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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
215
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

"The amount of throughput that we're getting is really nice."
"The sales and executive support have been outstanding compared to the rest of the market... My upgrade paths have been simple on the Pure... It's a lot simpler to implement and a lot simpler to manage."
"The support from Pure Storage Flash Array is amazing."
"The intuitive way of managing storage is what I appreciate about Pure Storage FlashArray, along with the clever use of flash modules, and absolutely the data reduction, because they are using that in a very clever way to do compression and deduplication."
"It is the SAN backbone for our company."
"I am very satisfied with this solution and I would recommend it to others."
"I never have to worry about its performance or if it is the root cause of an issue."
"Remote assist is a valuable feature that supports customers and engineers in troubleshooting and resolving issues, allowing for easy problem identification and repair."
"It gives us a single dashboard to control multiple sites and multiple zones. It helps to do things on a single platform and data sharing is quite easy. The network and the security are easy to manage."
"I would encourage you to try out this product, as you will not regret it because of the stability of the technology and the other benefits you can get from Nutanix."
"The technology of Nutanix Acropolis AOS is the most valuable feature. You don't need multiple screens to manage."
"Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure's most valuable features are all the cloud facilities or benefits it provides for my data center."
"General observation, Nutanix documentation is very well written with an elegant font and format; very easy to read and understand."
"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."
"You need to send commands through the command-line interface(CLI). This could be improved. The commands are done better in VMware."
"It is 100% stable. It's the most stable infrastructure that we have."
"The single management panel is the main feature that is wonderful for the customer."
"The most valuable features of VMware Software Defined Storage are scalability, high availability, and performance."
"The technical support is awesome."
"The most valuable features of VMware Software Defined Storage are scalability, high availability, and performance."
"The product is user-friendly from an administrative standpoint and very easy to use."
"VMware Software Defined Storage gives higher availability against data corruption."
"The best part of the solution is that you can actually scale up to a large number of operating systems without additional hardware."
"This is an easy-to-use product for adding flexibility to your storage solution."
 

Cons

"I would love for them to have a hyper-converged solution."
"If they could make it cheaper, that would be something."
"Pure Storage's logs could provide more visibility to the end-user. The logging algorithms are different from those of other vendors. For example, Cisco's logs provide extensive troubleshooting data, whereas Pure Storage logs offer limited information. We have to contact support to get more information."
"Regarding documentation, it would be helpful if we could have access to the root passwords for administrative tasks."
"We would like to see more cloud support, which we know is coming, although it's not out yet."
"I would like to see some improvements on the FlashBlade side around the CIFS space support. I am not super familiar with all the different NAS protocols that they run on their box, but there could be some improvements made on SMB CIFS side."
"I recognize it's a difficult challenge, but I would like to see them make the pricing more reasonable."
"Enhanced documentation and beginner-friendly guidelines would benefit users with less configuration experience."
"The new features are not free. You need to pay for each feature."
"In the future, I would like to see integration with external storage using the fiber channel"
"This is a pricey solution considering it's essentially a fork lift upgrade but the features, redundancy, and performance made it the most attractive solution for us."
"Lacks sufficient integration with other vendors and public clouds."
"Some of the features in the user interface can only be accessed through the command-line interface."
"As Nutanix Acropolis AOS is on the expensive side, one of its areas for improvement is the price."
"It would be ideal if it was more secure."
"Notifications could be improved as they're not currently very useful."
"The license model of the product is an area of concern where improvements are required."
"The performance is not as good as some competing products and reporting can be improved."
"VMware Software Defined Storage should include a shared database on a standard version."
"Simplifying the licensing model and making it cheaper would improve the solution."
"There is room for more integrations and plugins into more storages."
"It doesn't have the ability to be deployed on any kind of hardware and network connectors."
"The performance is not as good as some competing products and reporting can be improved."
"I'd like to see improved hardware compatibility"
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price was more favorable than Dell EMC."
"It could always be lower, but it's okay."
"The Evergreen Storage subscription is great, because then I get new controllers every three years."
"The cost has room for improvement."
"Because the price is a bit higher than other products, the data reduction equalizes the price with amount of the data reduction."
"The pricing is very attractive and it delivers performance for the money."
"It is a more expensive solution, but it is worth it. You are getting what you paid for."
"The solution is expensive."
"The license is quite clear to me. It's much clearer than what we had with our previous virtualization environment. The licensing is not complex to understand."
"We just have a support license for Nutanix."
"This product is less expensive than some of the competing HCI solutions."
"The product’s licensing fee is moderately expensive."
"We got the renewal done recently, and there was no cost involved."
"AHV is free! This is a great feature that should be taken advantage of."
"Many of my customers have issues with Acropolis' licensing model because they are charging the customers based on two things— the CPUs and the capacity in the solid stack disk — and that's a problem. Nutanix's competitors are not licensing that layer, so this is something that they should change. They should abandon this licensing model because it's too complex. Technical support is bundled with the subscription."
"The software only licensing model is priced normally, but the licensing model that comes with hardware is priced very high. You can choose to pay the license yearly, or you can pay every three years, or every five years."
"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."
"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."
"VMware Software Defined Storage is a slightly expensive solution."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Software Defined Storage (SDS) solutions are best for your needs.
892,646 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%
Computer Software Company
9%
Construction Company
9%
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 Business64
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.
892,646 professionals have used our research since 2012.