Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) Reviews

Everybody calls it three-tier, but we came from traditional Big Iron, so app hosting was on clustered Unix or Linux systems. It was nothing to have SAN, NAS, iSCSI, and all kinds of disparate storage in the environment. When we did a run-off of HCI products, we did VxRail, HyperFlex, and Nutanix. It was only a benefit to realize that there was a storage element that we did not account for. 

I was trying to beat out having to have all these products to do VMware. In the long run, there was this benefit where we started to think about what other things we could do now that we had this storage. There were files, objects, or whatever you wanted to turn on, so to me, it was a huge win for no money. It was just available. You just took advantage of it when you needed to.

We scaled out the second or third cluster in anticipation of removing EMC CLARiiON products at the time, which then became Dell EMC CLARiiON products. We scaled out a ten-node cluster. It had 300 or 400 terabytes in it, so we were able to migrate from traditional SAN-based infrastructure. I got rid of the SAN-based infrastructure. I got rid of the refrigerator full of disks and power cooling. We did not have only storage; we could also run compute on it, and everything runs local. We did some storage-centric nodes for a while. They were fun, but they were just large disk arrays that presented themselves inside the cluster. I figured that it was easier to have FAT nodes with enough storage in them to take advantage of both compute and memory versus having any sort of storage-centric nodes, but you could not run any workloads on them. It was a nice Flex environment where you could move stuff into a cluster because it has a ton of storage, but when you tried to uplift it or were close to it, you discovered that some of these nodes do have limitations. In the long run, it was better to have all the compute nodes with memory storage and an all-in-one compute platform for our use cases. Now that disks are fast and everything like that, it does not hurt in the long run. There is no downside.

In the long run, there was money savings. In simple terms, you had to continue either to pay maintenance for the SAN infrastructure and storage environment and then present that to physical nodes that just get shared out when all of that is rolled into one bottle of wine. Imagine taking two-thirds of your infrastructure away with no impact. It is a no-brainer that you are going to save a ton of money. In the long run, you did not have to convince your customer. It would probably be termed as reinvesting into this product. Do not just buy one and consider it done. Start to do the evolution—no more stack delivery, which is also a benefit. You do not have to forklift anything in. Just buy a few nodes every year. It is easy. It is a no-brainer. It saves tons of money.

When it comes to latency or throughput improvements, most of our infrastructure runs on what you would consider just traditional factors. If we had a database or if people had hosted apps, it all ran in the local environment. We rarely separated the infrastructure where we had a database server living somewhere in the environment, and then we had the front-end web servers living somewhere else. A lot of times, they were just combined, but with the all-flash capabilities that Nutanix has in Unified Storage, if you want to move workloads in or tier it, there are no issues. Nutanix has solved all of the problems. I never experienced any issues. I never heard any complaints. No one ever came to me. We have moved things to it. It is hard to get compliments when you are the cloud for your customer, but very frequently, you get asked if something changed. If you ask them why they're asking, they say. "It is a little faster." When it works a little faster, I pat myself on the back. We have been using it significantly, and we never ran into any problems.

In terms of a reduction in the number of storage nodes due to increased storage capacity per node, by being able to be clustered in the same process, we get some benefits from it as compared to traditional tiering. However, at least in my world, as soon as you make some savings, someone will take advantage of it. There might have been some savings, but I would not know. As soon as there is some space to be had, somebody needs space. The customers like it because any benefits that I somehow garner out of the infrastructure, or as I add, they win. If they give me money and I buy something, they instantly see a benefit. They never argue when I say that it is the time to buy. Nutranix MAKES it easier. It is not me. I just do the implementation.

For somebody like me who grew up building what others call three-tier and I call traditional architecture, the valuable thing is that you can now buy it. You can have new deployments and infrastructure up and running with very little infrastructure behind it. If you have networking and you buy the cluster, you are done. The flexibility it provides with growth is a no-brainer. It could be node-based or cluster-based. We have multiple clusters. We DR to different sites. We have now bought specific clusters for high-end compute for data analytics and data lakes. There is nothing that it cannot do, and it does everything better than ITS COMPETITORS. 

A pet peeve of mine is the integration with the hardware platforms. Each one of them presents its own use case. They have let Cisco on stage and they are bragging about it. Generally, when you buy UCS products, they want you to have FIs. FIs are nothing more than just fancy and smarter switches with a GUI. Now that they are partners with each other, you get LCM. LCM did not exist for UCS before. HPE is similar, but the integration points could be made better. 

At the surface level, they have done the handshake, and all those are wins. We are able to pick the platform of our choice and deploy it with the confidence that Nutanix is going to back it, but after having used almost all of the products that they have, except for Lenovo and Dell, I would still go with Supermicro. I would still go with the x nodes all day long. The flexibility is there. We only go to one vendor when something breaks. It just makes life easier. There is no short side to it. It is not deficient in some way based on the other ones. They are all equal, and there is more flexibility at a different price point. I don't integrate with extra partners and have to deal with whatever they have. In the long run, it would be just the devil in the details when it comes to hardware.

It was the second cluster we wanted. We started using it in 2017 or 2018.

