What is our primary use case?
We use it for the setup of multi-cloud infrastructure. Nutanix offers enterprise cloud, and then there are other clouds such as AWS and Azure.
How has it helped my organization?
It is a single platform to manage services. It starts at the infrastructure level, but Nutanix also offers other products that are more about services, not about infrastructure. Typical IT organizations know a lot about IT infrastructure, VMs, storage, and network. Nutanix is trying to reduce this workload and give you more time to think about services that are of benefit to your business because knowing about infrastructure is not of benefit at the business level.
Our clients run SAP HANA, Microsoft SQL databases, Oracle databases, and even MySQL databases on Nutanix. There are no limits. In 2012, they started with a high focus on VDI use cases because they were able to solve the problem of the traditional infrastructure solutions. Server virtualization and enterprise or mission-critical applications are also among the broad portfolio of use cases. I am sure you can run any use case on the Nutanix platform.
NCI’s features have helped our clients' organizations reduce downtime. One of the most impactful aspects is that once the SLAs of your services are declared or you know what your SLA requirements are, you can just implement or move the services to match the SLAs. This is one thing, and then you also have runbooks. High availability is not something you do once and it is done. It is a constant process of changes. You need to look at things, fix them, and test them. With Nutanix, you are able to do all of that. You have the ability to have runbooks where if there is an impact and something is down, you can specify how to start it again. This can be written in a runbook, so you have not only the technical ability but also the operational ability to recover from failures.
It helps to know the resource consumption. You know which resources are being consumed and which systems are over-provisioned. You can right-size them. You see the applications that are affecting other things. There is machine learning or artificial intelligence running at the backend telling you, "Look, these are the things we see." If there are any anomalies, you get messages saying that something is strange or going above the expected limits or below the expected reserve usage. You get to know if there is something going on that is different from the past. You can also do capacity management and planning. For example, if you have to run 20 more databases, you can assess if there are enough resources in your environment. In the end, you simplify things. You do not have to do the things that you did in the past but are of no value to the business, such as capacity management. If you are good at it, you will spend less on hardware, but it is not the business. It is just efficiency and consumption of resources, and it is automatically done for you with Nutanix. You do not have to do it.
For a client, we moved the complete IT infrastructure to the Nutanix infrastructure based on NCI. We moved hundreds of virtual machines or services. There is also a tool to do this, which belongs to AHV, not to AOS. AOS is for multi-cloud infrastructure. It is hypervisor agnostic, which means you can run the hypervisor you want such as AHV, Hyper-V, vSphere, etc. You can even select different hypervisors for different infrastructures. Generally, you move services at the hypervisor level, and it is easy to move services within the same hypervisor. If you want to move services across hypervisor where, for example, you decide on Nutanix and you also decide to switch from vSphere to AHV, there is a tool called Move that allows you to plan the migration process and deploy.
What is most valuable?
This is a way into cloud consumption. Because the cloud is not about a vendor; it is an operational model, you can have your cloud in your data center, and later on, you can extend to a public cloud, which is a different approach. A few customers say that they have a cloud-first strategy, which means everything from the data center is brought to the cloud. Another approach is lift and shift, but it will cost you a lot of money in the public cloud. If you want to leverage and use a cloud, why not start with a data center? You can implement your cloud use case there, and if you want to extend your multi-cloud or hybrid cloud to public cloud suppliers or CSPs, such as Azure, GCP, or AWS, you have the same workbench in their cloud, so what Nutanix offers us is that in their public clouds, there is dedicated hardware, and they run the same infrastructure links that are in your data center. This way, it is easy for you to move workloads from your own data center to the cloud, which is a real benefit because there is no cloud login. It is not easy to move from AWS to Azure if you use their products, but Nutanix offers this flexibility and scalability.
It is easy to use. One of the things they have as a design goal is to reduce complexity and simplify things.
What needs improvement?
One of the improvements I would like to have is related to naming. It gets confusing because they are using three-letter acronyms, which are more or less misleading. What I do not like is that they changed names and reused names. They had a meaning in the past and they are still using the names for something similar. It is not related to the product. It is related to the naming conventions thing because this is driving partners and even customers crazy because the name is still the same, but the product in the backend is a completely different product.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure for ten years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I would rate it a ten out of ten in terms of stability. It is rock solid. It is not made by god. It is still man-built, so there are errors, but their support is excellent. If there are flaws in the new functions, they improve it really quickly. Afterward, it is okay.
