What is our primary use case?
We need to exit our private data center and migrate to the public cloud. Transforming all our systems and the native cloud is very challenging. NC2 gives us the ability to migrate to the public cloud while giving us more time to transform all these applications that we have into modern apps.
How has it helped my organization?
The product gives us the ability to migrate to the public cloud without external resource recruitment.
We did not need to spend a lot of money transforming our apps. That allows the technologists and IT to focus on other areas of the business, including AI and automation, and improve these instead of worrying about migration to the public cloud.
What is most valuable?
The ability to manage our costs when we migrate to the public cloud is great. Costs can get out of control, so the fact that we can manage our costs is one of the best features. The other big value we get out of Nutanix is sustainability. In terms of lowering our carbon footprint or moving to NetZero, we can achieve a lot of targets by using NC2, and that's great.
In terms of dealing with our business-critical workloads, Nutanix is a highly scalable, highly resilient, and very high-performing solution. To have that capability in the cloud, just like having it within a private data center, means that our workloads run at an optimum level.
Nutanix Cloud helped to eliminate cloud waste in our organization. As we looked at the native cloud, we saw the wastage. We saw the costs and decided that a cost optimization strategy was very much needed. Having NC2 minimizes waste and maximizes what we're using in the cloud. We have a report coming soon about how much waste we've managed to reduce.
NC2 is great for managing our organization's application and data across on-premises and public clouds. That's a unique feature, and we really enjoy it. That unified management plane of managing both public and private Nutanix clusters means it's a seamless experience no matter what cluster we manage, which is great for the digital team that we have.
What needs improvement?
Not much can be improved at the moment, given that we're quite an early adopter and we're not quite live yet. The experience of deployment was very slick. The support from Microsoft and Nutanix was very good.
Perhaps the one thing that could be improved is the features of Prism Central versus the local Prism Elements UI but I understand that is being reviewed.
For how long have I used the solution?
We were early adopters of NC2. We've had it for about six months, and we're aiming to go live with it this year in August 2023.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
We've been running the product for six months as an early adopter, and we have not had any challenges. There have not been any problems in terms of reliability given it is the same software as Nutanix onprem.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Scalability is one of the features of the public cloud. Since we've deployed NC2 in a public cloud, we can easily weigh more capacity if we need that, and that's a very simple process.
How are customer service and support?
I'm in the early adoption program, which makes it very easy. Over many years, I've used Nutanix, and support is one of their finest features.
For example, once, I had a very complex issue on our cluster in our data center. In the end, there were eight senior engineers right across Nutanix who were getting called into our original call. That lasted a couple of hours. It got to the point where they fixed this very complex issue. I've never seen support like that before - where multiple senior engineers were called in and were willing to help. It got to the point where someone that practically wrote the piece of the software in question ended up talking with us and helped to sort it out.
Support remains one of Nutanix's best features.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
This is a brand-new project for us.
How was the initial setup?
Nutanix and Microsoft gave us excellent guidance and gave us very minimal assistance, even though they were there to support us.
What about the implementation team?
What was our ROI?
We are still in the early adoption stage and doing POCs. Once we go live, we'll be able to measure ROI more clearly.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The license portability is good. We migrated our hardware-tied licenses to their capacity-based model. Once we migrated those licenses we then linked to NC2. That was a great advantage that we could do that.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We did a lot of cost analysis and looked at some cloud-native options.
However, the reality is that a lot of the benefits, including having that unified management plane, meant that we could use Nutanix in the best possible way once we realized the cost optimizations behind it.
What other advice do I have?
For someone who wants to migrate workloads directly to the cloud and run them natively, you want to look at what these niche markets, third parties, and vendors like Nutanix have. They're filling a niche market inside the cloud where you can get better value for your money by utilizing the best of what's in the cloud. You've got the other benefits of sustainability and management, lowered costs in terms of upskilling, and more.
I'd rate the solution a nine out of ten.
I'd advise others to speak to Nutanix. They were very good at giving us consultancy to help us realize all the benefits of NC2. Of course, at first, we didn't realize all the benefits. However, once we were willing to take a look and get all of the documentation in front of us that showcases all the benefits of NC2, we wanted to try it. A trial is where, at least in my case, it shows how it can outshine the full native cloud.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
*Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