The customer service from my partner and from Nutanix directly is unrivaled. At Nutanix NEXT 2024, somebody was on stage saying that he treats Nutanix as a part of his business, and that is probably the most apt way of phrasing it. I implement it. I see it as an extension of my knowledge or support, so I get to call people and people show up. I do not call hotlines and put in tickets. It is like having two extra guys on your staff that you do not pay for. 

I would rate them a ten out of ten. If possible, I would even rate them an eleven. There is not one bad instance that I can think of. 

Positive

We used other products, but it would have been ad hoc.

It is all on-prem. Its initial deployment was pretty straightforward. We had deployed a few clusters before, so it was not a big deal to get the cluster up, but it was interesting to learn the lessons. You think you have all the storage and you can outsmart the unified storage environment by creating a FAT VM, and then I will give it a bunch of storage space. What you realize is that you do not get the benefits of unified storage without using unified storage. Just because you have storage does not mean that it works the way it is supposed to. You learn those lessons. You think that you can outsmart these guys and realize that you cannot. In the long run, it was easy. Once the cluster was up and running, it was just making sure our licenses and other factors were in place.

It is very intuitive. There is a wizard guide for creating shares, objects, etc. It is pretty easy.

The biggest return on investment is that it frees up revenue and the data center space cost of dealing with power, cooling, etc because now I can just put more Nutanix in there when needed. It never outgrows itself. As these nodes get denser and smarter, racks stay the same. When I scale out, I never need ten more racks of equipment. I can just fill out some older nodes, and they are now denser, so I stay in the same footprint. That to me is the biggest benefit.

We are not using Nutanix Data Lens. It is probably something I should do.

We are not using much to protect unstructured data in our organization. Most of the infrastructure data that we get is in huge datasets. We store that on larger storage platforms that are designed specifically to hold petabytes of data and then it is read into Nutanix clusters for analytic purposes. I do not have to deal with it. I am pulling from somebody else who hosts huge data frames.

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

We use it for our application servers. We have company applications for the casino, hotel, and food and beverage. 

The cost has been the main benefit. It is a cheaper cost than what we used to use, which was VMware and Dell. Now it is cheaper in terms of hardware and licensing, and that has helped financially. It being up and available helps too.

The throughput is really good, and it has low latency. I would describe it as good on speed and good on not being latent. We have not had any problems with data-intensive workloads.

Implementing Nutanix Unified Storage will eventually result in a reduction in the number of storage nodes due to increased storage capacity per node. We are still migrating, so I cannot say that it has done that yet, but it appears that it will. We are still in the process of putting it in. Overall, it would be nice to reduce by 50%.

Redundancy and availability are valuable. We have several nodes, so it stays up, and there is redundancy. Then there is availability. We have all those nodes, so it is always on 24/7.

There should be more information. If it gets used more by more people, they will have a bigger community to share ideas. It is still kind of newer. It is not as big as Dell and other companies. It is still newer. The older it gets, the better it will get.

We have been using Nutanix Unified Storage for about one year.

It is pretty stable. We have not had any outages, so it has been stable so far.

Its scalability is probably pretty good. I would rate it an eight out of ten for scalability. It seems that we can scale up pretty large if we want to.

We only have one main data center, but we are going to have a newer data center in the next year, and we are going to use it there too.

It can be slightly improved, but mostly, it is good.

Positive

We were using VMware and Dell. We switched mostly because of the cost. VMware increased the cost by 110%, so it was not economical to have anymore, whereas with Nutanix, once you buy the hardware, the hypervisor is included for free, so it is a better deal.

It is on-prem. Everything is on-prem.

Its deployment was easy. The tenants' move was pretty seamless. It was not necessarily a hard thing to do to migrate over. Now we were worried about the more intensive servers and databases and whatnot that may potentially have an effect on our company, but for all the smaller applications that are not as revenue-generating, they have been good so far.

In terms of the implementation strategy, we analyzed and defined levels of how critical and revenue-generating the applications were. We first did everything that was not supercritical, such as a very small database and whatnot, and then started to increase from there.

We use Nutanix Consulting, not a third party.

The ROI is in terms of the yearly cost or maintenance cost.

Its pricing is good to okay. It is not super inexpensive, but it is still competitive. Everything could always be lower.

We evaluated other solutions a little bit. We were not going to go to Citrix or anything else, so it was only Nutanix. That was our only option. 

We use NetApp MetroCluster to protect unstructured data in our organization. It has its own set of ransomware security. I do not have the exact details about it, but NetApp products have some ransomware capability to detect environments. These tools are very important for our organization. In our industry, there are lots of ransomware attacks, and they happen to all our competitors. That is why they are super important.

I would rate it an eight out of ten. It seems very good, but it needs to get slightly better.

My company started off without Nutanix Acropolis Hypervisor initially. After three years we migrated to Nutanix Acropolis Hypervisor and started to increase it in our company's environment with other clusters during the designing phase.

The product has been helpful for my company because we deal with big projects in the data center infrastructure, and we see that with Nutanix Unified Storage, we can improve and get better results for the company.

