Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs SwiftStack [EOL] comparison

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs. SwiftStack [EOL]

September 2024

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Categories and Ranking

StarWind Virtual SAN

Mindshare comparison

HCI

File and Object Storage

Featured Reviews

Felix E.

Technischer IT-Berater at ITC GmbH

Mar 8, 2024

Good monitoring and configuring capabilities but disaster recovery documentation is sparse

My impression has been mostly positive. However, there have been some pitfalls. For example, it runs until it does not - and disaster recovery documentation is sparse and mostly unclear. This consequently follows a long learning curve and can take some time until this can be done efficiently. The feature log-structured file system has been removed. While I have not used it, I know some colleagues who have reported some performance benefits under certain circumstances. Additionally, vSAN does not offer extended SAN features like inline deduplication, compression, or S3-compatible access, which is part of most modern SAN feature sets, also in hyper-converged scenarios.

Offers satisfying data protection and workload movement features with exceptional stability

Andrea Beccia

IT Systems Architect at Cividale S.p.A.

Apr 2, 2024

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure can be used up to 100% of its capacity, but our company is presently using 80% of the solution's resources. Our company manufactures iron casting products in the metal industry, and Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure is also used. For virtualization purposes, Nutanix Acropolis is used as a full-stack solution. For the Windows virtual machines in our company's server, Nutanix Acropolis is utilized instead of solutions like VMware Hypervisor. One of the main reasons our company adopted Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure was its data protection features. The solution is also used in disaster recovery through the automatic snapshots feature on the local site. Next year, our organization will try to join clusters in the network using the solution. Network clustering will help our organization's team move workloads into the geographical cluster automatically. Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure is considered an ideal solution for disaster recovery where data protection remains embedded. The solution is capable of even capturing auto snapshots for remote sites. Next year, our company plans to test new features of Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure that will assist in automated workload movements on two sides at a distance of 60 kilometers. I would recommend others use the solution for its exceptional stability, performance, hardware compatibility, and overall flexibility. Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure allows the use of varying hardware for the same cluster. I would rate the solution a nine out of ten overall.

We are able to dynamically grow storage at a lower cost

Engineerd3fd

Engineering Manager at BAE Systems

Feb 22, 2021

The file access needs improvement. The NFS was rolled out as a single service. It needs to be fully integrated into the proxy in a highly available fashion, like the regular proxy access is. I know it's on the roadmap. With some of the hierarchy, old management storage policies, I would like to be able to move data between different types of storage policies. One of the things that has come up before was being able to do distributed erasure coding. Right now, erasure coding is only supported locally redundant. Products, like Scality, support the ability using multiple rings to do erasure coding that's globally redundant.

More StarWind Virtual SAN pros

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The product's core feature of virtualizing our storage is by far the most valuable."

"Given the high availability of the server cluster, we were able to reduce separate physical servers onto one hyper-converged cluster - this saved in OPEX and CAPEX costs immediately, along with licensing costs of the Windows Server licenses."

"The product gave us a cost-effective way to deploy a highly available server environment."

"Quick setup, great support, stability is great"

"The most important feature is the ability to experience the loss of one node or one storage device, and not lose the entire cluster."

"The instant failover, with vSAN copying data to the second node, allowed for the continuous availability of our applications."

"With an uptime of 384 days, StarWind has improved overall server reliability."

"When using new (warranty) servers, you can forget about the storage service for several years. The users will not even notice the failure of two servers out of three."

"The architecture of Nutanix is the best, and the virtualization we get, out of the box, is an advantage. Also, dedupe and compression are done natively, inside the platform, so there are no additional licenses. That adds value to it."

"Maintenance is not required for Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure"

"The most valuable features are simple management and one-click upgrades."

"Technical support is okay."

"The management interface of this solution is great."

"The administration console, automation, and the first cluster are all valuable features."

"The interface is very good. Before we used this solution, we had separate storage and switches, but with the hyper convert, it's all in one."

