Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) Reviews

Nutanix Unified Storage is our primary storage solution, and I primarily use its volumes to provide additional disk space for machines. These volumes are shared between vision machines and technical servers. However, for some projects, this solution was discontinued. I currently have all of my additional systems running on bare-metal machines, which fully utilize the available hardware and provide ample storage capacity. To accommodate this, I've repurposed the volumes to share them over the network and connect them to the bare-metal hosts and storage systems. This approach has proven to be highly effective for multiple companies I've worked with.

Another use case for Nutanix Unified Storage is sharing storage through the SMB and NFS protocols. This has been particularly beneficial in my work, as it allows both Windows and Linux machines to access shared files seamlessly. This is a valuable feature for large-scale projects.

Nutanix Unified Storage also offers object storage, which I have used in large-scale environments. However, I have not been entirely satisfied with the available options. Therefore, I have opted to use AWS object storage instead. Currently, I do not utilize Nutanix object storage internally due to ongoing limitations. A year ago, I attempted to integrate object storage into my workflows, but it fell short of my requirements. Consequently, I reverted to the AWS system. Overall, I am pleased with the file storage and volume options provided by Nutanix Unified Storage, as they have significantly enhanced my productivity in various tasks and projects.

I previously worked at a hospital where I utilized Nutanix Unified Storage to facilitate data sharing and capture from the laboratory. I developed a shared design using Nutanix Unified Storage over the network infrastructure. This design enabled seamless data transfer whenever a machine-generated a test result. Upon receiving a blood sample, the machine, connected to a printer, would automatically print the blood test results and the blood type. Additionally, a copy of these results was generated and shared via the Nutanix Unified Storage platform. Using the 'fixable to call' function, I mounted the shared file to the machine, enabling the automatic printing of one hard copy and the simultaneous sharing of a soft copy. This allowed lab technicians or lab doctors to conveniently send the test results to the attending physician at the clinic or directly to the patient.

Nutanix Unified Storage has proven to be flexible to meet our needs.

Unified Storage is good at unifying our organization's block files.

Implementing Unified Storage has streamlined the way I manage and execute tasks across our multiple branches. Unified Storage has enabled me to consolidate data, effortlessly mount it to machines, and share files and folders with colleagues in different locations.

Unified Storage's ability to remove silos is good.

The integrations between Unified Storage, Kubernetes Engine, and the database service are complete. We have not encountered any incompatibility issues.

The Nutanix block files are the most valuable feature.

Unified Storage failed to fulfill our object storage requirements.

The virtual volume has limitations. If I create more than one disk, it encounters limitations. When I mount the volume group to the physical machine, it updates the same disk or partition on the machine, which is not desirable. I was working on a media project that required ten gigabytes of data. I created a volume group of that size, but due to the limitations of the virtual disk, which can be up to 64 terabytes, I had to create a mini disk. Once I mount the disk to the physical machine, it creates a mini virtual disk or mini partition, not just a single partition.

I have been using Nutanix Unified Storage for five years.

Nutanix Unified Storage is stable.

The technical support is one of the best support services we have used.

Positive

I previously used VMware in another organization.

The initial deployment is straightforward and I can do it myself.

I would rate Nutanix Unified Storage ten out of ten.

The security of Unified Storage is comparable to that of other SDS solutions, and we have not encountered any security concerns.

Our positive experience with Unified Storage has prompted us to further invest in Nutanix products to establish our private cloud with on-premises data centers.

I would recommend Nutanix Unified Storage for anyone researching enterprise data storage solutions.

We use Nutanix Unified Storage for file storage and analytics. We use Nutanix as an additional server. Before implementing it, we didn't have insight into our files. We have two Nutanix clusters. One is at our primary location, and we also have an off-site disaster recovery cluster.  My company has about a thousand users on the main site. 

Nutanix's analytics provide better insights into all of our files. 

