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Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs VMware Software Defined Storage comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 5, 2024

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

Everpure FlashArray
Sponsored
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
217
Ranking in other categories
All-Flash Storage (4th)
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructur...
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
200
Ranking in other categories
Software Defined Storage (SDS) (6th), HCI (3rd), Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) (1st), Hybrid Cloud Computing Platforms (5th)
VMware Software Defined Sto...
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
7
Ranking in other categories
Software Defined Storage (SDS) (14th)
 

Featured Reviews

Sowjanya MV - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Lead at Wipro Limited
Has improved performance for mission-critical workloads and enabled seamless non-disruptive upgrades
The availability is 99.99%, which is the main factor any customer would need because their data should be available whenever they want to access it. This is one main critical thing. It is very easy to upgrade since Pure Storage FlashArray handles it well. Everything is non-disruptive now; previously, there were forklift shifts, but now that is not the case. Pure Storage FlashArray says no to forklift upgrades. Usually hardware requires downtime, but Pure Storage FlashArray has improved their footprint so that they are not asking for downtime; everything is just a non-disruptive activity, which is why customers are more inclined towards Pure Storage FlashArray. Customers want more of the models in their environment due to the performance they are giving, and everything is in one Pure1 Array console where we can view all the models on one page or just an orchestration tool. You don't miss anything; you have replication, notifications about replication, and details about which host groups replication is happening in and if that replication is successful or failed. On a daily basis, our purpose is to create volumes for infrastructure; our daily activities include creating volumes and mapping them to the host, doing any migrations from a VM, clearing the data stores, and carving the volumes to those VMs. One key factor is the data compression with a ratio of 5:1, focusing on space efficiency, inline deduplication, and the compression Pure Storage FlashArray works on; that is a major factor we can suggest to any customer. Analytical capabilities are crucial. Daily, we check the throughput and consumption, and Pure Storage FlashArray provides predictions for one year regarding usage. This prediction helps plan updates well ahead. For support, we just raise a case, and they follow up and get it done. There is also AI readiness, but with the model R2, we don't have much of that AI readiness. For others, we do have AI readiness that predicts capacity based on daily or monthly trends, enabling us to analyze how much space we need or if we need to expand the disk shelf. From an operational point of view, a good feature is that if you accidentally delete a volume, it will be retained in the destroyed state for the next twenty-four hours, which is not the same with any other vendor. I have worked in this storage domain for the past fifteen years, and this option is remarkable, benefiting any L1 or L2 engineer. Additionally, from a compliance perspective, Pure Storage FlashArray has REST APIs enabled. I have not explored automation much, but from a security standpoint, it is strong with encryption data. If you want to automate, you can easily integrate with all clouds and explore Pure Cloud for scheduling workloads, including volume creation. Customers find benefit in Pure Storage FlashArray's single management pane of glass due to the dual controller and active-active setup. If one of the controllers goes down, all workloads automatically shift to the other controller, ensuring their data is safe and accessible at all times. This is a highlighted feature that any customer desires because their data should always be accessible. For SAN workloads, we use Pure Storage FlashArray because for SAN FC fiber channel, we don't use it; we use NetApp for NAS activities. We have clearly split this, so SAN is for mission-critical applications, while network-attached storage handles file systems. This architecture helps us maximize the benefit from Pure Storage FlashArray due to the significant workloads from this giant retail client. From a footprint and energy consumption perspective, you can see energy consumption from the Pure1 storage portal on a daily basis, and it is very compact. The three models we use consume only three units, which is quite low. From a footprint and data center perspective, it doesn't occupy much space. As everything moves to cloud, there are requirements to avoid excess spending on data centers, and Pure Storage FlashArray is efficient in energy consumption and is environmentally friendly.