"It's much easier and faster even when you want to create a server from a template or clone."

More Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) pros

"The scalability is phenomenal. It seems infinite, as long as you put enough storage in place, add enough nodes."

"It has helped us with the ability to distribute data to different data centers. As part of our DR strategy, we have nodes automatically replicating data from one data center to the other. This makes it easier for us to not have to shift tapes around."

"The biggest feature, the biggest reason we went with SwiftStack, rather than deploying our own model with OpenStack Swift, was their deployment model. That was really the primary point in our purchase decision, back when we initially deployed. It took my installation time from days to hours, for deployment in our environment, versus deploying OpenStack Swift ourselves, manually."

"The SwiftStack Controller, which is the web UI, provides out of band management. This has been one of the best features of it. It allows us to be able to do upgrades and look at performance metrics. It is a top feature and reason to choose the product."

"SwiftStack is also quite flexible when it comes to hardware. It depends, of course, on the use case and the kind of hardware you want to buy. But you have quite a bit of choice in hardware. The SwiftStack software itself does not impose anything on you."

"The graphs are most valuable. They have a lot of graphs and reports that you can run to see what's happening in the background to configure OpenStack Swift."

"In terms of the hardware flexibility, with SwiftStack not being a hardware company, I literally buy any hardware that's the least expensive, from any vendor... from a flexibility standpoint, I think it's fantastic. I can go to anybody, anywhere - any vendor - and get my hardware."

"The performance is good. It is a secondary storage platform designed for archive and backup, so performance for the right use cases is very good. We have been pretty happy in that regard."

More SwiftStack [EOL] pros

Cons

"I had to buy upgraded support, which was not a problem, but it wasn't a prorated amount, so I paid for the support, the full upgrade, but I only got a couple of months out of it because it was only good until renewal time."

"Diagnostics information or alerts on the state of systems could also be implemented to give more visibility."

"It would be great to have more automated tooling around managing the iSCSI connections in Windows"

"There should be some kind of active monitoring connected to StarWind vSAN, so you will be able to act when needed."

"Proper training sessions should be included with the licensing."

"There is no IPv6 support. That is our only issue at this time."

"The software monitoring should be web-based to be reachable from any VLAN workstation."

"I would like to see some additional, and possibly clearer, implementation videos with some slower and possibly more detailed descriptions of what the various steps of implementation are for someone who is unfamiliar with high availability and failover clustering in Windows."

More StarWind Virtual SAN cons

"I would like to see more Kubernetes and container-related workflows and multiple cloud-partner management. I would also like to see how they will synergize all these AI/ML functionalities that are available on other platforms."

"One of the very important things that I would like to see in Nutanix, but I'm not sure if it's in the roadmap or not, is to have some kind of caching optimization at remote sites, to build active-active data centers more easily."

"The solution doesn't support older systems, which can be a problem for some organizations who wish to implement it. It became a problem for us due to the fact that some of our systems are older."

"As of now, Acropolis and VMware cannot talk to each other. Until we have some kind of interface, it would be much better for Nutanix if they built an interface that can talk. Otherwise, if I have a VMware stack and I already have a Nutanix stack, I can create containers, I create clusters on VMware, I create clusters on Nutanix."

"It would be great if they could improve the GUI features."

"I would like them to update their licensing to provide more features with their basic license."

"While the customer support is truly incredible, for Spanish speakers it would be appropriate to have support in their native language to further improve problem-solving conditions."

"Nutanix should improve AHV to support migration VMs between clusters and storage containers. Migration between containers is possible, but it requires shutting down the VM. The procedure is long and there is no migration between clusters at all."

More Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) cons

"I would like to see better client integrations, support for a broader client library. SwiftStack could be a little bit more involved in the client side: Python, Java, C, etc."

"The file access needs improvement. The NFS was rolled out as a single service. It needs to be fully integrated into the proxy in a highly available fashion, like the regular proxy access is. I know it's on the roadmap."