The most valuable features of the solution are replication and backup and our company needs a tool to help us with disaster recovery and the security of our data.

Some of the new features in the tool cannot be used with just one click, as was possible in the past. The aforementioned area can be considered for improvement in the product.

The throughput or latency of Nutanix Unified Storage for data-intensive workloads, such as AI or data analytics, is better in the present compared to the past. In the past, my company faced some small problems with the latency part, but nowadays, it works very well.

In terms of the use of detecting and blocking ransomware threats, I would say that my company applies some configurations to all the data so that the other people in the environment involved in the administration part can't delete them. If someone tries to attack and delete some data, then my company has a feature in the tool to enable the protection of data so that no one can delete any data.

Implementing Nutanix Unified Storage resulted in a reduction in the number of storage nodes due to increased storage capacity per node. In the past, my company had more servers and appliances, but nowadays, we have reduced the number of appliances in the data center by around six percent. The reduction in storage nodes has affected our company's operation and business in terms of the cost of energy, environment, administration, and contracts for continuing the business in the data center.

In terms of the tools used to protect unstructured data, my company replicates the environment in one data center to another and one Nutanix cluster to another Nutanix cluster.

It is very important to use the data protection features offered by Nutanix in our company because we can have another point of data in a separate cluster of Nutanix.

My company analyzed a traditional architecture, but we saw a better solution in Nutanix because it is small, and we can run the same appliance everywhere.

The new solutions that users have been seeing for the past one or two years don't have features available in one click like they were in the past, but they do work, though it is not as easy as it was in the past.

I have been using Nutanix Unified Storage for eight years.

It is a stable solution. My company did not have to stop anything in our environment due to any problem associated with Nutanix Unified Storage.

During the eight years that we have had the product in our company, we haven't seen any problems during the three times we used the tool's scalability feature in the environment. During some moments, we were able to improve the same clusters. At times, our company had to buy or order new clusters, but every cluster is actually used for replication, and it has never been a problem.

During the eight years my company has used the product, I would say that we have had some experience with the tool's support team. Whenever my company requires help with the product, we have received good support. I rate the support team a nine out of ten.

Positive

In the past, my company used to use some other solutions for replication purposes, but it was not a native solution of the appliances used. My company used to use another solution like a backup solution, which was a tool to restore a queue manager from IBM.

The product's initial setup phase was easy, especially because my company was planning to move some small workloads on it to see how it works and then continue with the other biggest work.

The solution is deployed on an on-premises model.

My company sought help from a partner company in Brazil named TechChannel to help our organization with the deployment.

The security of the data and replication are areas where I see an ROI from the use of the solution. I think the best ROI is in terms of security since we can save the data in other appliances.

My company is in Brazil, and making the payments in dollars is tough for our organization.

I rate the tool a nine out of ten.

It is utilized as a storage repository, serving as the file storage. It is also employed for enabling the export of any NFS share for web applications.

The flexibility of Nutanix Unified Storage is evident, particularly in its licensing model. Unlike before, where we had to meticulously calculate license allocations for different storage types, now we can simply purchase a specific amount of storage and utilize it as needed. This means we have the freedom to allocate storage for various purposes, whether it's for object storage, agent storage, or data block groups, without the hassle of rigid licensing constraints.

I'm well acquainted with the resilience offered by Nutanix. When you create a file server using Nutanix Files, the tool automatically sets up a cluster of virtual machines. Each of these virtual machines is a vital component of the file cluster. Should one virtual machine encounter an issue, others within the cluster step in to maintain high availability, ensuring uninterrupted service. It establishes a cluster of object servers, utilizing multiple VMs for resilience.

The Nutanix Data Lens is a product developed by Nutanix, operating in the cloud.  It provides valuable insights into the various types of data stored in my Nutanix Files. Recently, Data Lens introduced a new feature allowing connectivity to Nutanix Objects as well. However, I have been using it to analyze the data within Nutanix Files. It offers numerous dashboards to delve deep into the characteristics of stored data and provides helpful insights for data protection.

The benefits of utilizing Nutanix Unified Storage lie in its performance. With numerous virtual machines supporting critical business applications, any issues with one VM are quickly mitigated by others in the cluster, ensuring consistent performance and resilience. Managing and setting up file servers with Nutanix Files is straightforward and unmatched in simplicity. It doesn't require extensive expertise to handle storage tasks.

Unified Storage enables us to efficiently run and manage storage operations from any location. Currently, we operate from a single site in our production environment. As a healthcare research center under government jurisdiction, our main facility is located in the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. We manage our data center there, and due to the presence of Nutanix, our storage management is consolidated in this single location.

I appreciate its storage licensing model, as it offers flexibility. With this model, you purchase a specific amount of storage and have the freedom to allocate it to different services as needed.

One notable feature is the ability to set hard limits on data consumption. Also, its compatibility with data lakes. This allows for data inspection within the cluster, providing a solution for potential attacks on object storage buckets.

"When creating a SMB share, Nutanix Files is restricted to 100 characters, whereas Windows allows for up to 254 characters."

I have been using it for approximately five years.

I would rate its stability capabilities ten out of ten.

