Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) Reviews

The primary use case is as our main provider for our infrastructure, for compute and storage for our main and secondary sites. 

Simplicity has been the most helpful characteristic emerging from a Nutanix-based solution.

From what can I see indirectly from our infrastructure team, I'd say the simplicity of management is the  most useful aspect. Whenever we have some necessity in terms of capacity and expansion of infrastructure, it's like a Lego system where they can just place in some more nodes and our needs are met. They just provision new nodes in a cluster, and everything just goes.

We have noted a reduction in the number of storage nodes. It helps reinforce the simplicity of the solution. There are many capacity problems solved by simply expanding the cluster. 

The reduction in the number of the nodes does have benefits - especially in terms of physical space. We can keep pour racks tidy and use a small footprint. It simplifies the physical infrastructure.

Unfortunately, I do not have information since I did not work directly with the solution. From my point of view, which is indirect, I did not see any relevant defects or needs for marginal improvements.

The pricing could be improved. 

We've been using the solution since around 2017. 

We have not had any issues with stability. 

The scalability is easy. It's simple. They just provision new nodes or set up new clusters. That's all you need to do. It's a great offload for maintaining the infrastructure itself. 

I haven't worked with support directly. I know the team is pretty much satisfied. they will go directly to Nutanix without going through the integrator. They are in direct contact with Nutanix support. 

Everyone seems satisfied. They see value in being able to directly reach Nutanix in order to exchange valuable knowledge. 

The company did use a different product beforehand, however, that was before my time. 

While I did not personally handle the setup, my understanding is it is easy. If we need to scale, we simply order new nodes and provision them, and that's it. 

I do not have visibility on the pricing. My understanding is that the team sees the pricing is fair for what we get. 

We do not use it for any AI or data analytics - yet. That said, we've seen a lot of focus on this area for Nutanix. Likely, we will make use of it more in the future.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. We don't use all of the functionality.

We sell it. We are an MSP. Nutanix Unified Storage is for our customers who need storage outside of our environment that runs on Nutanix. 

The benefit that our clients see is the security of the whole Nutanix platform where they have simplified usage.

Nutanix has helped to reduce our customers' number of nodes because it has a larger storage capability. It definitely helps to save costs. 

The most valuable feature is the snapshots. 

I have heard that there have been latency problems. 

We have used it for two years. 

We haven't had any problems with stability. 

Technical support is superb. They're always there and give our engineer suggestions. They follow up. 

Positive

We use Rubrik and Cohesity to protect our unstructured data. These solutions are very critical because we store customer data.

We chose Nutanix ten years ago and have stuck with them.

The deployment is very easy. It can take one day to deploy and have it up and running. 

The main ways we see ROI is through management and storage space. 

The pricing and licensing could be hard. The customers have a problem with the pricing model. Customers don't understand the core licensing model. 

Most of our data analytics and AI functions are running on a separate system.

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

Our primary use case is for virtual desktop infrastructure. We shifted our delivery storage. We installed other Nutanix files classes for it.

Another use case is for object configuration.

My company has benefitted from Nutanix Unified Storage because we have everything in a centralized place. With Prism Central, we can go to the console files and do what we have to do.

The simplicity of using the files and object, and the performance are really good.

We have all the storage that we need without doing any configuration. The protection it offers is also valuable. 

The data is stored in a LoadBalancer type of way. This feature is very interesting for us. 

There is some confusion in the reporting when I have to create the report for statistics. I find it is not so user-friendly. 

The analysis of data could be improved. We would like to have a better user experience for data analysis. 

We tested Nutanix Unified Storage three years ago and started using it two years ago. 

This whole year I didn't have any stability problems. 

Nutanix support is the best among all the competitors like Red Dot and VMware. Nutanix support is far better than the other competitors. We were really small in 2014. The support was excellent and they were able to maintain that level of support. Every time we open a ticket, we have an engineer assigned, and the problem is fixed.

Positive

We installed Nutanix in 2014. We were the third company to install Nutanix in Italy at the time. We looked at the performance of VDI. 

We also looked at SimpliVity and traditional architecture. Nutanix's performance was far better than the other two competitors.

I don't mind the licensing. It's very simple to license. The pricing structure changed last year. The price seems fair.