"They should provide a more concise hardware calculator when you're putting your capacity together."

"At the moment we are using Erasure coding in an 8+4 setting. What would be nice is if, for some standard configurations like 15+4 and 8+4, there were more versatility so we could, for example, select 8+6, or the like."

"The biggest room for improvement is the maturity of the proxyFS solution. That piece of code is relatively new, so most of our issues have been around the proxyFS."

"It's very well done for what it's supposed to do, and I don't have anything to add, but I would like them to keep it available to the public. SwiftStack is going out of the market. NVIDIA purchased SwiftStack a couple of years ago, and they won't be making it available to the public anymore. Our license is up to March 31st."

"[One] thing that I've been looking for, for years as an end user and customer, for any object store, including SwiftStack, is some type of automated method for data archiving. Something where you would have a metadata tagging policy engine and a data mover all built into a single system that would automatically be able to take your data off your primary and put it into an object store in a non-proprietary way - which is key."

"On the controller features, there needs to be a bit more clean up of the user interface. There are a lot of options available on the GUI which might be better organized or compartmentalized. There are times when you are going through the user interface and you have to look around for where the setting may be. A little bit more attention to the organization of the user interface would be helpful."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Cost is affordable and licensing is smooth."

"The support contract is well worth it. The price for it was very reasonable and their team has been very engaged whenever we reach out."

"StarWind is best price/performance for SMB."

"The cost was ultimately low to implement, which allowed us to be 3-2-1 complaint."

"Licensing is based on nodes rather than TBs, which means that the users are free to increase storage capacity without putting thought into licensing."

"We found that the pricing was perfect; simple and clear."

"I would suggest that you download the free version, deploy in your lab, and play with it."

"The cost takes into account the number of nodes, so the size of the storage is not important."

More StarWind Virtual SAN pricing and cost advice

"Our customers are on three years license to use Nutanix Acropolis AOS. The price of the solution includes all features and support."

"Pricing varies greatly between license and editions."

"Nutanix is cheaper than Cisco HyperFlex, although it depends on the configuration because Nutanix can also be expensive."

"It is slightly more expensive compared to a standard, on-prem, bare-metal configuration. There is about a 30 percent overhead there."

"The one disadvantage is relative, financially Nutanix Acropolis AOS is a little bit more expensive than the old solution."

"The price of the solution is expensive. However, the price to performance is good. The cost for development and installation is very low."

"The solution could be a little less expensive."

"There is a license required for this solution and my clients usually purchase a two-year license with extended support. The price of the solution could be reduced, it is more expensive than competitors."

More Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) pricing and cost advice

"It's pricey for us because we're a nonprofit. I'm not privy to any amount or cost, but I have been told that it is pricey. There are no costs in addition to the licensing fees, and it seems to come with the support."

"The annual support and maintenance costs compared to our old solution for backups had about a two-thirds savings, so about a 60% annual savings on our support and maintenance contract. That savings funded additional expansion for what it was costing us for the support and maintenance contracts on old solution."

"The pricing and licensing are capacity-based, so it's hard to put my finger on them, because so many different vendors charge in different ways. We are still saving significantly over any of the other options that we evaluated because we can choose the best hardware at the best price, then put SwiftStack software on it. So, it's hard to complain, even though a part of me goes, "It would be nicer if it were less expensive.""

"All in, with hardware and everything else - and I hate to say a dollar amount because it's been awhile since I computed it - I know I'm under the $300 to $500 per terabyte mark. I call that my "all in" price, which has replications built in and protections built in."

"We find the pricing rather steep. Of course, you get quality for your money, that's absolutely true... [But] when you look at the prices of the licensing and the prices of your hardware, it's quite substantial."

"We are able to dynamically grow storage at a lower cost. We can repurpose hardware and buy commodity hardware. There is a huge cost savings, on average $100,000 a year compared to traditional storage for what we have at our size."