Scalability is a strong aspect of this solution for my company's needs. Currently, we operate our Unified Storage cluster comprising eighteen nodes, supporting government processes. We plan to further expand our Unified Storage cluster. I would rate it nine out of ten.

Technical support has consistently been very helpful, often providing prompt responses to our inquiries. The speed of their response typically depends on the urgency of the case, whether it's classified as critical, normal, or given priority status. I would rate it nine out of ten.

Positive

Previously, we utilized a Windows share with the SMB protocol, for some types of data. We opted for Nutanix because of its streamlined approach to purchasing unified storage, enabling us to modernize our data storage practices. Nutanix offers enhanced performance capabilities, akin to working with Amazon S3 or Microsoft's Azure Blob storage, facilitating ease of use and adaptability for developing new applications aligned with Devops culture.

The initial setup may require some intermediate knowledge, but Nutanix provides thorough documentation which, if followed attentively, leads to smooth implementation.

Recently, I successfully created a new cluster of objects, overcoming initial challenges by delving deep into the documentation. While previously, such tasks were handled by the company providing the Nutanix solution, I now have the confidence and capability to independently deploy and manage clusters. 

For the implementation process, I can manage the process by myself, but certain requirements necessitate involvement from other teams. For instance, I need to collaborate with the security team regarding firewall configurations. Additionally, I must coordinate with the network team to obtain the necessary subnets for creating the cluster. I am also responsible for the maintenance.

While the price may not be the most affordable, I believe it offers good value for the benefits it provides. It offers simplicity and excellent performance. I consider it to offer the best balance of cost and benefits.

Before opting for Nutanix, we considering options like Dell and Cisco solutions for hyper-convergence. Nutanix wins. We have Nutanix Karbon (Kubernettes) and Nutanix Calm (Aplications Orchestrator) in our arsenal, but due to the limited number of collaborators on our team, we haven't yet deployed these solutions in our production environment. Additionally, within the upgrade Prism Central Pro to Ultimate version licensing product, there's a feature called Nutanix Cost Governance. This allows us to manage the costs associated with virtual machines like a public cloud. We can assign specific values to factors such as RAM, storage, and virtual CPUs for each virtual machine, consolidating them into a single cost for internal departments. It enhances visibility and tangibility regarding IT costs, making it easier to manage resources effectively.

If you're migrating from Windows File Server to Nutanix Files, my recommendation is to proceed gradually, involving different departments and prioritizing non-critical tasks initially. Thorough testing and careful planning are essential steps and would help mitigate risks and ensure a smoother transition. Overall, I would rate it nine out of ten.

Our NetApp storage array, nearing its end of life, prompted us to seek a replacement. We aimed to migrate NFS, CIFS (SMB), and SIP shares to a new platform. Initially, we considered a Windows file server, but the Nutanix Unified Storage file offering proved more appealing. However, setting up Nutanix files required a dedicated server, and we used Robocopy jobs to transfer workloads to the new platform.

Nutanix Unified Storage boasts impressive flexibility. It offers extensive capabilities and built-in continuity, ensuring minimal disruption to workloads during updates. Unlike Windows servers, where applying updates or security patches necessitates rebooting and potential user downtime of five to 30 minutes, Nutanix Files seamlessly handles updates. During an update, user requests are automatically directed to another node while the original node reboots and sequences, ensuring a smooth and transparent experience for users.

Resiliency is about maintaining functionality despite setbacks. During our installation, we had three different file servers built with redundancy. When we tested this by powering down one server completely, users didn't experience any change in file accessibility.

I've seen demos of Data Lens, but it's not currently deployed in our environment. Nutanix United Storage is holding it in development and testing until additional features become available. However, I recognize its potential, particularly for specific notifications like unusual file activity, such as encryption or large-scale downloads. The snapshot technology offers the advantage of swift recovery within hours or minutes, compared to days or weeks with traditional methods.

One of the key advantages of Nutanix Unified Storage is its resilience, which allows us to perform updates without causing disruptions to users. This is crucial for our global organization, as any downtime would affect employees accessing files anywhere from Great Britain to India. With Nutanix, we can perform maintenance without worrying about complaints due to inaccessibility. We initially encountered the benefit of this resilience when we first implemented updates. While it was still in a testing phase and files weren't accessible to the entire company, we grasped the power of seamless updates for our globally distributed teams.

Unifying everything to Nutanix makes great sense. We no longer have to deal with multiple vendors. For us to have different workloads running. At one time, we had three different storage vendors for different application uses.

Three years ago, I was frustrated with the user permission management process for Nutanix files. It necessitated using an MMC plugin for Windows. Thankfully, newer versions, like our current version 4.4, have streamlined this management by unifying and integrating it into the overall solution.

Nutanix Unified Storage helps our organization remove storage silos. It allows us to create diverse file repositories, eliminating the need for separate tiers of storage. Additionally, we can set distinct policies based on the specific storage requirements of each repository.

Nutanix Unified Storage integrates seamlessly with other Nutanix solutions, presenting a unified view through Prism Central's single pane of glass. This centralized console simplifies operations, eliminating the need to navigate across multiple interfaces for information or management tasks.

