Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) Reviews

My total experience for data-intensive workloads, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning in a hybrid cloud environment, is over eight years. I have worked six to seven years on hybrid hypervisors and the hybrid cloud, delivering multiple projects in the cloud, including virtualization platforms.

Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) is software-defined storage that consolidates file, object, and block storage into a single platform. It is a very beneficial solution with advanced features. The platform runs natively on the Nutanix AHV or external environment and simplifies storage management while delivering performance, scalability, redundancy, and resiliency.

Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) offers data protection and availability features, including built-in replication, snapshot, erasure coding, and RF2, RF3 for data resilience, along with integration with Nutanix data protection and disaster recovery solutions.

One of the best features of Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) is the ability to deliver file, object, and block storage from a single unified storage platform, along with native integration into the Nutanix Prism for centralized and simplified management. This eliminates the need for separate storage, simplifying administration and allowing seamless scalability. The software-defined nature of Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) enables flexible deployment on-premises, at the edge, or in the cloud, making it ideal for hybrid environments.

The cybersecurity features are used for protecting unstructured data against threats such as ransomware.

I have five years experience with Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS), and I have been working with it for five to six years.

When using Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) for five years, the TCO can reduce by 30 to 40 percent. Using Nutanix for four years, the return on investment would be one crore in savings compared to the traditional data center TCO. When using a traditional 3-tier data center, the TCO for one crore over five years may apply. Nutanix provides a TCO ROI calculator on its website, which helps customers estimate cost savings compared to traditional infrastructure.

DataLens uses SaaS (software as a service) and is one of the best features of the Nutanix Cloud platform. It is used for file analytics and governance, particularly for unstructured data stored in Nutanix files or objects.

Hyperconvergence plays a role in assessing whether the solution has reduced total cost of ownership. In TCO, Nutanix could reduce costs by 30 to 60 percent, depending on the use cases and scale. I find it to be cost-effective.

I am a Senior Engineer at Ericsson, and my email is nadeem.iqbal2563@gmail.com.

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.

Our primary use cases include using the immutable defined storage as a solution for backup, where we have warm backup as the immutable data that we can store there, ensuring that the security of that data will not be changed, which is our last part of security in the data lake.

The immutable data and the object storage are important to us as they provide the same solution as the public clouds with buckets of data that we can store inside. We have always had it, and it's important to integrate our backup solution using this with data course.

The immutable data and object storage are important to us, providing the same solution as the public clouds with buckets of data. In our current situation, we have benefits with NUS that our infrastructure depends on, and we have more benefits by implementing NUS integrated with our infrastructure. This part of Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) is particularly valuable.

We have been using NUS for about four years.

Regarding downtime issues, we haven't had downtime in generations, and everything is going very well. I wouldn't be able to provide negative feedback on that aspect considering the cost benefits.

We plan to assess our storage needs by increasing with ten more nodes, which add up to our storage, and we plan to expand further in the future. Currently, we have purchased ten nodes with approximately six hundred terabytes for our workload.

When considering the difference in cost benefits, if you consider it only as a storage solution, you may find it expensive. However, if you see NUS as a solution with additional features, in my opinion, it's cheaper than others, providing middle-term cost benefits.

When it comes to the vendor or partner, Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) is the best partner we have, so you need a partnership with them.

My use cases include storage, system storage, and distributed storage for virtual machines.

What I appreciate most about Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) is the efficiency in terms of storage capacity and reuse.

This efficiency improves my company by offering greater logical capacity per physical tera.

In day-to-day operations, this translates to a lower cost of ownership per tera.

The improvement in response times to business applications by Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) is notable, as it enhances response times.

At this moment, I cannot think of any improvements at the product level, everything is working extremely well.

I would like to see more components, although the analytical component is already included with Lens.

I have been using Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) for eight months.

The stability of Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) seems good so far, as the platform's availability is designed for that purpose.

The platform's scalability has not caused any problems; scaling hasn't been required yet, but the scaling functionality is available.

I have not needed to request technical service or customer service.

Positive

I have seen the return on investment when using Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) in lower ownership costs, as we have a traditional storage system where the value per tera is higher.

The experience with Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) prices and licenses is good, there is a good relationship.

I have considered options such as Unity or PowerStore from Dell.

I believe the cybersecurity qualities of Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) are an essential component in an organization's cyber resilience strategy to protect data from being compromised, accessed, or deleted due to cyber issues.

Cloud integration is important, not only with other platforms but also with Dell and storage systems that are not Pure Storage.

Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) excels in cost efficiency and value per tera, and it is software-defined storage that can be scaled flexibly.

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

We use Unified Storage for file sharing, application access, and backups.