We already have Nutanix, and then we use OpenShift together with CSI for block and volume service.

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

We are mainly using it for VDI profile and business continuity for that area.

The HCI concept was relevant for us while going for Nutanix Unified Storage.

For DR and VCP purposes, we have two sides where the storage resides, and the replication feature is very nice for these kinds of scenarios.

It gives us the flexibility and the agility to work from both sides.

DR and the replication power are valuable.

We are using it in a very narrow area. I am not sure if there are a lot of enhancements for that. Pricing can always be better.

We have been using Nutanix Unified Storage for more than two years.

We did not use their technical support, so I guess its stability is okay.

It scales well.

We have not used their support a lot.

We are using another NAS solution for different use cases. We are using both solutions. We went for Nutanix Unified Storage because, for VDI purposes, everything is in the same box. There is a shorter distance for the IOs to go out from the nodes and everything. It is all in the same box.

We see an ROI, but that is not from using this particular solution because it is a very narrow use case. It is a combination of the UC solution.

It is not too high for what we are using.

We are currently utilizing some tools to protect unstructured data in our organization. These tools are very important because we are a regulated company and a bank.

I cannot assess Nutanix Unified Storage for detecting and blocking ransomware threats. It is only for the user profile. We are not using it as a fully blown NAS solution. We have other solutions for that.

Overall, I would rate Nutanix Unified Storage an eight out of ten.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

We use Nutanix Unified Storage for our day-to-day operations in relation to production clusters.

We had a brand new build for our data center and implemented the solution there. We were not trying to solve a specific problem but liked the product and its features.

We have one block with four nodes in it, but our use case for our cluster is different because we run our own private cloud. We don't have traditional offices and have more web servers. We don't have file server services. Thus, we are not fully utilizing Nutanix Unified Storage for unifying our organization’s block, file, and object storage.

We use a solution with snapshots as part of our ransomware protection strategy. For backups, we use HYCU with different backup schedules and snapshots. We're migrating over to Veeam right now as well. If we had a ransomware-type scenario or a situation where the servers were encrypted and there was a DR situation, we'd rely on our solution to go back in time on snapshots until we found a recovery point. We'd then restore from there.

Nutanix Unified Storage is easy to use. New employees are able to come up to speed fairly quickly with regard to the day-to-day administration processes.

Because Nutanix is web-based, I can be in Illinois and check on the data center in Michigan. If we have a problem that one of my engineers can't solve, then they can call me, and I can take a look at it. The remote availability features are great.

I used Nutanix Data Lens a little bit, but my security engineer has been playing more with it. He has not said anything bad about it.

Nutanix Unified Storage helped remove siloes in our organization. IT doesn't have to operate as it did 10 years ago, where you had a team dedicated just to storage, one team that was just hardware, or one dedicated to certain applications. With Nutanix, everybody learned all the different ins and outs. We're bringing on a whole new data center and will be doing replication between the clusters and between the data centers. Everyone has come up to speed pretty quickly, and I don't have to pigeonhole a person. Everyone can jump from console to console and learn it fairly quickly.

We've been using this solution for two years now.

I'd the give solution's stability a ten out of ten. It's never been down.

I would give Nutanix Unified Storage a ten out of ten for scalability.

Technical support has been excellent, and I'd give them a ten out of ten. Anytime we've got questions, someone will get us an answer fairly quickly.

Positive

The initial deployment was straightforward and only took a couple of hours.

We hired Nutanix professional services to handle the deployment, and they trained us on it after the fact. They have always provided excellent service.

We have definitely seen an ROI in terms of uptime and the quality of the software. If we have issues, we reach out to support, and they respond quickly. We'll have a response within 30 minutes, and that is worth more than anything else. Our account reps and resell vendors have been great too.

With all of the Nutanix equipment, the licensing is expensive. We operate in the enterprise space, but we're a midsized company. At times, the price tag is a little bit shocking for a company with only 35 employees. We're not a Fortune 500 company, but we deal with Fortune 500 drug and energy companies. We have to play in that enterprise space if we're going to have enterprise customers. I'm very price-conscious, but I understand that if I want the best, I've got to pay the price.

Nutanix Unified Storage fills a need, and it definitely works well within the Nutanix stack. It's not a waste of money. I would rate it ten out of ten and recommend it.