With the current version of Nutanix Unified Storage, we've implemented a new feature called Data Lens that provides powerful capabilities for reporting file usage and identifying abnormal trends. These trends could include unusual file deletions, large-scale file access events, or potential indicators of cyberattacks like ransomware. Additionally, this data lens can help detect malicious insider activity, such as a disgruntled employee downloading sensitive company information before termination. The real-time alerts generated by this system enable us to swiftly address and mitigate such threats.

The feature request I have is for the consistent improvement of how user account permissions are assigned in Nutanix Unified Storage. While there have been vast improvements over the last three years since I began using it, there's still some additional functionality I'd love to see. I believe their team is working towards those goals, but I understand that not everything can be implemented at once, and progress takes time.

I have been using Nutanix Unified Storage for three years.

I've only experienced one instance of downtime, and even that wasn't caused by Nutanix. It was a network issue. This underscores the stability of Nutanix Unified Storage. I haven't encountered any other problems with it. If any concerns arise, we can always reach out to support for a health check. They typically respond quite promptly.

Nutanix Unified Storage is indeed highly scalable. With just a few clicks, we can deploy another worker VM, and the solution seamlessly scales to meet our growing needs.

Technical support is generally quick to respond to P3 requests. Their standard response time is within eight to twelve hours, although I usually receive responses much sooner than that. The benefit of their global support network is that even if we call from the US at midnight, there's a good chance we'll reach someone in Australia who can help and is happy to do so.

Positive

We were previously using NetApp for our storage needs. However, when we decided to switch to a hyper-converged platform as part of a broader platform change, we needed to move away from NetApp. Finalizing our purchase with Nutanix was an easy decision because it streamlined the process considerably. The fact that Nutanix offered file services was also a significant factor in our choice.

The initial setup was straightforward. While some network and firewall configuration was necessary, the installation wizard clearly outlined the steps. I was able to complete the installation myself within an hour, thanks to the helpful Nutanix documentation.

The migration, however, took several months due to the large amount of data involved and the need to coordinate with other departments and teams. Since the data resided in existing storage, we continued running our Robocopy jobs to maintain synchronization. This meant we had to carefully choose downtime windows compatible with business operations for the cutover, which ultimately extended the migration timeline.

Two people were involved in the full deployment process.

The implementation was completed in-house.

Using Nutanix as a whole, I've seen a significant return on my time investment. I spend significantly less time troubleshooting, configuring, and updating. It's been much easier, and it's allowed me to reclaim my nights and weekends.

Nutanix Unified Storage pricing is reasonable.

We were initially considering VMware as a hyper-converged solution, similar to Hyper-V. However, the licensing costs for VMware were significantly higher than what we found with the Nutanix solution.

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

I find the security of Nutanix Unified Storage to be on par with industry standards. Additionally, the various security reports and analytics offered by Nutanix help me ensure that we are following best practices and maintaining a secure environment.

For those considering Nutanix Unified Storage for their organization but concerned about the cost, I recommend visiting the Nutanix website to test drive the solution. For specific pricing information, speak with the local reseller to explore available options.

The only maintenance required is for the software updates.

I recommend reading the documentation and taking advantage of the free test drive before migrating your existing storage to this new platform. Be sure to create a migration plan to ensure a smooth transition.

Our organization primarily uses Unified Storage for hybrid cloud connectivity, virtual machine deployment, and migrations. We mainly use mixed storage with varying block and object sizes and compare various databases within the unified interface. It's mainly used to share storage to the SMB and enterprise protocols. It's very helpful for my use case.

We use any data type. The structural application code is any type of data storage. We have EC2 and S2 buckets in AWS and also GCP bucket storage. All of our storage is managed from one location, and we have more than 100 users. 

We previously used a traditional file server storage solution, and we had to use a different vendor for every type of work. By migrating to Nutanix storage, we could simplify everything through a single-vendor approach. The fact that Unified Storage is centralized makes it easier for us to consolidate business operations. 

We also appreciate the scalability aspect because we can scale based on the performance procurement of our workload. It unifies all types of storage. Everything has been streamlined and simplified to a single-window approach. This is amazing because we can accomplish whatever we want in terms of operations and migration. We had a three-tier architecture, but now we can stream everything using a single vendor. 

Unified Storage's centralized management features enable us to accomplish whatever we want in terms of operations and migrations. It's easy to manage the environment. Scalability is also a valuable feature. Unified Storage is highly flexible and stable. Scaling up the environment is simple, and we can scale based on our workload, which can be unpredictable. 

Nutanix's SaaS-based data security solution is great. It protects us against ransomware and global data threats. Everything is protected. It also provides cloud-hosted analytics. The Data Lens monitoring services are working well for us. We can view all the analytics from within the centralized management platform, which is convenient for users. The security features are all there. We feel comfortable knowing that we get a high level of detail at the security level. Data Lens' rating is centralized and everything is easy to use. 

The graphical user interface could provide more detail. It would be nice if we could click on the service and get some expanded definitions of them. When hiring new people, it's difficult to teach them how everything works, but if they can access everything, they can teach themselves. 

