Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) Reviews

My main use case for Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) is for files, specifically file analytics. We're looking to do file stores, either SMB or NFS shares.

We don't run any AI or ML workloads.

With File analytics, we have granular visibility. We are able to keep an eye and see the usage of users using File services. We can use File analytics to see which files are accessed more frequently, or if we have someone who's potentially exfiltrating files. We can see which files are being accessed, and if we did have some sort of data exfiltration going on, we would have the introspection to see that.

We transitioned from a three-tier architecture to Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS). With the Files offering out of Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS), we were able to migrate those shares with a smaller footprint. We didn't have to create a bunch of Windows file servers and reset everything. We could just migrate our current environment, and that migration has been very nice for us. If we were doing it currently with Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) Files, the Move functionality is built in. Five years ago, I had to do scripting. There are certainly time savings with the Move feature. Using the scripting method that I worked on required finding the right times for particular groups and all the coordination. I needed to make sure everything was right.

Five years ago, the integration and the provisioning setup for NFS were not automatic. That has been improved greatly in the latest release or the 5.x releases. There have been many great improvements. 

Pain points are just in the management and understanding of how the functions work. As far as updating and day-to-day operations, if my staff is properly trained and we have those proper training sessions, we don't have that many issues. There can be more educational resources from their side.

I have been using or working with Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) for five years now.

Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) is very stable and very reliable, running multiple virtual machines or virtual appliances with unstructured files. It's very reliable.

Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) scales effectively with our growing needs. We just add to the cluster.

Customer support for Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) is top-notch. They're very knowledgeable.

Positive

Prior to adopting Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS), we were using another solution, specifically NetApp and a three-tier architecture.

It's an easy, quick process.

We had some training. Through Nutanix University, I have attended good learning sessions. We have partnered with Nutanix to have some education sessions, and Nutanix also throws great events.

For new users, the ROI would be in terms of time savings through the File analytics of how the data is being used, as well as with the migration aspect. If we were using a more current version of Move, those migration aspects would have taken less time. So, there could have been potential time savings for current users. 

I assume Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) has helped reduce our total cost of ownership.

We considered other solutions, such as using Windows distributed file systems and file shares, and maybe looking into some other sort of NFS or SMB sharing.

The negative aspect of Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) at the time of implementation was provisioning. That's something that's been greatly improved in the last five years. A positive aspect of comparing Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) to Microsoft would be that it has lower licensing costs.

The advice I would give to other companies considering Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) is to make a good implementation plan and also ensure good communication with users, including file users and accounting users. 

My overall rating for Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) is a nine out of ten. Five years ago, it would have been at an eight, but today, I would rate it a nine since we don't use it for anything other than file shares.

Our use case for Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) is basically for virtual machines, so all of the users' virtual machines are hosted on our Nutanix currently.

The best features of Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) include redundancy, and there are many more features, with NetApp being one of the best. What makes Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) stand out are the support and customization capabilities.

Areas for improvement in Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) include more redundancy to ensure no data loss, and balancing the workloads is very important to maintain managed workloads throughout the year.

I have been using Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) for around two point five, almost two point seven years now.

I rate the stability of Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) between nine to ten, as it remains stable throughout the year.

Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) is scalable.

The technical support for Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) deserves a rating of ten.

Positive

Currently, since it's on-prem right now, we have twenty plus users working with the solution.

In terms of time and resources savings with Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS), it saves about 50% for the cloud environment and 70 to 80% for on-prem since everything is manual.

The pricing of Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) can be quite high for higher utilization scenarios, but it may become cost-efficient if we can bring more on-prem data into the cloud. Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) is cost-efficient when moving to the cloud, as it's in the hybrid model that it can either be cost-effective or not optimal as on-prem.

The performance of Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) is pretty much satisfactory, but I do not have much visibility on it since it is not just the storage that I've worked in. I am not using the Data Lens high-cost feature. There are a few technologies that we can incorporate with Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) to maintain high-quality data for storage, but I'm currently unable to recall them.

Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) requires maintenance, including scheduled hardware replacements in case of outages or drive failures. The system requires regular maintenance just any other system to ensure security and performance. The duration of maintenance depends on the data that the storage has.