The model at Dicegsa involves many sellers storing their information on Nutanix Unified Storage from different places in various ways. Nutanix allows us to avoid silos of information by consolidating everything into Unified Storage, so no data is lost and users have high trust in it. Phones, laptops, etc. get lost, but the data remains protected. 

Nutanix Unified Storage has enabled us to reduce the number of storage nodes. When it comes to renewing the technology, I prefer to buy NUS because it works better than traditional storage. In terabytes, we have reduced about 80 terabytes into two little boxes. It has affected us positively in that we do not have any outages. We have lost devices but the information is still available. 

The best Nutanix Unified Storage features are its recovery and data speeds. It has resolved the issue of accessing information quickly. NUS's throughput is quite good. However, our model still requires optimization for better results. It isn't the solution's fault but rather how our data is organized. The throughput is excellent, especially the data analytics, it has many conversions. A lot of information comes and goes, which is analyzed differently. The result is perfect.

It has immutability functionality within the backups that is out of the box. Nutanix delivers it and offers us an additional layer of security. I did not know the feature existed, I was pleasantly surprised when I found out about it.

Perhaps Unified Storage could be improved by including artificial intelligence to make searches more effective. Also, if someone has access who shouldn't, it could automatically update, so I do not need to physically remove permission. The platform could do it automatically. AI could make it more self-service.

We have used Unified Storage for three years.

In the three years we've used Nutanix Unified Storage, we've never had any issues aside from the ones we've generated. 

We are not yet at our limits, and what we purchased still supports our data, but I believe Nutanix Unified Storage has no problems scaling. It's a highly stable platform.

I rate Nutanix customer service nine out of 10. It's only nine because I do not believe in perfection. This is a critical subject for us. Normally, our suppliers deliver and leave. However, we have maintained a relationship with Nutanix for three years. We started with a single solution and decided we wanted to continue working with them. 

We recently renewed three other servers and will continue to grow with the same provider. We know each other, so it's easier to trust someone you've known for a while. Indeed, a community is growing and more clients join every day.

Positive

We previously had a Dell that was expensive and incomplete. We would have to complete it with something else that made it even more expensive and have the dependency on a resource. This was ultimately reduced thanks to NUS.

Deploying Nutanix Unified Storage was simple for the IT team, and we quickly integrated it in compliance with the minimum security mechanisms. We updated, migrated, and implemented it, so it wasn't too chaotic. There was a learning curve, but it wasn't so bad because our IT staff members aren't rookies. They already understand the concepts and how things are implemented, so it was fast.

We started with certain important people, focusing on the business aspects, not technology. We took advantage of technological renewal, the fact that it was time to renew and change components. In every deployment, people always react differently to change. At first, you don't trust the technology, but once you start realizing its potential, things become much more fluid. 

A consulting integrator called Mtsolutions, which is in Latin America. The name of the integrator was Ronald Paniahui, the experience was very positive.

It is difficult to say because we have never measured the ROI of Nutanix Unified Storage, but I can provide a concrete example. For example, a salesperson had a problem in January when her laptop stopped working. That loss of information costs a lot of money. We implemented Unified Storage in March, and something similar happened to another person in May, but they didn't lose their information. There was only minimal physical damage to the device.

We know there is operational efficiency and the information is easier to recover. If we were working the same old way, we would have needed people dedicated to many issues. Maybe this measurement has not been from a human resources perspective of how long it takes for a person to recover their information, where they do it, what they recover, etc. The business flow would not be the same if we still used another solution.

The price can always be improved. As a customer, you always seek reasonable solutions within your budget, and they give us little to do a lot. My IT team always has to justify that we are choosing an optimal solution, so the price could be a little lower.

I rate Nutanix Unified Storage nine out of 10. The platform sells itself without forcing you to like it.

In my organization, we manage the servers using Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS). We previously used traditional servers for the production servers. We migrated to Nutanix, with all the VMs hosted in the Nutanix environment. It a shared storage, which is effective with the cost, reducing expenses in this process.

It offers better high availability and performance due to the combination of SSD and HDD disks. When compared to systems using only HDD disks, the performance improvements are notable. Additionally, the RAM and ROM specifications are significantly higher. As a result, we can efficiently run several virtual machines (VMs) across the environment.

Regarding cybersecurity features, we configure several security policies to trigger alerts via mail to the respective team during threats or malware attacks, resolving issues as soon as possible. In the traditional environment, this would require manual settings; in Nutanix, it's mostly automated, and we can reference documented known issues on the Nutanix portal.

