Microsoft Azure File Storage vs Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) comparison

Microsoft Azure File Storage vs. Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS)

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Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

Microsoft Azure File Storage

Ranking in Public Cloud Storage Services

4th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS)

Ranking in Public Cloud Storage Services

6th

Average Rating

9.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

All-Flash Storage (6th), Software Defined Storage (SDS) (4th), File and Object Storage (4th), NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays (4th)

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2025, in the Public Cloud Storage Services category, the mindshare of Microsoft Azure File Storage is 12.5%, down from 13.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) is 1.3%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Public Cloud Storage Services

Featured Reviews

PrashanthR

Lead Software Engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Seamlessly streamlines document processing with advanced file storage and OCR integration

We need to store data over there. We process documents through Kofax Time is a major benefit, as well as ease of processing. With configuration, it happens quite easily, and we can finish tasks early. File storage is complemented by OCR with Azure Cognitive Service. This enhances the processing…

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Juan-Contreras

System Administrator at a educational organization with 501-1,000 employees

Ensures streamlined management, simplified infrastructure, and efficient data handling

It has effectively managed our unstructured data, including audio and video files. We've experienced smooth operations without any complaints regarding uploading or downloading videos. While video usage isn't as frequent, we primarily utilize it for downloading videos related to specific incidents for administrators or our police department. We've encountered no issues uploading files of any kind. Transitioning from VMware to Nutanix has highlighted the overall flexibility of Nutanix's platform. Unlike VMware's three-tier system, Nutanix simplifies the learning curve by streamlining operations. The update process, in particular, has been favorable, with no critical issues encountered. The resiliency of Nutanix hasn't been thoroughly tested in our environment so far. However, I routinely check fault tolerance settings to ensure they meet our requirements. During the update process, I've observed critical errors occur as hosts restart, but Nutanix's self-healing mechanism handles these issues seamlessly. The benefit of using Nutanix is evident in several ways. Firstly, we've effectively compressed our storage while significantly expanding our overall storage pool. Previously, our service had a capacity of twenty-five terabytes, but with Nutanix, we've scaled up to a hundred and twenty terabytes physically and approximately fifty terabytes logically. This expansion has been accompanied by noticeable improvements in performance, particularly with reduced latency and IOPS well within the boundaries of our equipment. All our resources are centralized in a single location for managing and running storage: our data center. We operate three Nutanix nodes within this center, effectively managing everything from one central location. We don't have any other locations outside of our data center running a Nutanix cluster. Nutanix's capability to eliminate silos within our organization's storage infrastructure was discussed during our recent call with the engineer. Although we haven't explored this feature extensively yet, there's a forthcoming project where we anticipate leveraging it.One thing I'd appreciate is having a desktop application similar to what VMware offered. With VMware, I could download a separate client program onto my computer, allowing me to log in directly rather than accessing the host through a browser.

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"My client had zero data loss while using the solution for backups and file security."

"It is a scalable product since it is a cloud solution. Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."

"The most valuable feature of Microsoft Azure File Storage is the cloud file storage capability."

"I like that we can copy and download data using Azure. It's not just for file storage; we can also use it for large data sets or to host static web applications."

"File storage is complemented by OCR with Azure Cognitive Service."

"It was quick to synchronize back from Azure to the on-premise server."

"The interface is very good."

"The solution is user-friendly and integrates easily with web apps."

More Microsoft Azure File Storage pros

"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."

"Unified Storage's centralized management features enable us to accomplish whatever we want in terms of operations and migrations."

"The most valuable features of the solution are high availability and synchronization to another location."

"The capacity is very good. They use fewer nodes than before. Each node is isolated with the CPU with the performance. It is a cluster node but works separately, so the performance will be tripled."

"What I found to be the most valuable features were better performance and uptime."

"The integration with Prism Central makes it a lot easier to manage, so we just have a single pane of glass location that we can go to. We do not have a separate admin console or anything that we have to use."

"Currently, the most valuable aspect of our Nutanix implementation is its file storage functionality."

"Nutanix Objects is reliable."

More Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) pros

Cons

"It should allow better methods for handling large files."

"The solution is not user-friendly."

"They can improve the ability to assign permissions to different groups or users."

"The integration of the site storage with SQL was not completely seamless."

"Licensing costs are expensive."

"One thing that Azure File Storage could help us with is some kind of impact assessment. When we talk to some of our larger customers who have between 500 and 1,000 applications, we normally do an assessment of all these applications and then tell them which ones are ready to be lifted and shifted, and which ones need to re-architected. It would really help if Azure File Storage could come up with a better way to give estimations of the total investment required, including all costs incurred during the migration."

"Microsoft's technical support could be improved. Their response time is usually high, and it takes considerable time to get a response."

"The tool needs to add more controls and enhance Power BI. For instance, I'm just suggesting the visualization layer. Power BI can increase visualization as much as possible, and the product can add more controls to the data flows."

More Microsoft Azure File Storage cons

"We have had to deal with some infrastructure and general cluster issues but these issues don't impact storage."

"The solution should include more protocols to access data."

"The GUI is easy to use, but it's complex to do tasks from the command line. That is one way they could simplify things for the engineers. People tend to use a graphical interface more than the command line interface. If anything goes wrong, we need to do troubleshooting from the CLI. It would be nice if there were more ways to fix issues within the GUI."

"The dashboard could be more customizable"

"Lowering the price would improve this product."

"Perhaps when it comes to deploying NUS virtual machines on top of CVMs, it should not be necessary for it to be in all of them or they should require fewer resources on the servers."