I would recommend Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) because of its data redundancy and security features. I rate Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) nine point five to ten, as it's easy to manage, scalable, has great performance, and includes advanced features.

My use cases for Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) are storage, Hypervisor, and critical applications.

The feature I like most about Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) is the ability to optimize storage spaces.

This capability has helped my company achieve cost reductions and price improvements.

I have reduced costs by approximately between 20 and 30 percent.

Regarding Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) for low-latency or heavy workloads, it helps significantly in optimizing quantities and achieving better performance with lower response times.

The biggest return on investment when using Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) has been better response times for applications, which applies to latencies.

I think Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) can be improved with integration with vendors other than VMware or Dell, seeking more integrations with other storage vendors.

For Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) to be a ten, I would want more interoperability with other platforms.

I have been using Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) for about one year.

Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) is a stable platform and is top of the market.

Regarding scalability, Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) can reach many petabytes of storage.

The technical and customer support service is good, as we haven't had many problems. I would give their technical service a nine.

Positive

I considered VMware before choosing Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS).

The installation experience of Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) has been easy, performed by technicians. I don't know how to do it myself, but I understand it has been a straightforward integration.

I have been able to lower prices using Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS), with cost optimization of nearly 30 percent compared to what we had before.

Regarding prices, installation, and licenses, I believe they are within market range, so it is not concerning. It is necessary for them to manage these costs.

We ultimately chose Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) because integrability with other platforms was key in our decision.

The integrability extends to platforms such as Dell and VMware to make it more open.

Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) has connections with other platforms, but not with all, though it is more open and has many more use cases.

I rate Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) eight out of ten.

We use Nutanix Unified Storage for file storage and SMB sharing. My company has around 2,000 to 3,000 users on the platform.

We have massive storage needs and currently have 20 terabytes of storage Nutanix. We are storing around 10 or 11 terabytes of data on NUS. The cost would be huge if we wanted to add another NAS. 

A separate NAS would require us to buy more hardware and add switches. Nutanix allows us to add more storage inside the same cluster. It has significantly reduced our storage nodes by about 50 percent. It has been effective for us in terms of operations, management, and control. 

Nutanix Unified Storage is easy for end users to access. They can use it like any other drive on their systems.  We have mapped it in the user system so they can scan files and store them. They can use it just like an Android drive.

The dashboard could be more customizable

We have had Nutanix Unified Storage for four years.

I rate Nutanix Unified Storage nine out of 10 for stability. 

Nutanix Unified Storage is scalable. 

I rate Nutanix support nine out of 10. If you face any problems, support checks and resolves them immediately. 

Positive

We were using a VMware solution, but it required us to purchase separate storage and integrate it with the hardware. Nutanix is more convenient. 

We have Nutanix Unified Storage deployed on-prem in our data center. The deployment wasn't complex, and it only took two days. After deployment, NUS only requires periodic software updates but no patches. 

We see a 35 to 40 percent ROI on our investment. 

Nutanix Unified Storage isn't expensive. 

I rate Nutanix Unified Storage nine out of 10. I would recommend it to others.

Our main use cases with Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) are specifically for unified storage and file shares.

We are not doing any AI or ML workloads at this time.

It removes a layer of aggregation to present storage to end users, so we do not have Windows file servers. This benefits our company by reducing one of our attack planes from a cybersecurity perspective, so we do not have to worry about the OS. 

It also simplifies the storage to ensure we are not allowing anyone to get a file share wherever they want it.

They can include some playbooks for storage deployment. There should be more automation. Going deeper, I would appreciate seeing out-of-the-box automation for storage provisioning and maybe some more customer-facing, web portal-type or API functionality to Jira or ServiceNow.

I have been using Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) in this organization for about four months. Prior to that, I have used Nutanix Prism, not Unified Storage but the Prism series of products, for the past seven years or so.

We have had no issues whatsoever, and we have not had it go down.

From my understanding, Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) scales fine with the growing needs of my company, which is theoretical because we have not had to scale up yet. We buy hardware and add it to the stack and keep going.

We have never had issues with technical support from Nutanix. Nutanix has the best customer support in town.

Positive

We were using Windows VMs. It was still Nutanix, but it was not Nutanix storage. 