I have used Unified Storage for a year and a half.

I rate Unified Storage 10 out of 10 for stability. 

I rate Unified Storage nine out of 10 for scalability.

I rate Nutanix support 10 out of 10. 

Positive

Deploying it is straightforward. I wasn't part of the initial deployment, but I know about the integration and migration because I primarily focus on storage. The deployment took about 20 days. We have about 10 people on our team. 

Unified Storage requires some maintenance, but it isn't that difficult. We need to do some patching, but everything is efficient and manageable. The support system around is excellent. If we need to purchase anything, we can get everything quickly from the website. Only three people are responsible for maintenance and administration. 

The Nutanix team handled the deployment. They were very helpful. 

Unified Storage is reasonably priced compared to other platforms. The license is neither costly nor cheap, but it's reasonable. 

We explored Dell VxRail and NetApp's retail solution. Unified Storage offers a higher level of granularity and more control over the security features, and options are available to us.

I rate Nutanix Unified Storage 10 out of 10. I would recommend Unified Storage if you're looking for more security. It's a feature-rich platform that gives you a high degree of granular control over security. 

We run our entire production environment on the HCI Nutanix cluster, including SQL servers, web servers, on-prem exchange, hybrid Active Directory, and essentially, our entire virtual infrastructure.

The biggest problem we had was with an old aging vendor and our three-tier architecture. We had to constantly spend a lot of money on purchasing storage to meet our demands, making it quite expensive. Additionally, our data center's power consumption was increasing rapidly. To solve these issues, we decided to replace the old vendor with a four-node cluster of about 8U, significantly reducing our footprint and the cost of buying various components for virtualization, CPU, and SAM solutions separately. This was achieved by implementing Nutanix Unified Storage.

Nutanix Unified Storage handles unstructured data effectively. Currently, we are using Citrix, which works well for audio and other tasks. However, apart from that, we don't have a significant amount of media of that type in our organization's environment.

Nutanix Unified Storage is incredibly flexible and scalable. It has made troubleshooting CPU spikes, memory, and network issues very easy for us. We can easily fix and remedy any problems that arise. The interface is user-friendly, and we can easily expand and add additional clusters when we run low on resources. Overall, it provides us with great flexibility in managing our storage needs.

The resiliency of Nutanix Unified Storage is impressive, with excellent uptime. We faced numerous issues with our previous three-tier architecture. However, with our current Nutanix solution, we have experienced no downtime in the last three-plus years. It appears to be very reliable.

Nutanix Unified Storage has significantly improved the performance of our virtual machines. We can now supply data faster to our end users without experiencing long waits and lag. Additionally, we save a lot of money by purchasing a server that contains all three components, storage, computing, and everything else at a much cheaper price, rather than buying them individually. Switching to Nutanix from a three-tier architecture has also allowed us to save considerable money on electricity consolidation in our data center.

We immediately recognized the benefits of Nutanix Unified Storage after its deployment.

We have integrated the Nutanix file system to consolidate our files and object storage. Previously, we had a CIFS share from a different vendor, which resulted in significant lag and poor performance. However, after implementing Nutanix and its file analytics component, the speed improved drastically. As a result, we are now able to share numerous files with our end users, enabling seamless collaboration. We no longer experience network bottlenecks or performance problems like before.

Nutanix Unified Storage helps our organization manage and operate its storage from any location. Currently, we have two campuses where we utilize this technology. With the challenges brought about by COVID, our employees in the healthcare profession have shifted to remote or teleworking, and Nutanix has played a significant role in enabling them to access all critical systems just as if they were in the office. It has allowed our end users to work from home and connect seamlessly to their workstations.

Before switching to Nutanix Unified Storage, we had a three-tiered architecture with siloed individuals who only knew specific components of that architecture. This led to a highly compartmentalized organization, with separate individuals responsible for storage, virtualization, and VDI. Now, with Nutanix Unified Storage, all these tasks can be handled by a single administrator as they are integrated into the same system. This centralization makes management much easier as everything is now consolidated within the organization.

We have a Nutanix cluster with four nodes. Additionally, we use File Analytics and Nutanix Files for managing our files. The integration between these solutions and Nutanix is excellent. We can easily manage them through their respective management UIs, which are very user-friendly. There are numerous add-ins and third-party products that we can incorporate into their system, although we haven't explored this option much yet. However, the products we currently utilize, such as Files and File Analytics, seamlessly integrate into a single management interface.

The scalability, ease of use, and technical support are the most valuable features of Nutanix Unified Storage. Whenever we encounter an issue, we call their support team and they are great in assisting us. We are able to quickly scale our environment to meet our annual demands without incurring high costs for replacement or addition. We do not have to remove anything, we simply add on as needed.

The graphical user interfaces could benefit from more attention to detail. Simplifying some menus and incorporating a few sub-menus would enhance the ability to manage the clusters through Prism and Prism Element.

I have been using Nutanix Unified Storage for a couple of years.