"Dollar per gigabyte, it costs us more because we are storing more. However, if you look at it from a cost per gigabyte perspective, we have dropped our costs significantly."

"One of their advantages of being a commercial open source platform is, for the scale that they offer, the pricing is pretty competitive."

More SwiftStack [EOL] pricing and cost advice

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Comparison Review

it_user244362

Managing Consultant with 51-200 employees

Aug 30, 2015

Nutanix vs. VMware EVO:RAIL vs. FlexPod

Originally posted at www.storagegaga.com/dont-get-too-drunk-on-hyper-converged/ I hate the fact that I am bursting the big bubble brewing about Hyper Convergence (HC). I urge all to look past the hot air and hype frenzy that are going on, because in the end, the HC platforms have to be aligned…

What do you like most about StarWind Virtual SAN?

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

18%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

Government

Educational Organization

31%

Computer Software Company

14%

Financial Services Firm

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

19%

Manufacturing Company

19%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

It is easy to use and can monitor system synchronization and check Storage status. StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN) combin...

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for StarWind Virtual SAN?

If you are comfortable with the solution and you feel that you don't need support, you can begin with the free licenc...

What needs improvement with StarWind Virtual SAN?

Areas for improvement in StarWind Virtual SAN include simplifying the setup process, especially for users with limite...

What is the biggest difference between Nutanix Acropolis and VMware vSphere?

We found the reduced power consumption with Nutanix Acropolis AOS a very attractive feature. We also like the interfa...

How do I choose between Cisco Hyperflex HX Series and Nutanix Acropolis AOS?

Cisco HyperFlex HS series vs Nutanix Acropolis AOS Cisco HyperFlex gives extended hyper-convergence functions from ...

Which would you choose - Nutanix Acropolis AOS or VMware vSAN?

We found the reduced power consumption with Nutanix Acropolis AOS a very attractive feature. We also like the interfa...

VMware vSAN vs StarWind Virtual SAN

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Product Reports

Download StarWind Virtual SAN product report

StarWind Virtual SAN

August 2024

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI)

August 2024

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) report

Download Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) product report

Download SwiftStack [EOL] product report

SwiftStack [EOL]

August 2024

Also Known As

StarWind SAN & NAS

Nutanix Acropolis AOS, Nutanix AOS, Nutanix Acropolis

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StarWind

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Overview

StarWind Virtual SAN provides high availability and fault tolerance for virtualized environments without the need for dedicated SAN hardware. It allows for real-time replication between servers, shared storage for Hyper-V clusters, and enables vMotion and High Availability features for VMware vSphere. The solution reduces costs and leverages existing hardware while providing a scalable and reliable infrastructure. Valuable features include ease of use, scalability, top-tier support, hardware agnosticism, and the ability to use off-the-shelf standard servers to increase storage space. StarWind VSAN has helped organizations improve performance, data availability, and data security while reducing downtime and providing cost-saving storage options.

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is a top-ranking HCI software, cloud management tool, and Software Defined Storage (SDS) tool that is marketed as the foundation for users' hybrid clouds. It offers a powerful and secure hyperconverged infrastructure to deliver all data and applications at any scale and on any cloud. The solution offers a complete software stack that allows users to unify their hybrid cloud infrastructure.

NCI’s services include computer, storage and network, hypervisors and containers, and deployment in public or in private clouds. The product also comes with built-in resilience, disaster recovery capabilities, self-healing, and high-security capacities. It provides further deployment flexibility through several software and hardware options and platforms. NCI includes a full set of enterprise capabilities. It can also be deployed on a wide range of servers from popular manufacturers.

