Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) Reviews

We have a practice of testing different solutions and we completed a POC of Nutanix Unified Storage. 

The capability of Nutanix Unified Storage to store unstructured data is impressive. We have CCTV camera footage from each office location, and we can efficiently manage all the instructional data from a single interface. This is in contrast to Cisco, which represents a more complex system to manage.

Nutanix Unified Storage demonstrates resilience. The solution has the capability to duplicate data across multiple node storages, ensuring that if one node fails, the data remains accessible.

Having the capability to consolidate our storage through Nutanix Unified Storage gives us the assurance that we can oversee all our data under a single management team, rendering it more dependable.

We can utilize mixed storage block-sized objects and combine various databases within a unified interface. 

We can scale up or out without causing any interruptions to our service.

The concept of using the Gflag should not be employed in unified storage, as storage is a particularly sensitive domain. Allowing the use of the Gflag compromises the integrity of the Nutanix system and its established standards. While we do employ the Gflag to meet customer requirements, it's important to note that during maintenance activities, it becomes necessary to reset the Gflag to align with the customer's expectations. Thus, on one hand, the Gflag serves to support the customer, but on the other hand, customers become more reliant on the assistance of the Nutanix support team.

I have been using Nutanix Unified Storage for one month.

Nutanix Unified Storage is stable.

With Nutanix Unified Storage we can scale up and down accordingly.

The technical support is good. Our sole concern arises when we require assistance from them on weekends. We've noticed that the engineers' response time is slower during weekends.

Furthermore, when we ask for feedback regarding the nature of the issue and its resolution, we are only provided with a summary. This leaves us reliant on their support. They do not share internal articles with us; instead, they only provide generally available ones. If they could furnish us with detailed steps, we could address the issues independently, thereby saving time and reducing our dependency on Nutanix support.

The deployment took two days. We had several dependencies related to the required port openings that we had to satisfy while also adhering to our organizational standards during the process.

Normally we would only have two people involved in the deployment but because it was a new solution everyone wanted to be involved because they were eager to learn.

I would rate Nutanix Unified Storage a six out of ten because my experience is limited to the POC, and I haven't fully familiarized myself with the solution.

We also use Nutanix NCI and Database Service.

The POC involved a total of five people. One person conducted the testing, while the other four observed on Zoom through their screens.

Our clients usually use the product in the financial industry for application servers.

The solution is very easy to manage. The replication almost always works without fail.

The solution is very expensive. It is very network intensive.

I have been using the solution for six years.

The solution is very stable. I rate the stability a nine out of ten.

The product is scalable. I rate the scalability a seven out of ten. The scalability could be better for a very large deployment. Our clients are mostly medium-sized, but there are a couple of enterprise clients.

The installation is very user-friendly.

The deployment takes days, and the number of staff depends on the number of servers we install. Four engineers can do a medium size installation of 20 servers in about five days. 

When we have a problem with the solution, it may require maintenance, but Nutanix actively supports its systems. Since support is very good, maintenance is minimal. We need two people to maintain and monitor 20 servers.

I rate the pricing of the product an eight out of ten. The product has an annual licensing fee. There are no additional costs associated with the product.

I am using the version that was released before the latest version. People planning to buy the solution must make sure that whatever software they put on it is licensed in a way that is friendly for moving block storage in Nutanix. Some products like Oracle Database are not licensed in a way that is friendly for Nutanix products. It is very expensive to license these products.

Technically, it is a very good product with good support, but it is very expensive. Other alternatives might require a little bit more technical support, but their prices are very friendly. Overall, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

We run our VMs on Nutanix Unified Storage. We were trying to reduce the data center footprint and shrink the bandwidths on the number of storage units that we were using. We also wanted to avoid having to deal with different vendors when there is an issue. We have a 700 TB environment.

We use Varonis for ransomware protection. It's very expensive, but it does a very good job. Varonis monitors file pattern changes and maintains well-known dictionary sets.

The life cycle managers of the PCMs are very impressive, and I like them. They make our lives easy when managing patches and security updates when they come in. A life cycle manager helps to consolidate different vendors.