The most valuable feature is Nutanix's file analytics. I like the ability to manage all my file servers from a single platform. I can see which owners have access to files and track changes. 

The interface could be improved.

We have used Nutanix Unified Storage for about seven months. 

Nutanix is stable.

The scalability is excellent. We can scale up and out. Nutanix can expand to meet any demand. We can increase the VMs, CPU, and memory as needed. 

I rate Nutanix support 10 out of 10. It's excellent. We contact them when we have problems, and they always resolve the issue quickly. 

Positive

Before implementing Nutanix, we used a traditional file server storage solution. We adopted Nutanix because we have more than a million files and we didn't have any insights or analytics. We didn't know who deleted or moved files. We couldn't see who had permission to access a file. Nutanix is integrated with our Active Directory.

The setup is straightforward, and it only took about 15 minutes to deploy Nutanix to our file server. We had help from a reseller and rely on the vendor for maintenance.

We haven't seen an ROI so far, but I believe we'll start to see a return after three years.

Nutanix is cost-effective because we don't need to upgrade our infrastructure. It's cheaper than the alternatives. 

I rate Nutanix Unified Storage 10 out of 10. The file server analytics are great. 

We are using the files component of it. We are using it for our network file servers, as well as for some encrypted storage.

By implementing this solution, we wanted to get away from legacy storage solutions like NetApp. We wanted to find a way to make the most use of our Nutanix environment and the storage that we had purchased for the whole HCI implementation.

There is much less oversight of the storage than we had before. We were able to take storage administration away from our backup administrator. We were able to free him up to do other tasks, and the storage fell under sys admins who were able to keep an eye on it from day to day without having to spend too much time or man-hours. It gave us a lot of time back within our department.

It certainly fits our needs in terms of flexibility. It is easily expandable. As long as you have existing storage in your environment, you can license as much of that as you need for the files. The nice thing about it is that you can split up your licenses between multiple clusters. That is what we did with our production in the DR site. We set up a protection domain on our DR site and split the storage fifty-fifty so that we could have a backup of all of our files on our DR site, which was very easy to set up.

Its resiliency is good in terms of the protection domains and the ability to replicate to another cluster that took care of our BCDR needs. Also, because it is built on the Nutanix ECI platform, it is as resilient as Nutanix is, so a single drive failure or something like that is not going to affect the storage array. With the way files are implemented as VMs, if a host goes down and you have a cluster of three VMs, you know that you will always have one that is up and available. As long as you are not riding right on the edge of your storage resiliency limit, you can lose a node without batting an eye.

It is a good solution if you need to unify your organization’s block, file, and object storage. If you have multiple different storage platforms or you require different formatting of your storage arrays, you can get everything on just one platform. You can manage it all in one location. That makes it much simpler to manage.

It rolls everything into one management platform or one pane of glass. You can either have the storage managed by your sys admins or virtualization admins. You can move away from having a dedicated storage admin, or if you still need a storage admin, you can assign them rights to the storage management very easily. It gives them a simple interface to use. It just makes it much easier to tear down silos and consolidate management tasks. If not the roles, you can at least consolidate the location where that management is done, even if you still require multiple people in the department to manage it.

The integration with Prism Central makes it a lot easier to manage, so we just have a single pane of glass location that we can go to. We do not have a separate admin console or anything that we have to use.

It also replicates a lot of the features that NetApp had in terms of tiered storage and snapshots but at a much cheaper price.

While they are good and they do work, some of the snapshotting and tiering features are not as simple to set up as they could be. However, it has improved from when we first rolled it out about three years ago. In the newest release, they have improved the management of it a lot. I have not configured new storage, so they may have made that process easier and I do not know. The management aspect of it has improved a lot just over the few years that we have had it but the initial configuration of the snapshots and the tiering can still be a little bit difficult.