Nutanix Unified Storage is extremely stable. In the past three years, I have never encountered any issues that resulted in downtime. The storage system has multiple resiliency and backup features, ensuring that we do not experience any outages. Occasionally, we have come across some software bugs, but when we contact their engineers, they promptly provide solutions and guide us through the process of fixing them. Through screen sharing and phone calls, we quickly resolve these minor issues without any significant impact on our operations or data loss.

What I like about Nutanix Unified Storage is the ability to easily add the amount of space it would save in our data center. With our previous vendor, we needed almost an entire rack full of hardware to accommodate what we are now able to do with just four servers sitting at the top of our rack. This takes up very little space, leaving plenty of room underneath for expansion and growth. All we need to do is buy one server if we want to expand, as it contains the CPU, memory, and storage in one small unit, all being solid-state drives. We can easily expand our current cluster by adding on an additional one, and if we run out of space, we can simply buy and add more servers until our rack is full. This level of flexibility and ease of expansion is something I haven't experienced with their competitors or other solutions we've tried in the past. It requires a lot less effort and work on our end.

I have never encountered tech support that is better than theirs. Whenever I call their main number, I am always connected with an engineer. The person who answers my call is always the engineer who then opens a ticket and ensures they have all my contact information. Once the engineer receives the information and inputs it into their computer, we are already on a screen share. This means there is no waiting involved, and I have never had to wait for a callback, regardless of the criticality of the issue. Whenever I call, I immediately get on the phone with an actual engineer, and I am never transferred. They always manage to resolve the issue efficiently.

Positive

We used to use NetApp before switching to Nutanix Unified Storage. NetApp had much slower disks and did not have solid-state disks. It was essentially just a 10K RPM storage shelf that we kept having to add on to, and it eventually reached the end of its lifespan. The performance was no longer good, and we experienced some outages as a result.

The initial setup is straightforward. I had never worked on an HCI solution before, but I found it very intuitive once the engineer contracted to help us install the solution and showed us how to do it. It didn't take very long at all. He was there for only two days, and we had an entire cluster and all of our production stuff migrated over to it. It was simplistic.

The deployment was completed by two network engineers, including myself and the consultant.

We hired a consultant from Converge Technology Solutions who was helpful in assisting with the implementation.

We have definitely seen a return on investment, particularly from an uptime perspective. It has proven to be more cost-effective and efficient. Our users have been able to be more productive due to the increased uptime with our old solution. Previously, we experienced quite a bit of downtime, which hindered our users' ability to perform their jobs. Therefore, Nutanix Unified Storage has undoubtedly been beneficial for us.

The only concern I have about the cost of Nutanix Unified Storage is the buyout between VMware, as we still use VMware instead of Acropolis. I believe Broadcom now owns VMware, and Nutanix has its own hypervisor, Acropolis. We are considering migrating to Acropolis due to the increased cost imposed by VMware since being acquired by Broadcom, which raised their virtualization pricing. However, in terms of pricing, Nutanix is very competitive. They offer one of the better pricing schemes compared to their competitors, providing many included products at the base level that other companies charge extra for.

Considering our origins and the benefits we gained from Nutanix Unified Storage, we explored other vendors such as Dell VxRail and another NetApp three-tier solution. However, we ultimately found that Nutanix was the best fit for us. Currently, I am the main administrator for this product. In terms of its functionality, I find that it works wonderfully and has several fail-safe features. For instance, if updates are done, it can easily roll them back or identify and fix any issues. Personally, I haven't encountered any problems with it. Additionally, I appreciate their tech support as they are always very responsive.

I give Nutanix Unified Storage a perfect score of ten out of ten.

When I compare the security offered by Nutanix Unified Storage to Dell VxRail, the two solutions are very similar. However, it seemed that Nutanix had a slightly higher level of granularity and more control over the security features and options available to us.

I am the person responsible for managing the environment, particularly in terms of maintenance and patching. I take care of these tasks using either Prism Element or Prism Central. Occasionally, I update our VMware hypervisors through VMware VirtualCenter.

I'm not sure about all the various vendors currently in that field, but when we installed Nutanix Unified Storage, there weren't many other competitors. I recommend researching different solutions, checking their pricing, ensuring a fair comparison of features, and considering their potential future needs. Additionally, it's essential to evaluate how easy it is to support the solution, decide who will administer it, and select a vendor with excellent tech support. Nutanix offers new training at Nutanix University, and I've never seen anything like it. They provide a lot of free videos, training, certifications, and similar resources. I think that's also important for the decision-makers evaluating other vendors to ensure they have some sort of good training documentation or utilities as Nutanix does.

Nutanix Unified Storage will mostly be used for home folders and departmental shares. We do a lot of research, and we use this solution for research storage. There are several instruments that generate a lot of data, and we needed a place to store this data during analysis. We needed long-term storage as well.

Our previous system was a large lake of storage, and it worked well for shares and home folders. One of the things the researchers wanted to do once the file sets were placed was to analyze the data. We mounted those volumes on a server to be analyzed, and it wasn't performing enough. It couldn't keep up with it. With Nutanix Unified Storage, however, we can tailor different file servers for different workloads.