The thing with the software is that you can test and test and test it, but in the end, the reality is that most software solutions get better after reaching the first customer. They get better and better by detecting errors. This is the same with Nutanix and other vendors. They track where the problems are, and if errors accumulate in a specific area, they have their task force internally focusing on these problems and fixing them. Pretty soon, in about three months' time, the problem is solved, and the fixes are released.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
It is scalable. It is not difficult to add compute and storage on demand. If you run it in your own data center, you need extra hardware. If you need more resources, you have to add hardware and the whole process of adding this new hardware is simple. Mostly, we support scaling by adding more nodes to the cluster. There is also the possibility to scale up, for example, by adding some more disks to the existing system if there are free slots. It is also possible to get an extended RAM. It depends on the hardware. Some hardware vendors allow you to change CPUs.
Nutanix runs on hardware from different vendors, such as HPE, Dell, Lenovo, Fujitsu, or Supermicro, so you are independent of the hardware. You do not need any special hardware, so there is no RAID control. The idea is to use x86 servers, so you do get rid of all of the special hardware. You just buy what is available from Intel or AMD. You buy what is actually available, and all the functionality is made in the software. The resources are made in the hardware from existing vendors. It is a cloud-built and run-on-your-own setup. If you go to the cloud infrastructure, you also have hardware provided by the cloud provider, and you install Nutanix NCI software on this hardware. That is the way you can scale. If you want to have it in your data center, you can even have it run by a local MSP. We offer something like this, so it is more flexible. It is like traditional hardware, but you can add to the actual existing hardware if needed. They do not have to be the same types of nodes, so you can mix and match the way you need them.
How are customer service and support?
Their support is extraordinary or exceptional. It is good. I would rate their support a ten out of ten.
How would you rate customer service and support?
How was the initial setup?
In terms of the deployment model, there are options for on-premises or on the cloud. You are free to choose. A lot of customers start with on-premises and add a cloud later on, but we do have customers who started directly in the cloud.
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure offers a variety of cloud operating models across on-premises, edge, as well as multiple hosted, managed, and public clouds. On the strategic consulting level, this is one of the key benefits because you do not have to run or select different cloud vendors. You can have one platform that helps you to run applications everywhere. However, most customers we work with still come from the approach of making their own IT infrastructure and not buying it. They are moved to the buy model, from the make model, by the C-level to reduce the cost. C-level mostly thinks that the cloud is cheaper. Another reason for the move is to get rid of multiple technical levels in their IT organizations.
In terms of maintenance, everything you run needs maintenance, so there are updates going on. Most of these updates are done with a simple click, but you should know what is running in the backend, and you should know what you are doing. A fool with a tool is still a fool. It is not as simple as the marketing statements are, but it is much simpler than the old traditional way of running IT infrastructure.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
It is not cheap, but if you look at the return on investment and the total cost of ownership, it is worth the price.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
In our selection and evaluation process of various solutions, we found that Nutanix is the best solution on the market, so the decision was made to only support this solution with our customers because other solutions do have more or less drawbacks.
The main benefit of Nutanix is that they are doing things in a simple way. For example, Nokia had smartphones, and then came Apple with a smartphone. Apple consolidated and simplified the use of a smartphone. Nutanix is inheriting these principles of convergence and making things simpler.
In terms of comparison of Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure application and database performance versus a standard SAN solution, in most situations, Nutanix is above the expectations of our customers. They are surprised by the better performance. You can have the same performance as its competitors, but you would need more resources, which means more hardware. It is not that they cannot do it. It is possible, but you need to buy more hardware.
What other advice do I have?
There is a culture of over three to five years of planning in most organizations. They know there is a budget of one million dollars, and they want to use it to the maximum for the next five years. Most of the time, customers buy too much hardware or too many resources. Nutanix offers them a change in the way they consume hardware and licenses, but changing a customer's business culture takes time. Most customers do not realize this in the first use case, but you can help them if they understand better what they really need. After the first implementation, most customers realize that they are over-provisioned. They bought more than what they needed. Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure allows you to buy as you need. You do not have to buy for five years, and you always can add resources based on your need. You also have the information about when you need them. For example, the systems will tell you that if you add more, you will need more resources. This is the benefit, but most customers do not trust these statements in the beginning. This is a learning process, and the lesson learned is that instead of over-provisioning, how to use resources wisely and how to discuss things with the procurement department so that they give you the money when you need more resources, not every five years. It might be every year and so to have a fixed growth. There are a lot more benefits. For example, there is no aging hardware. If your hardware is aging, you can just replace it or add additional hardware to the infrastructure when you need it. There is also no loss of value where you buy something and it loses value over time. When you spend one million dollars on the hardware, its value is reduced every month. At some point in time, it is at zero.
This solution is different from the way we did things in the past. My advice is that if you are feeling the pain over and over again, that means that you are doing something wrong. If you want to change things, you have to do different things. You cannot do the same thing over and over again hoping that the outcome will change. Nutanix is one way out of this. They help you to reduce the time to run your own infrastructure and increase the stability and availability of your infrastructure.
Overall, I would rate it a ten out of ten.
*Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Reseller