OB
Head Systems Administration/Security at Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System PLC
Infrastructure efficiency has improved significantly with quick server provisioning, though physical to virtual migrations need a streamlined in-house tool
From my experience with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), there is one area that needs improvement. When moving a critical infrastructure from a physical machine to Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), we currently have to use a third-party tool to convert the physical machine to a VM. We have to use VMware converter to perform this conversion before moving it to Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI). I would suggest that Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) should develop their own P2V (physical to VM) tools instead of requiring users to rely on third-party solutions.
Mohammad Jundiah - PeerSpot reviewer
Solutions Architect at QDS
Data security and performance excel but integration and licensing need improvement
I used Nutanix for its hyper-converged infrastructure capabilities and VMware Site Recovery for disaster recovery.  Additionally, I worked with VMware Software Defined Storage both internally and with partners to consolidate servers into one solution The most valuable features of VMware Software…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Pure Storage FlashArray has helped us to improve the reporting and the billing cycle."
"The all-flash disc is the most valuable feature of this solution."
"The first year, we started out with one or five terabytes and it took what was 20 terabytes of storage down to less than one terabyte."
"It worked flawlessly."
"I can personally state that the Pure Storage Flash Systems are the best built and Pure has the utmost professional customer care."
"It is very easy to use."
"If you're interested in using this solution, I recommend that you do the same — see if you like it."
"Service and support is phenomenal."
"Acropolis could help us build a cloud environment for our company."
"Pricing is a little high but if you really look into what the product provides, the cost saving on setting up infrastructure and maintaining it is greatly reduced."
"The most valuable features are its ease of use and its good performance."
"SRM capabilities for replication have been proven reliable and very useful for our organization."
"Hyper-convergence is the most valuable feature for me as it allows me to scale the hardware according to project requirements."
"The most valuable feature would be the ease of deployment. That is the most significant feature for me because I've worked with multiple vendors and it's always been very complicated to install the software and get everything running."
"Now, we can worry less about the technology and focus on other business value initiatives."
"We primarily use Nutanix as our base environment where we host all our database servers, our active directory, our mail servers, and all of our bare-metal systems combined into one unit."
"VMware Software Defined Storage gives higher availability against data corruption."
"The technical support is awesome."
"The best part of the solution is that you can actually scale up to a large number of operating systems without additional hardware."
"The best part of the solution is that you can actually scale up to a large number of operating systems without the requirement of additional hardware, which is the biggest advantage."
"The most valuable features of the solution are that it is easy to deploy and the support is really good."
"The most valuable features of VMware Software Defined Storage are scalability, high availability, and performance."
"This is an easy-to-use product for adding flexibility to your storage solution."
"The single management panel is the main feature that is wonderful for the customer."
 