"When it comes to Nutanix Files, one thing that would be great is a slightly easier way of managing snapshots and restore points, especially when a third party is involved."

"The GUI is not user-friendly for new users and has room for improvement."

More Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price is comparable to other competitive solutions."

"There are fewer hidden costs involved compared to other solutions, and when our customer is already a Microsoft partner, they typically have access to more affordable fees."

"I think the pricing of the product can be reduced."

"The product's pricing need improvement."

"The pricing is usually dependent on your storage requirements. Overall, I believe Microsoft Azure File Storage's price is reasonable."

"The solution is a bit pricey compared to AWS and Google."

"The pricing could be more flexible."

"One needs to pay according to the storage they plan to use in the solution. The payments are to be made yearly. It is usually monthly, but we opted for yearly subscriptions in our company."

More Microsoft Azure File Storage pricing and cost advice

"Nutanix Unified Storage is competitively priced. There aren't any competitors that can do much better for the same price."

"I am not the one who makes the calls, but it seems to me that it was very competitive. Other solutions would have required dedicated hardware, so an additional CapEx has to be put in place. In that sense, it was definitely a more competitive option to go with Nutanix Files."

"Nutanix is priced a bit higher than some of its competitors. A lot of Chinese companies like Huawei are entering the Saudi Arabian market trying to provide similar solutions for a lower price. It offers a good value, especially the support. Nutanix has a highly competent team. The after-sales support is excellent."

"I'm happy with the cost and licensing because I don't have big volumes."

"Nutanix Unified Storage isn't expensive."

"The solution's pricing is fair."

"It is not too high for what we are using."

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

More Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) pricing and cost advice

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831,265 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

16%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Computer Software Company

31%

Educational Organization

27%

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

Which file storage system is better - Amazon EFS (elastic file storage) or Azure File Storage?

Amazon EFS is easy to set up: you can use the AWS management console, API, or command-line. Amazon EFS can grow to petabytes and deliver consistent low latencies and high levels of throughput. This...

What do you like most about Microsoft Azure File Storage?

The product is a reliable cloud solution.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Azure File Storage?

The price is almost the same as the competition. I would rate it three or three and a half out of ten on the pricing scale.

What do you like most about Nutanix Unified Storage?

Nutanix has excellent product documentation available on their portals, written in simple, easy-to-understand language.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Nutanix Unified Storage?

Nutanix Unified Storage isn't expensive.

What needs improvement with Nutanix Unified Storage?

The dashboard could be more customizable

Amazon EFS (Elastic File System) vs Microsoft Azure File Storage

Comparisons

Compared 47% of the time

Azure NetApp Files vs Microsoft Azure File Storage

Compared 18% of the time

Wasabi vs Microsoft Azure File Storage

Compared 16% of the time

Amazon S3 vs Microsoft Azure File Storage

Compared 7% of the time

More Microsoft Azure File Storage Competitors

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS)

Compared 21% of the time

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS)

Compared 20% of the time

MinIO vs Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS)

Compared 10% of the time

Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct vs Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS)

Compared 8% of the time

NetApp StorageGRID vs Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS)

Compared 2% of the time

More Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) Competitors

Product Reports

Microsoft Azure File Storage

Download Microsoft Azure File Storage product report

Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS)

Download Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) product report

Also Known As

MS Azure File Storage

Nutanix Files Storage, Nutanix Volumes Block Storage, Nutanix Objects Storage

Learn More

Microsoft

Video not available

Nutanix

Overview

Fully managed file shares that use the standard SMB 3.0 protocol

Key scenarios:

Share data across on-premises and cloud servers
Migrate file share-based applications to the cloud with no code changes
Integrate modern applications with File storage
Simplify hosting for high availability workload data

Nutanix Unified Storage provides high availability and seamless cloud platform integration, ensuring robust redundancy, scalability, and streamlined management. It supports hybrid cloud connectivity, enhancing storage security and performance.

Nutanix Unified Storage is designed for effective data protection across block, file, and object storage, offering features like ransomware detection and a centralized management interface through Prism Central. Users gain improved SLAs and IT cost savings through its efficient performance. Despite its user-friendly interface, there is a demand for enhanced security measures such as Multi-Factor Authentication and DLP. While its resilience is notable, users seek improvements in protocol compatibility, storage capabilities, pricing, and support processes.

What are the most important features of Nutanix Unified Storage?

User-Friendly Interface: Simplifies storage management and monitoring.
High Availability: Ensures continuous operation and reliability.
Seamless Cloud Integration: Compatible with platforms like Azure and AWS.
Robust Redundancy: Protects data against hardware failures.
Scalable Architecture: Easily adapts to growing data storage needs.
Ransomware Detection: Enhances data protection measures.

What benefits and ROI might users find in reviews?

Improved SLAs: Increased service reliability and performance.
IT Cost Savings: Reduces expenses through efficient resource use.
Enhanced Security: Stronger data protection and reduced risk.
Centralized Management: Easier control and monitoring from one dashboard.

Industries implement Nutanix Unified Storage for tasks such as file storage, database performance improvement, and storage solution consolidation. Companies deploying virtual machines, securing against ransomware, connecting hybrid clouds, and backing up data find it useful. It supports workloads like Citrix VDI, Kubernetes, and research data, assisting many organizations migrating from legacy storage for better cost efficiency and reduced data center footprints.

Sample Customers

Talon, Camden

JetBlue, International Speedway Corporation, Volkswagen SAIC, Brighton and Hove City Council, Foresters Financial, Janus International Group, Cloud Comrade, Serco

Microsoft Azure File Storage vs. Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS)