow the cycle that DBAs usually follow. It's really fast also. It really speeds things up. 

Our primary use case was turnaround time from server deployments, patching, and database restoration. Our main approach was turnaround times on new deployments, patching, and restoring of databases. We can restore a 2TB database in about 45 minutes, if that. It used to take days to do a restore for our warehouse refresh. Now, it is literally taking under an hour, which is a drastic improvement.

Our patching went down from about 40 hours a month to automatic schedules, so we don't spend a lot of overtime anymore from a patching perspective. Also, we have reduced the turnaround time for server deployments from an always-on availability group perspective from about four days to one hour.

Nutanix Era has helped optimize database performance to an extent. When we moved to the full Nutanix stack, we saw about 70 percent performance enhancements, going from the old physical to the Nutanix stack.

It has saved quite drastically on space. We have saved about 4TB just on one database, looking at the DR copies.

The strain that Nutanix Era backups make on the system is basically zero. So, it is quite nice to use Nutanix Era from a transactional log backup perspective.

The patching is the most valuable feature. We spent a lot of time and effort on the patching of our SQL instances after hours. With Nutanix Era, you can schedule and automate them during your normal operational hours (during the day). You schedule all the patching, then everything happens automatically with minor tickets from the engineer. So, our patching, which took four hours, went down to an hour for the engineer. This is much better for us from a return on investment perspective.

From an always-on availability perspective, it has simplified the process quite extensively. While this is not such an important feature for us, it has simplified things as a centralized access point to all our instances.

With all the advanced logging that takes place within Nutanix Era, it definitely has increased the visibility of our team into the actual processes which are running, what are being consumed, long-running queries, etc. Within Nutanix Era, it is a simple view.

I have been using it for four or five months.

Once it is set up and configured, it has brilliant stability.

Scaling has been quite easy, making changes to the actual VM was very simple. Based on the requirements, you can adjust it at any given time without having a major impact.

We have a DBA team of four engineers who all work on it. Hopefully, going forward, we can push it more towards the developers so they can roll out the database refreshes by themselves, because it is that simple. That should hopefully take quite a substantial load off my team in the near future.

We are still incorporating all our processes into it. At the moment, we literally just started up. We are migrating all our servers onto Nutanix Era. I think it will take another three to six months before we are entirely running on it. After that, we will start introducing it to the business to get the developers to do their own database refreshes, but that is something that we are planning going forward.

Deal with the technical consultants directly, because they are the guys who roll everything out of the way to support you.

It was all on the physical hardware, and that was very bad. That was the old way of doing things. We are modernizing it now, which is why we looked at the full Nutanix Era stack.

The initial setup was a little tedious and complex. If they could make the setup slightly more user-friendly, then that would definitely be beneficial. If they could give a clear indication of what ports are required across the business and multiple VLANs, then your prep work can be done beforehand and before you do the actual installation. Because the documentation that was provided was not 100 percent accurate, so we had to do a lot of custom firewall rules after we deployed Nutanix Era.

We first deployed it in DR to determine the workload, usage, etc., because we have quite a big environment. So, we deployed it to the office, then did all the test cases, proof of concepts, and everything within our DR space. Once we were happy with that, we rolled it out to production. The rollout to production went very fast. We figured out all the issues beforehand when deploying to DR.

Getting everything configured took about two weeks, with a few troubleshooting sessions with Era's technical team. Even when we were experiencing issues, it was quite pleasant. The support structure that they have is excellent. They have skilled resources who can assist with every single query that you have. It is the same with post-deployment issues.

For the turnaround time that it takes to troubleshoot issues, it definitely makes the process of coming back to business much faster. So, it definitely has increased the turnaround time on our normal queries that we have had from a database perspective.

We did a return on investment justification. We could get rid of our current backup software and consolidate that into the actual licensing cost. We should see a return on investment within three years and start making our money back.

Era is quite expensive. The thing that will be a showstopper for them in the long run is if you look at it from a technical perspective on what it provides and weigh it up against consolidation of multiple other software suites. 

We looked at IDERA from a performance perspective and Redgate from a monitoring perspective. However, I don't think, for the entire solution that Era provides, that it has much competition. It is a single solution that provides you new deployments and monitoring as well as everything in one bucket. 

If you look at the monitoring for long-running queries, it has given us good visibility of where the problem areas lie within the big databases. This gave us a good indication/direction to fix indexes and look at performance bottlenecks.

It is a great product. I would definitely give it a 10 out of 10. With the technology that it provides and the simplicity of the actual solution, there is no one who can compete with it.