Nutanix has improved my organization by reducing manual maintenance and costs related to previously using Cisco blades and Dell EMC external storage. I previously worked with some environments using Cisco blade servers, and we connected external storage, like Dell storage. At that time, the annual maintenance costs and maintenance for the servers and storage boxes were significantly higher compared to Nutanix. When we made the switch to the Nutanix environment, we invested more initially, but it is a long-term investment. Over time, it has proven to be beneficial in terms of performance and availability, especially due to its redundancy features.

In my previous hyper-converged environment, we experienced data loss whenever a node failed. However, after migrating to Nutanix, we have not lost a single piece of data. This is because it offers high availability, and we can set redundancy measures to ensure safe copies are stored within the environment, making retrieval easy. Additionally, we have observed a significant improvement in VM performance compared to the previous setup.

Currently, I am managing a six-node cluster with Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) and have saved 50% of the cost compared to the old environment. 

Since migrating to Nutanix, we have not lost any data despite node failures due to its high availability and redundancy factor.

Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS)'s best feature is that everything is inbuilt and tested in the environment once before reaching the customer. If you experience an issue, the vendor SLA is minimal compared to other products. 

The main feature is that we are using shared storage without needing any external storage box. 

One area where Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) has room for improvement is in rollback capabilities. If I update, I cannot roll back to a lower version, which I feel is a major drawback.

I have been using Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) for three years.

It is stable. I would rate it a ten out of ten for stability.

It is scalable. I would rate it a ten out of ten for scalability.

When comparing Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) with other products or vendors on the market, Nutanix has a minimal SLA for support, typically receiving a call within half an hour for P1 priority issues, with hardware failures resolved within three hours. 

Most solutions can be found on the support portal. The knowledge base articles are extremely helpful and well-updated. If I need information on the latest updates, I can check the Lifecycle Manager (LCM), where I can find most of the known issues along with their solutions. Overall, Nutanix's support is superior compared to other products.

Positive

It is currently deployed on-premises. We are in the process of migrating to Azure cloud, but the deployment is not yet complete. As of now, we are using only on-premises infrastructure.

When it comes to deployment, it is quite complex. Most of the deployment tasks require assistance from the vendor. During the migration, my old infrastructure was present in the hypervisor environment, and I needed to move to the new tenant environment. In my previous experience working with VMware, I found that the Nutanix Move software made migration much easier, allowing us to migrate with minimal downtime and more effectively than with VMware. I can compare both software based on my experience.

The configuration of Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) took one day with vendor help.

Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) does require maintenance. When we have hardware warranty and licenses for the HA nodes, maintenance is not required, but we can renew the subscription before they expire.

In my organization, we have a team of four people working with Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS).

It is very cost-effective compared to the traditional environment. With new hardware, it's a long-term investment but very effective for us.

It is mid-range in pricing. I consider it a long-term investment. If we look at traditional methods, the costs are higher due to the need to invest in multiple servers, storage systems, and switches. With Nutanix, the number of on-premises devices is reduced, which decreases maintenance costs. While I do invest more upfront in devices, the overall maintenance expenses for on-premises setups tend to increase with more devices. Nutanix allows for a limited number of nodes and a compact setup, which performs better than traditional methods. Therefore, we find the mid-range pricing to be cost-effective for our needs.

I would rate Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) a nine out of ten.

We use Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) for file storage options like storage pools and file servers. Additionally, we utilize Veritas for a third-party backup solution. We have been using all Nutanix-related products.

Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) is appreciated for its fault tolerance and redundancy at the cluster level, which ensures reliable storage of files, folders, and other information accessible on the client side. We utilize features like storage pool containers and file analytics tools for analyzing folder sizes. The functionality aligns with our management requirements.

Nutanix could improve the ability to track user actions, such as identifying who deleted a folder. Additionally, there is confusion regarding container size management; there should be an easier way to identify container sizes and associated storage usage. Nutanix should also consider archive-like functionalities similar to AWS and Azure for unused data, and allow quota assignment on subfolders.

I have been using Nutanix for around 10 to 15 years.

Performance-wise, Nutanix Unified Storage is good, but there are some issues with the security dashboard. It automatically triggers tasks, causing performance issues.

Nutanix needs to improve storage management similar to public cloud solutions like AWS and Azure for better scalability.

Nutanix technical support is excellent, with swift responses based on priority. I would rate it 10 out of 10.

Positive

We also use VMware, but for security and performance, I recommend Nutanix. It offers VM migration, automatic healing, resiliency, and security, making it a preferable option for critical VMs.

Installation of Nutanix Unified Storage was easy. We referred to the Nutanix Bible and utilized KB articles for guidance.

Pricing is good as per the market value.

We have been using VMware in addition to Nutanix.

I rate Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) a seven out of ten. It has good features but needs improvements in storage management and user permissions tracking. Consider consulting me for enhancements as I have experience and analysis reports that could help Nutanix succeed in the market.