Also, because the management is simplified, I can depend on one or two people. We are able to reduce contractors and FTEs. We used to be a team of more than ten people, and now we are a team of six. As such, we are able to save about $400,000 a year.

We have to run mandatory disaster recovery processes every year. It's very important that Nutanix Unified Storage is able to manage and run our storage from any location.

Nutanix Unified Storage removed siloes from our organization’s storage.

Security is an area for improvement. When there are vulnerabilities, there needs to be a faster approval process. The solution needs to automatically target the vulnerabilities and not waste too much time.

We have been Nutanix customers for two years.

NUS's stability is very good.

Nutanix's technical support is good. They go the extra mile to help us out with health checks as well. Therefore, I would give them a nine out of ten.

Positive

NUS's initial setup was straightforward.

Our partner, CAS Severn, helped us with the initial deployment process.

I believe that we have seen an ROI.

I would recommend trying Nutanix Unified Storage. I rate it a nine out of ten.

My use case is quite complicated because in our society we need to know how to integrate Nutanix products and we need to understand how to integrate technical products. Nutanix is a bit more challenging to use, start, administrate, and deploy, but overall a very stable solution and quite a good tool.

All of my clients are secret clients for military use or industrial use and, in all cases, we are on-premises.

There is room for improvement in the solution's customer service.

I have been using this solution for two years.

My opinion is that this solution has very good stability. Maybe it's better than, for example, DataCore, because there are more servers. So you can move your data easily to a different server. When it comes to moving data, it's better than DataCore.

When it comes to scalability, it's not as easy as, for example, DataCore, but it's scalable. When you have a lot of storage to add, it's pretty good. When you have small storage to add, it's more complicated than DataCore.

Customer service is more difficult to call and they do not responding as much as, for example, DataCore. It's not the same level of satisfaction compared to DataCore. Responses could be faster.

I would rate their customer service a seven, on a scale from one to 10, with one being the worst and 10 being the best.

Neutral

The license is paid on a yearly basis and they're quite expensive.

I would rate their pricing plan an eight, on a scale from one to 10, with one being the worst and 10 being the best.

I would recommend Nutanix for people that can manage their computing infrastructure. Because when you have Nutanix, you need some expertise in computing science, because it's not very easy to use and administrate.

We only have about three clients on Nutanix.

We primarily use the solution for storage. We've migrated all over all file servers and systems over to Nutanix Unified Storage. 

We had 10 VMs with older technologies. I'm happy to use this as it is really simple and complete. 

The high availability of the storage is important. We have some customer data and it's crucial for us to be able to maintain and secure the data. 

It's a complete product. It works well. 

The security is very good.

We use clusters, and these are not only dedicated to storage. We have VMs, containers, and other types of storage.

The performance has been very good.

We were able to save 20% of our time by using this solution. 

I haven't had any issues with the solution so far.

I've used the solution for three years. 

The solution is really stable. I'm really impressed by the product. 

We've started with three VMs. We now have five VMs in our operations. We have no issues when we try to scale. 

Technical support is good. We've opened cases with them, and my experience has been really good. They are very fast, and they have very good technical knowledge. They come to the calls prepared. 

Positive

We did not previously use a different solution. 

The deployment is very easy. It's no problem to implement it.

I do not have visibility of the pricing and licensing. 

We did look at other solutions. We were able to validate Nutanix against other solutions. It has a complete ecosystem, which is important for us. We wanted more options to extend our environment if we needed to. 

We do not use the solution for AI and data analytics or for preventing and blocking ransomware. 

We have not tried to integrate it with other products. However, I have tried to integrate it with a backup solution, and I didn't have any issues.

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten.

I do not use it myself. My technicians use it for their work. They look at the portal every day. It is open on their desktops all day.

We have time savings and scalability.

It is unified. This is the best thing that Nutanix gave to the world. You can do everything from one point.

It is very easy to use, and we also get the best customer service from Nutanix.

It is a good solution, but every solution can be better. I would like Nutanix to provide a solution for virtual disks. This is the main problem for which we want a solution.