Nutanix Unified Storage will allow us to be more agile when deploying storage for the different use cases that we need. Also, with DR, the failover and failback between the two clusters are very simple in Nutanix Unified Storage compared to most solutions. You click, answer a question, and let it go. In other systems, you have to do a lot of reconfiguring and synchronization, which can take hours or days depending on the length of time that you need to fail back from. However, with Nutanix Unified Storage it's very simple. It makes life a lot easier for us.

One of the things that really sold us on Nutanix Unified Storage was File Analytics and Data Lens. We could always tell how much storage we were using, how many files we had, and even the age of the files, but we could never get a good handle on who was doing what with them. This has been a huge issue for us. For example, if someone moved a folder, we would not be able to tell who did it. We did not have a good way of auditing what was going on with the systems. This could become an issue in a ransomware attack. It would make it more difficult to figure out when we got infected and where we need to roll back to in order to recover. Nutanix File Analytics and Data Lens give us that information. In addition, Data Lens has a mechanism built in to prevent a ransomware attack from getting a foothold on the system. It can shut it down before it does a lot of damage.

Nutanix Unified Storage does a very good job of unifying our organization's block, file, and object storage. It puts it all in one place. From one platform, we can deploy S3-type buckets. We can provide iSCSI-level block storage if we need to. It does a great job with home folders and departmental shares, which is what we mostly use Nutanix Unified Storage for.

We can manage and run its storage from any location. Nutanix Unified Storage does a really good job of that, especially with the newest version of Files, 4.3. You can run it on NC2. That opens up a whole new possibility for us down the road when it comes time to do a refresh on the hardware. As our data centers age, it also gives us another option. We would have to decide whether we want to spend millions of dollars updating our data centers or looking at a cloud-based solution. NC2 provides a lot of advantages over just a standard native AWS or Azure deployment.

As part of our organization's ransomware protection strategy, our security department has a number of ransomware appliances that do scanning. We have antivirus running on the various shares and workstations. What's really exciting for us with Nutanix Unified Storage is that we get another tool to help prevent a ransomware attack. In case something gets through the security's appliances or something slides in through the back door, we have an additional tool to look for that ransomware attack and recover from it quickly.

Other than testing Nutanix Data Lens, we haven't gotten into it yet. However, it looks very promising. We're very excited about it, and so is our security team.

In terms of removing silos in our organization, Nutanix Unified Storage does a good job. My team manages the virtual infrastructure, and that was one of the reasons why we went with Nutanix Unified Storage over some of the other competitors. We're familiar with Nutanix and the platform. It's easy to deal with, and it makes managing a large system with a small number of employees a lot easier.

The current hardware is not as dense as it could be. In our deployment, we have 2 PB per site, and we have to have 24 nodes. That's a lot of cabling and network ports that we use up. More dense nodes would be better.

We tested Nutanix Unified Storage for a couple of months before we purchased it. Last week, we spun up the clusters, and we're starting to deploy the file servers in the shares right now. We're in the very early stages of deployment.

The solution scales pretty well. Once it gets denser nodes, it'll scale better. There are options when you hit limits, especially using objects. You can scale that out, and they have excellent tiering options as well. I'm pleased with it.

Nutanix's technical support is excellent. That was one of the drivers in picking Nutanix. I would rate their support a nine out of ten.

Positive

We used a large lake of storage, and it did well for us. However, as technology moved on, we found that it wasn't meeting all of our needs. Nutanix Unified Storage gives us more flexibility to provide better solutions for our users. We evaluated other solutions and went with Nutanix Unified Storage because of the analytics that it provides and Data Lens. The simplified DR failover was a big factor as well.

With Nutanix Unified Storage, you can deploy file servers either vertically or horizontally. For a large departmental share, we can size it, scale it out, and have a large number of servers so that you can have thousands of users on it. If we're doing an export or a share that's going to run on an analysis server and more speed is needed, we can scale vertically and add more CPUs to add more memory to the file server. This is something we couldn't do with our previous system.

Once we had Nutanix Unified Storage racked, stacked, and everything cabled up, the actual deployment went very smoothly. We deployed 24-node clusters in about three days. We were ready to start building file servers and sharing on them. I was really pleased with how well it went.

Our partner, Choice Solutions, helped us with the deployment.

At this point, it's too early to tell, but I think we will see an ROI. We will probably see a reduction in support costs. We will be able to provide better resources for our researchers, which is the main driver. They're the primary users of the storage.

It's not the cheapest solution. It's in line with other solutions, but it offers features that the competitors don't have at any price point, especially with regard to analytics and ransomware prevention. No one else has any sort of object-based storage available. Nutanix Unified Storage is a lot more feature-rich. This is a situation where you get what you pay for.

My advice, if you're looking into Nutanix Unified Storage, is to definitely do the test drives. Do the research, and compare Nutanix Unified Storage with some others. Look at File Analytics and Data Lens, and compare how well DR works. Take a look at the various options that Nutanix Unified Storage provides and compare them to those offered by other solutions.

I haven't had enough time to really get a good feel for it, but from what I've seen so far, I'm pleased with Nutanix Unified Storage. Thus, I would rate it a nine out of ten.