In terms of the integration of Unified Storage with Prism, the funny thing is that they have now split it out for some reason. We used to be able to manage files within Prism directly, but now they give a link to launch a files console, which then launches as a separate web page. It is not the biggest deal in the world, but it seems odd that they would take something that was integrated and now break it out. I have also questioned them on why they would do that. In the meantime, we still access it from the Prism console. We only need to open a new browser tab, so it is not that it changed that much. It just has a dedicated tab now, but it seems like an odd thing for them to do. I am not quite sure why they did it.

I have been using this solution for three years.

It has been rock solid for as long as we have run it. Other than the hardware issues on the platform that needed to be resolved, there has only been one time when we had any software-related issues, and it did not even affect the storage. It was just an alert for which we had to call their support to resolve. We never had downtime on the storage since we started using it.

We have not scaled it as much, but in terms of the existing hardware that you have and buying the licenses, you can license it up to the maximum of your storage. Literally, you get a file from support and you install it. You can add that storage to your pool immediately. We have set up multiple storage pools, and those are very simple to configure and manage. If we bought more storage and added more nodes, we could keep expanding it. That ties more into the Nutanix platform in terms of their ability to add more nodes, but it is easy to scale.

Everyone is using the files that are on there. There are about 200 people in our entire organization.

Their tech support is good. They answer quickly. They have a good response time. They met our SLAs. They were able to resolve our problems quickly. One time, it was a hardware-related issue, so we had the replacement parts sent out the next day per our support agreement. I have no complaints about support. I would rate them a nine out of ten. I never rate anything a ten because there can always be some improvements, but they are pretty close to a ten.

Positive

We have had a few different storage solutions over the years. We used NetApp, and then we also had a product from Apache called HCP. Hitachi Unified Storage was there, but those were all separate storage arrays that were dedicated for a task, whereas Nutanix is integrated with the entire compute environment.

The Hitachi we had did have a NetApp head, so we were using the same management interface for that. There are certain things that it still does at a more enterprise level. You can get more granularity in NetApp in terms of tweaking things to a very finite degree, but if you are a mid-tier organization or a small business, Nutanix would simplify things. It makes it much easier to run or get a lot of those enterprise-level improvements.

We are using it on-prem. I know they have some integrations with AWS, S3 buckets, and things like that, but we do not use them currently.

I was involved in the deployment for Nutanix but not for NetApp, so I cannot compare it with the NetApp implementation. Nutanix was very simple to set up other than some complexity with the tiering and snapshot configuration. We got a license from them, and we installed it on the application or on Prism and deployed the VMs. Pretty much everything configured itself. We did not have to do a whole lot. Once we put in the parameters we required, it took over and did everything else itself.

It was all done in-house. Two people were involved in it.

In terms of maintenance, we have three admins who have the ability to manage it on any given day, but nobody really needs to look at it all that much unless there is an error or something like that or there is some configuration change. So, we only need one admin working on it on a day-to-day basis.

I do not deal with the financials, but I know we have paid a lot less for Nutanix Unified Storage than we did for NetApp. It has saved man-hours in terms of management. That alone would provide enough return on investment. We can use those man-hours for other projects. It helps with better time management.

It is very good. It is much more competitive than a dedicated storage platform.

To someone who is researching Nutanix Unified Storage as an SDS solution for their organization but is concerned about the cost, I would say that if they are looking for just a storage solution, I do not know if I would look at Nutanix solely for that. However, if you already have an HCI platform or you are looking for an HCI platform, and you already have or are looking for virtualization in your environment, then it is a no-brainer to add Unified Storage to Nutanix as a part of that environment. I went to them solely as a storage vendor.

We looked at some of the other vendors such as Nimble and Pure, as well as getting another NetApp, but the cost ratio of what they wanted for what we needed was just too high. Nutanix definitely came in at a good price point for us.