From my point of view, the biggest return on investment when using Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) is probably the lack of downtime associated with Windows file servers.

We are going through that right now. It is competitive with other vendors, but you get more for your dollars. It is fairly priced, but not cheap. 

I have not analyzed the total cost of ownership reduction until now, as I have only been here for four months.

We did not consider any other solution before choosing Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS), as we were already a Nutanix customer on our compute storage, and it was a natural progression.

I would rate Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) an eight out of ten. More automation could make it a ten, specifically out-of-the-box automation.

Some of the features that we use include replication and snapshot capabilities, especially from remote locations to our data centers. The main benefit our company sees from using Nutanix Unified Storage is simplification. In the past, we used three-tier solutions with a lot of complexity and operational overhead. Now, we want to focus on the layers above. I want to have storage available, but I don't want to have to think about it. I want it to work without any issues.

The solution needs to be more open to integration with other vendors. Sometimes, we struggle with the support process. Our skilled engineers must explain our problems to everyone, even though we've already done preliminary investigations. The support team follows standard procedures, which can be painful. We're not a small customer, especially in the life sciences sector, so we'd appreciate more specialized support. I've heard Nutanix Unified Storage has teams dedicated to life sciences and healthcare; we should be part of that.

I have been using the product for five years. 

The solution's stability is good. We haven't heard about any issues with it, which is great. We have had issues related to hardware. 

We have used the tool's technical support and found it good. It's one of the best support services in the market. While some tech support experiences can be painful, Nutanix Unified Storage's support has been solid.

Positive

We see time and money savings from using the product. The simplification means we no longer need to worry about configuring small pieces. It's just a few clicks, and it's done. This saves us a lot of time and helps us avoid human errors. It's hard to put an exact number on the savings, but overall, it's a really simple process.

The solution's pricing is fair. 

The tool has been good so far. Our company has thousands of clusters installed, which we're using for virtualization and VMware. I want to explore whether there's a way to eliminate VMware. We want to try using AHV together with storage as a complete solution. 

Over the last five years, we don't have any other use cases with Nutanix Unified Storage. We're new to NetApp. We use NetApp extensively, and everything is connected to our NetApp ecosystem. We'll try the solution, but there are special use cases where we use some specific NetApp features that aren't available in Nutanix Unified Storage. 

One limitation we faced was the inability to use external storage, but I've heard that it's on the roadmap and should be delivered soon, which is awesome. Another important feature I learned about is the ability to scale up storage and compute independently. This is crucial for us because we've struggled with this in the past. It's good to see that you're listening to your customers.

We haven't been able to reduce the number of storage nodes so far because our systems are distributed worldwide. We need capacity everywhere, so it's hard to consolidate. However, we have been increasing the storage capacity in our storage nodes. I'm happy the tool allows us to think about storage and computing separately. We can grow each independently, which is good for our needs.

We initially used VMware virtualization, but we adopted a dual strategy by introducing Nutanix Unified Storage about five years ago. We saw great potential in it from the start. While there were some aspects we weren't fully satisfied with, we actively engaged with the tool, providing feedback. Our goal was to help make Nutanix our primary infrastructure solution.

The key factors driving us to adopt Nutanix Unified Storage fully are simplification and end-to-end coverage. We don't have to worry about building the solution or dealing with integrations.

I rate the overall product a nine out of ten. 

Our use cases can be divided in two. The first relates to end-user computing. We run Citrix on top of Nutanix clusters. It's highly stable, and we have a user base of around 8,000 people. It's a platform where people can claim government benefits, and many of our office staff at job fairs use it to access their applications. 

We also use it for backend functions in our data and analytics department. Our data lake solution uses cloud data housed on several Nutanix clusters in our data center. The application crunches that data and several analysts rely on it to predict things like fraud. 

The other side is a data warehouse we use for our SaaS application. It holds a massive data set that is pulled into the SaaS application, which crunches the numbers. With Nutanix, we can spread our SaaS worker VMs across several Nutanix nodes. They're all rolled together, but each worker is only dealing with the local data.