Cons

"A year ago they promised that they would be able to read through the database encryption with more metric and they have not delivered on that patch, which is significant because it gives us back so much more storage room."
"I would rate this solution an eight because we have had outages. The commit times went very high in the database, the whole array went down, so our customers were down for around eight hours."
"It is a bit expensive."
"Storage. There could be better storage."
"Most of our upgrades have not been as smooth as they should have been."
"Larger capacity and more storage ports would be the two things I'd like to see."
"The support for NFS protocols right out-of-the-box need improvement. I'm used to other storage vendors who have NFS support right out-of-the-box, and Pure Storage doesn't seem to have anything."
"CIFS and SMB Shares cannot be mounted directly."
"The ability to create clusters faster would be nice to see in a future release."
"AHV is a great hypervisor but still limited compared to VMware."
"I believe the only things that may need to improve is that the Nutanix Controller VM consumes quite a lot of resources."
"The software-defined networking should be improved. It is quite substandard as compared to the VMware variant. The software-defined networking is quite limited, and we usually use other products to do that. We're aware that Nutanix is working on that and will be coming out with better solutions, and we can't wait because to do a fully software-defined architecture, the abstraction layer needs not only software-defined storage, which you have, but also the software-defined networking piece."
"The documentation could be improved."
"We could always use a performance upgrade, or simplified management."
"The pricing of the solution is too high. It needs to be adjusted or lowered to be more competitive."
"Cloud integration, automation and orchestration need improvement."
"I'd like to see improved hardware compatibility"
"The performance is not as good as some competing products and reporting can be improved."
"The performance is not as good as some competing products and reporting can be improved."
"The solution has some limitations in terms of replication to remote sites or cloud infrastructure, which need improvement."
"There is room for more integrations and plugins into more storages."
"VMware Software Defined Storage should include a shared database on a standard version."
"The cost of the product is where an improvement could be made. It's generally very expensive and requires a lot of architecture that needs to be designed according to specific situations."
"The license model of the product is an area of concern where improvements are required."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We have seen a reduction in total cost of ownership (TCO)."
"You get what you pay for. It is expensive, but it really works."
"Pure is typically more expensive than everyone else. You get what you pay for, but I have lost deals to similar solutions because of pricing. They include everything, and that's another positive about Pure Storage. They aren't trying to nickel and dime their customers for different features. It is all included in one price. The license is by capacity, and the price depends on the capacity and the discount we're getting from the vendor. You get the SKU of the physical appliance, support, and maintenance, and that's it. You're licensed for whatever feature they offer. It is all rolled up into the price of the appliance."
"We evaluated Oracle and Hitachi, but Pure Storage had the better pricing."
"When I last looked, the prices were reasonable, and we could get an excellent array for about $60,000."
"The licensing is $100,000."
"I would rate it a seven out of ten for pricing. It could be improved."
"I'm good with the licensing. Of course, pricing can always be less... It's actually not a bad pricing model, considering I don't have to rip-and-replace."
"Setup cost is minor, pricing is quite a bit (we have a 7-node-cluster for about 450K EUR with 2 vGPU-nodes for Citrix) but that includes hardware, software, and support."
"There are a lot of features included with Nutanix that cost a lot with other companies."
"Nutanix Acropolis AOS price includes no additional costs for features."
"The pricing is fair for the package."
"Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure could be cheaper. It's costly to upgrade the solution. There are no additional costs aside from the license."
"Work close with your InfraTeam and discuss with Nutanix the best way to achieve sizing and price that are right for you."
"Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure’s pricing is very good and competitive."
"I would rate the price seven out of ten with ten being the most expensive."
"A single socket costs you around US $6,000 for three years. At a minimum, you have a three load cluster for a medium or enterprise-scale company. It can get quite expensive because you're likely to need four to six sockets on the other side. It comes to around $30,000."
"The solution is very expensive."
"I believe there is a yearly licensing fee of around $2000 - $5000. I don't think there are additional costs above that but it depends on the type of infrastructure you're booting."
"The product is quite expensive and is among the most expensive for this type of solution."
"VMware Software Defined Storage is a slightly expensive solution."
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Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Software Defined Storage (SDS) solutions are best for your needs.
893,164 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Comparison Review

it_user244362 - PeerSpot reviewer
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…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
12%
Construction Company
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Government
7%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business65
Midsize Enterprise36
Large Enterprise151
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business92
Midsize Enterprise77
Large Enterprise82
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Large Enterprise6
 

Questions from the Community

Which should I choose: HPE 3PAR StoreServ or Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform F Series?
Both are great platforms, but if you are considering all flash solutions, I would recommend you to consider Pure Stor...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure Storage FlashArray?
The only issue is the pricing. Because we have competition, our customers always take another brand and say they can ...
What needs improvement with Pure Storage FlashArray?
Our customers using Dell storage also use competing solutions. Our customers who have Everpure FlashArray may also ha...
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 ...
What makes Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) worth using?
NCI is a product with many tools and services but the one that, in my opinion, makes it better than similar products...
Have you received reliable help from Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure's support when you contacted them?
NCI is one of the best out there. For any software, no matter how good it is, technical support makes it or breaks it...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for VMware Software Defined Storage?
The price of VMware Software Defined Storage is on the pricey side, rated four out of five in cost. There is room for...
What needs improvement with VMware Software Defined Storage?
There is room for more integrations and plugins into more storages. More automation, such as using Playbook on Ansibl...
What is your primary use case for VMware Software Defined Storage?
I used Nutanix for its hyper-converged infrastructure capabilities and VMware Site Recovery for disaster recovery. Ad...
 

Also Known As

Pure Storage FlashArray
Nutanix Acropolis AOS, Nutanix AOS, Nutanix Acropolis
VMware SDS
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Nielsen, Lamar Advertising, LinkedIn, Betfair, UT-Dallas
St. Lukes Health System, the City of Seattle, Yahoo! Japan, Sligro, Empire Life, Hyundai AUS, and many others.
Helse Nord, Sky
Find out what your peers are saying about Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs. VMware Software Defined Storage and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
893,164 professionals have used our research since 2012.