The security offered with Nutanix Unified Storage is good. We use encryption there. It is very easy to set up. The key management is very simple. We are only using software encryption, and I do not know if Nutanix offers hardware-based encryption on their hardware or not. I know that the other vendors, such as NetApp and Pure, do have those options, but hardware encryption is much more expensive. Even if Nutanix offers it, I am sure it would be a lot more expensive than the software. Software encryption is often as difficult to set up as hardware encryption, but Nutanix makes that very simple.

I believe they provide one terabyte of Unified Storage free with any license. I would advise testing out your free terabytes in your environment, and if you like it, you can go for it. That is what we did. We evaluated it first using the terabyte of space that we got for free. Once we added our licenses, we just kept going with what we were testing and expanded out the storage to max out our license. So, try it out for yourself. You already have access to it if you have got Nutanix.

In terms of managing your unstructured data, such as audio and video, Nutanix Unified Storage does have some features to organize by file types. We do have one folder with MP3 and video files, which is separate from everything else, but because of the way we organize it, the Nutanix part of it did not come into play too much.

I would rate Nutanix Unified Storage a nine out of ten. It has been pretty much as perfect as we can ask for.

The price was unmatched for us. We got the pricing down. We had an issue where we already had two copies of the data, but we needed to get the third to be compliant. We were looking at alternatives with a backup vendor, but we couldn't get the pricing to that level. They had an archiving function to S3 or NFS, if you wanted to use it. In this case, we went with S3.

The most valuable feature is the storage density of the nodes. We went with the HP's low-density nodes. 

The installation is set and forget. We didn't really have the personnel staffing to be able to handle more storage systems, we were already running in Nutanix as a primary driver for a virtualization platform. It was just a matter of setting up another cluster.

Nutanix enables us to reduce the amount of nodes. We had the coding and data reduction features. We had the larger, hard-density nodes and we were able to decrease the amount quite a bit. Had we built it another way, we would have ended up with larger traditional storage vendors. Nutanix is really perfect.

We just installed it, set it up, and then we forgot about it. We do quarterly patching. We just set up the alerting and it just works. That's the benefit that we want all IT systems to have.

It could be more user-friendly. You can abstract the technical details. If you look at the IP plans and the services running underneath it, it's quite a simple product. As a customer, you get exposed to a lot of the decisions, which is not always necessary. That should be able to exist for some customers who have special needs but in general, the complexity could be lower. It looks scarier than it is.

At my last place, we used it for two years. It's still running. We used it as a secondary target for data security backups. We were using S3 buckets which were exported to the primary backup cluster.

Support is excellent. It has a fixed delivery value. We know we're going to get good people.

Positive

We also use VMware to protect unstructured data. Unstructured data is a horrible mess. You need to ship it and you need to ship it fast. We're very happy with the tools we have in place to protect it. 

We used to use an old Dell system which was fine in terms of data reduction, but we had issues when we needed to rehydrate the data and get it back into production. The RTOs and RPOs just didn't work for us anymore. Nutanix is so much faster in comparison. 

We switched to Nutanix as part of a lifecycle management. We noticed that even if the data reduction was good with the Dell system, we couldn't get the data out fast enough. That's the primary reason why we ended up going with Nutanix.

The deployment was easy. It took two days for us to be up and running. 

We looked at the Data Lens in our POC but we didn't end up putting it into production.

I would rate Nutanix Unified Storage a seven out of ten. They could simplify the user experience. Technically it's a ten, but there's still some work we have to do for it.  

I am not using it currently. I tested a few things a while ago. This is something that we will probably adopt mid-term.

I am not a storage guy. I am a Nutanix guy. I got a question from my boss about what Nutanix can offer, especially for the Nutanix environment. There is a limitation that Nutanix is not able to use any other storage solution or external storage solution. It is NFS inside the VM. We wanted some block storage, so I started to experiment with the Nutanix solution.

There is ease of use. We use other third-party solutions in our environment for storage. The challenge that we have is that we do not have enough people. If someone is going on a vacation, I have to take care of a few things in this area, such as configuring new NFS storage, and trust me, some of the other vendors are very complicated. It is hard to deal with simple things, whereas the solution from Nutanix is simple and intuitive. If I show it to a colleague just once, he will be able to do things easily. It is very good.