I have been using Nutanix for six or seven years.

Their customer support is great. They provide the best support and service. Nutanix is the best in this aspect.

Positive

I hope that it will stay the way it is. We have seen the changes in VMware and what happened to them. I have heard that Nutanix will raise the prices, but I hope that they will not do that.

When we did the PoC about seven years ago, we found Nutanix infrastructure better for us. It helps us with Kubernetes.

I would rate Nutanix Unified Storage a ten out of ten. We are very satisfied with all the solutions that Nutanix provides us.

We have two major use cases for Nutanix Unified Storage. For the first use case, we use the solution to provision volume for our Kubernetes cluster, which is used for telecommunication. If you buy an iPhone 15, the eSIM is downloaded from a Nutanix Karbon AHV, and the volume is provisioned by Nutanix Unified Storage. The second use case I have is with volume, which is also part of the NUS. In some cases, we use Nutanix Volumes for a third volume.

The solution has helped our organization the most at an operational level. Before using Nutanix Unified Storage, we were manually provisioning volume for Kubernetes using heavy technology. We had to do a lot of tasks to provision one basic volume. Now, we are giving big volumes. The solution provides good stability and high availability, which is not the case in the previous version of my volume.

The console and volume management for Kubernetes are very nice and easy to use. The product is good, easy to upgrade, easy to use, and user-friendly.

The solution's monitoring and security features could be improved. Nutanix Unified Storage is not easily managed by the command line.

I have been using the solution since the beginning of Nutanix. We installed the first clusters in 2016 and have been using Nutanix Unified Storage since 2017.

Nutanix Unified Storage is a very stable solution. I have been using it for seven years and have never had a problem with stability.

Nutanix Unified Storage is very easy to scale. You just need to go into the tool's console, click on update, add some memory or CPU, and update. You can also use the solution's console to monitor your performance live.

The solution's customer support is very, very good. I am very satisfied with the support. Nutanix Unified Storage has very good customer support compared to the other tools I use.

Positive

Before Nutanix Unified Storage, we used different solutions. We used VMware volume for the Kubernetes clusters. We also used basic NFS on Linux machines, which did not provide resilience and high availability. That's why I was very happy to have Nutanix Unified Storage. It provided high availability, resilience, and performance, which was very good for me.

The solution's initial setup is very easy. First, you have to install Prism Central. Then, you get your file console with one click, deploy the volume, give a name, and give an endpoint.

The biggest return on investment has been the operational time for my team.

I'm very happy with the solution's pricing. I'm using iOS Pro licensing. I'm really happy because I have the benefit of getting one terabyte for free, which is sufficient for my use cases. I'm happy with the cost and licensing because I don't have big volumes. I have a little bit of volume to consume without added cost. So, it's perfect for me.

The throughput or latency of Nutanix Unified Storage for data-intensive workloads works well because we have good infrastructure and networking. Since the networking is recent, we have good bandwidth. We're using little volume, but we don't have a lot of traffic. I have never had issues or struggles.

I have 15 clusters, and I'm using only one terabyte free. I can't see the efficiency of data reduction because I don't have big volumes. Since I don't have a great volume, I can't say that I have ten terabytes, and deduplication has helped me to reduce one node.

I'm the infrastructure manager of our data center. We propose Nutanix Unified Storage. We deliver our volumes, and then the integration team consumes them. I don't know which kind of data is structured or unstructured. We use Cassandra databases for some purposes and Oracle for other use cases.

Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of 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.

The first use case, we mainly want to use it for our Citrix profiles. So that will be the main usage of files and maybe also other applications. 

Before, we had the classic Windows file server. Because Windows file server is just that, one alone, and we want to be able to replicate, recreate it, etcetera. So we tried to use Nutanix Files. Our use case is also that we can then fulfill files replicated on Rubrik.

We also use it for objects, because we can't back it up on a Rubrik, we have another cluster, which then functions as the backup for the object storage.

We haven't already seen the benefits because we're still in the engineering phase. The main focus is that we have failover in place. We always have access to the data, and we're not blocked in case of that.