The capabilities of the product are categorized into three main groups:

AOS storage
Flexible and open compute
Automated and secure networking

Outside of these categories, NCI also offers other capabilities:

Integrated disaster recovery
Full-stack lifecycle management
VMware with Nutanix
Intelligent operations

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Features

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) offers its customers various features and tools in each of the previously mentioned categories. The available features for users currently include:

High-performance: This set of features utilizes hardware advances such as NVMe and RDMA to accelerate users' most demanding applications with consistent performance. The tools in this feature category work alongside data locality to ensure successful results.
Foolproof resiliency: These Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure features protect data and keep it available by facilitating advanced distributed consistency algorithms. Users can utilize these features to protect their data from issues like bit rot, hardware failures, and even entire site failure.
Flexibility: This set of features allows storage to be sized for the needs of each organization and expanded promptly and easily so that the organization and its data can grow. The features offer flexibility to users in terms of applying storage policies logically on a pre-workload basis, instead of being tied to hardware.
Hypervisor choice: Users can choose from the leading hypervisors - Microsoft Hyper-V or VMware ESXi. They can also leverage the built-in hypervisor AHV that Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) provides.
Integrated virtualization: These features offer simplified automation and AHV streamlined operations. The services in this category are optimized for high performance and reliability.
Kubernetes: Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) offers features to build and deploy cloud-native applications on intelligent distributed infrastructure. Apps can be integrated with cloud-compatible storage and both building and deployment can be achieved within the same platform.
Microsegmentation: Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) offers features to prevent malware spread and reduce attack surfaces by leveraging machine learning (ML).
Virtual networking: This set of features allows users to easily implement multi-tenancy in their environment or stretch networks across clouds.
Centralized network management: Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) provides organizations with a way to manage networking configurations centrally. Users can utilize it across their human-computer interaction (HCI) environment with simple virtual switch management.

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Benefits

The product offers various benefits to users who utilize its capacities. Some of these include:

NCI reduces technology sprawl and frees up technical resources to allow organizations to focus on other activities, potentially reducing costs for the business.
The product allows customers to deploy, scale, and bridge to the public cloud to be able to react in evolving business environments.
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure improves data availability while simultaneously protecting it against several kinds of failures and attacks.
The solution offers high-performance, resilient distributed storage for all workloads.
Working alongside Nutanix Cloud Platform, NCI offers simple management of data from one console.
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure works by the zero trust philosophy, protecting users' apps and data through specially designed security protocols.

Reviews from Real Users

According to Gerhard J., an IT manager at Q4 Fuel, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) provides serious reliability and stability across the entire system makes for ROI.

A solutions architect at a computer software company describes NCI as a stable, straightforward to set up, and scalable solution.

SwiftStack focuses on handling large-scale unstructured data, providing software-defined storage, and boosting data scalability and durability.

SwiftStack is known for its proficiency in object storage, seamless workflow integration, and robust support for multi-cloud environments. Its architecture ensures high-performance data access, making it ideal for big data analytics, media asset management, and backup tasks. Users value its flexibility, ease of integration, and strong performance. The solution's high availability and efficient storage capabilities contribute to its strengths. However, areas needing improvement include customer support response time, initial setup guidance, and enhanced scalability during high-demand periods.

What are SwiftStack's Most Important Features?

Robust Scalability: Easily manages growing data volumes
Multi-cloud Support: Seamless integration across cloud environments
Seamless Data Management: Efficiently handles large datasets
High Availability: Ensures data is accessible whenever needed
Open-Source: Customizable and flexible with extensive API support

What Benefits Should Users Look For?

Enhanced Performance: Handles demanding workloads efficiently
Easy Integration: Adapts well with existing systems and workflows
High Durability: Ensures long-term data storage and protection
Cost-Effectiveness: Reduces overall storage costs
Scalability: Grows with organizational needs

In industries like media management and big data analytics, SwiftStack’s capabilities in high-performance data access and multi-cloud support facilitate efficient data handling. Backup and archival solutions also benefit from its robust storage and high availability features.

Sample Customers

Baker Tilly BVI, CMS Internet, Board Harpeth Hall School

St. Lukes Health System, the City of Seattle, Yahoo! Japan, Sligro, Empire Life, Hyundai AUS, and many others.

Pac-12 Networks, Georgia Institute of Technology, Budd Van Lines