I could not test it much for resilience, but overall, we never had any issues with the Nutanix products that we use. We never had data loss or any data-related issues. The performance is also very good. Even though my testing was not deep enough, I am confident it is a great solution. It is a very easy one.

Nutanix Unified Storage is great for helping manage and run storage from any location.

I like that we can have Nutanix clusters for VMs and files. That means we have data locality when we use the NFS storage somewhere else. When you use an external vendor, you do not have the data locality.

The interface is quite simple. It is very good. It is easy to configure. It also has a powerful CLI. In the few hours that I was playing with it, I did not explore the power of it, but I noticed that CLI has potential. Because of its simplicity, the interface can lack some options, but I am pretty sure that any lack of features in the UI can be compensated by the CLI.

Its interface is very simplistic. It is a good thing for people because of the ease of use, but at times, I find it too simplistic. It is hard to find advanced options. They should eventually expand it and provide additional drop-down lists or menus with advanced feature sets. They should expand it with some additional menus and options so that we can do more. Currently, Nutanix is too simple, whereas, with other vendors, you get lost among all the buttons and menus. Nutanix is doing all that simply, but if you keep it too simple, you miss the options to do things through the UI.

The routing of their support cases could be better.

I had a test cluster for two weeks, and I was logging in from time to time. It was more of experimenting than testing. I had my test cluster, and I played around for a few hours.

It was a great experience to use it for files for two weeks.

I can rate it a ten out of ten for stability, but I need to fully test it to provide real feedback.

I did not test it in a big environment, but looking at how Nutanix works, I would say it is scalable. You just add more nodes and storage to expand, and this is familiar with the concept. I am confident in its scalability.

We are a company with about 700 people. We had two people testing it. It was me and my colleague, but he barely tested it.

I have mixed sentiments. If my case reaches the right person, it goes well. It is not about the people. It is about the way the case is routed. We are based in Europe. Usually during the day, our case lands in Asia or EMEA. The India team works till One o'clock our time. If I raise a case an hour before their shift ends, it still goes to them. That is not okay. They are going home. Why assign the case to them? These kinds of things bother us.

I would rate their support a seven out of ten because I know that the others are very bad. As compared to other companies, Nutanix is still doing better. Otherwise, I would have rated it a five out of ten.

Neutral

Its deployment is simple. It took a few days because I was installing it for the first time, so I had to read more, but the second time, I will be able to deploy it maximum in a day.

Nutanix Unified Storage consolidates block, file, and object storage. It is a great idea. I like it, but I am a bit reluctant to put everything into the same cluster. If you have virtualization and storage with all its features, such as block, file, and object, in one cluster, I am not sure what the impact will be in case of any kind of failure. For me, it would be too much. It is nice to have it all, but I am wary of putting too many things in one box.

I would recommend Nutanix Unified Storage. I am also in discussion with my manager to start using it.

I would rate Nutanix Unified Storage a ten out of ten.

We normally use it to create servers and manage them. We use four nodes. We have one cluster with four nodes for our production servers, Active Directory, etc.

Nutanix Unified Storage has helped us digitalize. Our mission is to digitalize the administration in Morocco. It has helped us to apply our strategy very fast, and it has been very helpful.

We have not had any issues with the throughput or latency of Nutanix Unified Storage. I am satisfied with its throughput and latency.

We have not had any ransomware attacks. It seems to be doing great at detecting and blocking ransomware threats.

Implementing Nutanix Unified Storage has not resulted in a reduction in the number of storage nodes. It is the same.

I like its interface. It is very interactive and simple to use.

Its licensing can be better. They can make it easier for us to scale our infrastructure.

I have been using Nutanix Unified Storage since 2021.

It is very stable. We rarely faced any bugs or errors. It happened only a couple of times in three years, so it is good.