The best feature is that it's on Nutanix itself. In comparison, if Windows file server gets killed, then all the data is gone but for Nutanix, it's on another layer. 

It gives more security that the data isn't going to get lost. 

The replication is better solved if we have Nutanix Unified Storage because one file site storage solution has at least three VMs. If one VM doesn't work, it gets replicated on the other two, which means we always have access to the data in comparison to Windows File Server.

It's a little bit slow because there's so much in the underlying layers that even after talking with Nutanix support, I couldn't really grasp it. 

There's still a little bit of a learning curve, but the support was really helpful.

We only started engineering with it this year. Our project is now in the phase where we engineer Nutanix Unified Storage, mainly files, but also a little bit of objects.

We have issues with stability sometimes. I found one specific issue kind of bizarre where in one of our clusters, the underlying inode was full.

I thought, for example, the inode, after some time, would delete all data so that it doesn't get full. But in that case, it was full. Then, the whole cluster shut down. It also deleted one of the other files that Nutanix needed to work. Even the support guys didn't under how it happened but they were able to fix it. 

The tech support is very good. One time, I didn't have the Zoom session on my computer. So the guy I talked with told me what I had to do, and I could also ask questions about the template, in terms of how it works or what it is exactly. 

It was really helpful to be able to show the person on the other side what exactly was happening when I asked questions. They were helpful.  

Positive

Initially, we deployed everything through Prism Element, where it functioned perfectly.

Our Nutanix partner told us to do it over Prism Central because if you do it over Prism Elements, then it's tough. You have problems managing it from Prism Central. 

Our focus is not on detecting and blocking ransomware because the Nutanix cluster we are building doesn't have access to the Internet. To be able to go to the server itself, they have to overcome a lot of clogs or boundaries.

I had to do with the licensing for Nutanix Objects Storage (NOS). While NOS comes with one terabyte of free space, if you actually want to use it, even just for development reasons, we have to buy some terras, or otherwise, it wouldn't work.

Overall, I would rate the solution a seven out of ten. With the migration from Prism Element to Prism Central, some things don't really work, but they are always trying to modify it and make changes.

I use the solution for user home directories, profiles, and general file storage.

The product is very easy to manage. File Analytics allows us to track who's doing what. We can set up scenarios based on what the product alerts when somebody creates or deletes a bunch of files.

The solution's deployment and scalability are the most valuable features. The solution is simple and robust.

We originally deployed the file server VMs from Prism Element. So now we have to go back to Prism Element to manage them. Since then, Prism Central has gained the ability to manage file servers. It would be great if we could import older file servers into Prism Central to avoid having to manage things in two different places.

We have issues with software updates occasionally. The new features seem to be rolled out before they go through quality control.

I have been using the solution for three years.

The core infrastructure is rock solid. I don't ever have a problem with it.

The solution is extremely scalable.

The support is top-notch. I've never had a problem with the support. Whenever I have an issue, I typically get a federal person right away, and they work with me until the issue is solved.

Positive

Previously, we used Synology, QNAP, and NetApp. We switched to Nutanix Unified Storage because of its ease of management.

The initial setup was super easy.

The product is pricey. The pricing makes sense when running Nutanix Clusters just for files, but when running it to do everything, the per-terabyte limit gets a little pricey.

We use the solution mostly for SMB shares. Our environment was built using Nutanix. Since Nutanix Unified Storage was built into the platform, we decided to go with it.

By implementing the solution, we want to get rid of traditional NAS, consolidate everything into a single platform and alleviate having to run file shares based on regular Windows VMs. The product provides a single platform for file storage. We run our VMs and have our file shares on the same hardware. It's all protected at the same level of redundancy.

Nutanix Unified Storage has made it very intuitive for the administrators to have a simple console to log in and ensure everything's up and running. We have ransomware protection enabled within files. We also have backups. We are a lab, so we don't have any off-site storage.

The solution narrowed the gap between file administrators and Windows administrators. Typically, file shares are managed by Windows administrators. Now, the same admin can manage the virtual infrastructure and the Windows domain infrastructure in the same place.

Overall, I rate the product a ten out of ten.