Once we patch a Nutanix cluster, we know it has also patched the storage element. We aren't dealing with the hypervisor separately, so we know it isn't completely separate from the SAN, which makes things a lot slicker. It's the same with the storage element.

From an analytics perspective, the best aspect of Unified Storage is its locality. When you read data, you want to know that you're only reading data from the particular local storage node. It's also critical to access the data as quickly as possible from that.  From a business perspective, the most important thing is ease of use. Having a combination of compute and storage makes it much easier to manage. 

We don't have any latency, which is one reason we continue to use Nutanix for these workloads. Our data warehouse has a traditional three-tiered structure and has been that way for many years. It doesn't mean it doesn't function, but we wanted to modernize it by improving performance. 

We achieved that using Nutanix. We could remove the latency you would get from reading your traditional SAN and combine all that into the Nutanix nodes on a cluster. 

It has reduced the number of nodes to a degree because we've been able to collapse several legacy SAN infrastructures into the Nutanix boosters. We still need that storage for three-tier, so we put it together outside. 

Historically, it has been a hyper-converged infrastructure, so when you are looking to grow the solution, you need to scale the compute and storage. Having the ability to scale the storage independently would be a good improvement. 

We have used Nutanix Unified Storage for nearly seven years. 

Nutanix technical support is generally very good. You can speak with someone, and they'll work behind the scenes to resolve the issue. If it's a more long-term issue, it may need to be passed from one team to another. It tends to work smoothly. 

Positive

We also use VMware, Oracle, and Linux hypervisors. When we adopt new tech, we add tenants to the picture because of what they can offer. We combine the skills of our system administrators and collapse them into one. Nutanix's advantage is ease of use. Compared to all the products we've tried, Nutanix performs just as well as anything else — better in some cases. 

Nutanix Unified Storage is competitively priced. There aren't any competitors that can do much better for the same price. 

I rate Nutanix Unified Storage eight out of 10. 

The use case for Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) includes using Nutanix Files for storage. We migrated from a legacy NFS system to Nutanix NFS, which we use to store business-critical files. Additionally, we perform backups with snapshot storage at remote sites. We also use Nutanix Volumes for scaled-out volumes and backups. We plan to integrate Nutanix Object Storage for internal backups and storage solutions. I have recommended using Nutanix Lens for data growth pattern analysis and data visibility.

The features I like the most about Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) include the direct availability of NFS and iSCSI storage protocols. This setup removes dependability on a server running on virtualization, offering us direct access to these protocols. This feature enhances monitoring, growth pattern analysis, and manageability, all from a single console. Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) provides stability and self-healing with no problems to report, establishing a reliable storage solution.

I suggest more flexibility and resiliency for object storage, supporting more protocols. The licensing terms are restrictive, as they go by terabyte cost. It would be beneficial to reduce costs and offer flexibility to encourage more usage of raw storage. Including a more granular snapshot restoration process would greatly improve usability, allowing us to restore deleted files rather than the entire share.

I have been using Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) since 2019, which amounts to about four or five years now.

The stability of Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) is commendable. The solution offers self-healing, and I have not encountered any problems with stability so far.

Scalability is fine with Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS); it allows compatibility and building on top of existing infrastructure. The scale-out capability works well, enabling us to run both legacy and advanced hardware seamlessly.

Technical support is adequate, but it is challenging to reach a subject matter expert quickly. As a technical person, I find it difficult to get direct answers from SMEs instead of going through initial support levels. This process can delay resolution.

Neutral

Previously, I used solutions such as Citrix, VMware, and Hyper-V. I chose Nutanix for its flexibility, intelligence, and straightforward management, which suits my day-to-day work much better.

The initial setup was not difficult, but having some prior reading makes understanding easier. Nutanix provides good knowledge resources, making it tech-user-friendly, although not necessarily easy.

I recommend that Nutanix include file storage features in the pro license or Prism Pro, reducing the cost per terabyte. This would encourage more usage, make the product more accessible, and optimize the idle storage present in clusters.

In my previous experience, I evaluated solutions from Citrix, VMware, and Hyper-V.

I rate Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) a ten out of ten. The solution is excellent for stability, scalability, and valuable features, although improvements in licensing flexibility and more granular snapshot restoration would enhance it further.