We are trying to do that. We have not done it before. We want to add two or three nodes. We will see.

I used their support twice. It was very fast. I am satisfied with the troubleshooting method that they use. I would rate them a solid nine out of ten.

Positive

We did not use any other solution previously. This is the first one.

We are using it on-premises. We are a governmental organization, so we want our data to be very safe.

Its initial setup was a little bit complex, but with the help of our partner, it went smoothly.

We did not have any implementation strategy as such.

We used a partner. They are a reseller and integrator. Their company is called MTS. Our experience with them was very good.

We have not yet seen an ROI.

The licensing should be more flexible.

Its cost is a little bit more than what we want, but if we consider the quality and the price, it is okay. It is fair.

We evaluated other solutions. While deciding, we first considered the cost and whether it could meet our needs. We then tried to choose the best one for us. 

To protect unstructured data, we are using a backup solution. We try to make redundancy for every server. We also take snapshots regularly to make our data safe in any disaster.

I would rate Nutanix Unified Storage a nine out of ten because I feel comfortable using it. I feel comfortable with the support and scalability, but its price stops it from making it a ten. If they decrease the price, it would be a ten.

I'm using the solution for profile storage, home drive, Citrix VDI implementations, and containerization.

Nutanix Unified Storage is adding features for easy migration of files to Microsoft Azure. That's helping us to get old data out of the data center somewhere in cheap storage. That's helping us quite a lot. The solution provides highly available file servers.

The most valuable feature of Nutanix Unified Storage is SMB file sharing. We use that feature for our use cases, including the home drive.

The analytics part of Nutanix Unified Storage is too big and should be made smaller and less resource-hungry. I don't use the solution's object storage because I find that part too complex.

I have been using Nutanix Unified Storage for four years.

The solution provides good stability.

Nutanix Unified Storage's scalability is similar to other products. If we need more resources or capacity, you can easily scale out to have more performance.

There's no better support than the one provided by Nutanix. I had one issue. The customer wanted to switch their data centers. We moved the old cluster to the new data center, which worked fine. However, switching back to the original one didn't work. We contacted the support team, but they couldn't help us.

One of the engineers of the NUS team came remotely into the cluster and fixed the issue after spending 13 to 14 hours straight on it. If the support team cannot help us, they will ensure that someone from their company will assist us.

Positive

We previously used Windows file servers or NFS file storage. We switched to Nutanix Unified Storage because it gives us better performance and requires less maintenance work. Implementation is easy, and it comes with Nutanix's lifecycle management. To upgrade the tool, we do our life cycle management in a couple of clicks.

The solution’s initial setup is easy.

We implemented the solution through a consultant.

If a company has five system administrators, the solution can reduce the number of system administrators because the product is very easy. The solution provides a return on investment by lowering costs on the company's system administrators.

I don't see any issues with the solution's latency for data analytics.

Implementing Nutanix Unified Storage has not reduced the number of storage nodes. The solution's implementation removes the legacy file servers we're using. It doesn't matter if we have Nutanix Unified Storage or traditional file servers.

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

My customers use the solution for storage purposes.

The solution is a repository with redundancy and faster access than the Windows server.

The most valuable feature of Nutanix Unified Storage is redundancy.

The solution should include more protocols to access data.

I have been using Nutanix Unified Storage since 2020.

Nutanix Unified Storage is a stable solution.

The solution’s technical support is very good. The technical support team is fast, competent, and correctly provides technical details.

Positive

I previously used Windows File Server.

The solution’s initial setup and the transfer of the files are very easy.

We have seen a return on investment with Nutanix Unified Storage.

Before choosing Nutanix Unified Storage, we evaluated SUSE.

We don't face latency issues because the solution provides fast access.

Implementing Nutanix Unified Storage has reduced the number of storage nodes due to increased storage capacity per node. We have a six-node cluster, which was double that size earlier.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.