Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) vs VAST Data comparison

Nutanix and VAST Data are both solutions in the NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays category. Nutanix is ranked #4 with an average rating of 9.0, while VAST Data is ranked #8 with an average rating of 10.0. Nutanix holds a 1.6% mindshare in N, compared to VAST Data’s 5.8% mindshare. Additionally, 98% of Nutanix users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of VAST Data users who would recommend it.

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 18, 2024

VAST Data and Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) compete in the storage solutions market. Users favor VAST Data for its pricing and customer support, while Nutanix NUS is notable for its advanced features justified by its higher cost.

Features: VAST Data users like its high performance, scalability, support for diverse workloads, ease of management, and innovative data reduction capabilities. Nutanix NUS stands out with robust compatibility with various hypervisors, comprehensive storage services, and seamless integration with existing infrastructure.

Room for Improvement: VAST Data users suggest improvements in documentation, enhanced data protection, and better integration with third-party backup solutions. Nutanix NUS users want better cost efficiency, more intuitive management tools, and enhanced support for more cloud environments.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: VAST Data offers a straightforward deployment process and responsive support team ensuring a smooth transition and quick issue resolution. Nutanix NUS is recognized for its flexible deployment options, but some users report a steeper learning curve and mixed experiences with customer service.

Pricing and ROI: VAST Data is commended for its competitive initial setup costs and strong return on investment due to efficiency and performance. Nutanix NUS tends to be more expensive upfront but offers substantial long-term value, making it a cost-effective choice for those seeking extensive features and reliability.

To learn more, read our detailed Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) vs. VAST Data Report (Updated: February 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) vs. VAST Data

February 2025

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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

Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays category, the mindshare of Pure FlashArray X NVMe is 2.6%, down from 2.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) is 1.6%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VAST Data is 5.8%, down from 6.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays

Featured Reviews

Eugene Hemphill

Sales Manager at Multicomputos PR

Helps to save money and resources with the data compression feature

One point I'd like to improve is that the tool should start selling small boxes again. It discontinued some products and is focusing on bigger, more capable boxes, neglecting the SMB market. Even though it's not a big market, it shouldn't have removed them. One way to improve the product is to add an operational assistant that doesn't depend on VMware. It could also establish more alliances with other operational systems.

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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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Alan Powers

HPC CTO at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

Stability-wise, a device that has been up and running for years

The failover capability and resiliency are some of the solution's valuable features. The big thing is resilience because it has richer coding in it, so multiple devices can't fail. Also, one can still access a number of CBoxes that can allow one to access their file system. Once a device fails, it fails the transparency of the end-user, and it just starts using another resource. The encryption capability, the snapshots, along with a whole bunch of features make the tool valuable. VAST Data keeps adding more and more features all the time.

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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

"It has benefited my organization because it has reduced time to insights."

"Everything, especially the VMs inside, is pretty fast."

"The most valuable features of this solution are its ease of use and performance."

"Pure FlashArray X NVMe has low latency and high Ops. It is an evergreen model."

"It's incredibly easy to use and greatly simplified our ability to both deploy and manage our storage subsystems."

"Pure Storage has signature security technology, which cannot be deleted, even if you are an administrator."

"The high availability of the product is the most valuable feature."

"It is very easy to install and configure. It has got excellent diagnostics. If you really need to see how the box is performing, the console gives you a lot of information. You can set thresholds as well as alerts based on the thresholds, which is a very powerful functionality. They are very proactive. They know how to monitor and manage the systems. They see a problem, and they are all over it before us. They see the problem before we see it, which is very good."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pros

"Whenever we have some necessity in terms of capacity and expansion of infrastructure, it's like a Lego system where they can just place in some more nodes and our needs are met."

"The most valuable feature is the unified dashboard, as it allows us to easily observe everything from a single location."

"From an analytics perspective, the best aspect of Unified Storage is its locality. When you read data, you want to know that you're only reading data from the particular local storage node. It's also critical to access the data as quickly as possible from that. From a business perspective, the most important thing is ease of use. Having a combination of compute and storage makes it much easier to manage."

"What I found most valuable in Nutanix Files Storage is its high availability and ability to scale out with many VMs."

"The most valuable feature of Nutanix Unified Storage is redundancy."

"Nutanix Unified Storage does a very good job of unifying our organization's block, file, and object storage. It puts it all in one place. From one platform, we can deploy S3-type buckets. We can provide iSCSI-level block storage if we need to. It does a great job with home folders and departmental shares, which is what we mostly use Nutanix Unified Storage for."

"For somebody like me who grew up building what others call three-tier and I call traditional architecture, the valuable thing is that you can now buy it. You can have new deployments and infrastructure up and running with very little infrastructure behind it."

"Nutanix Unified Storage is easy for end users to access. They can use it like any other drive on their systems. We have mapped it in the user system so they can scan files and store them. They can use it just like an Android drive."

More Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) pros

"This has been one of the most reliable storage systems that I have ever used."

"The solution is useful for machine learning and scientific applications, including computer simulations."

Cons

"The software layer has to improve."

"Every time I think of something that needs to improve, they're one step ahead, which I love. The only area I wish to see improve, I believe is coming, is in the FlashBlade product. Blade implementation fell short on a few of the services."

"We need better data deduplication."

"The tool's portfolio is minimal. It is expensive."

"There is room for improvement in catering to midrange storage needs, especially for customers seeking Enterprise-class features."

"We would like to see VNC integration or be able to use Pure Storage with VNC."

"If the customer only needs 500 terabytes and doesn't care how much data they'll put in the server, IBM is cheaper than Pure."

"We have run into a couple of instances recently where we are running out of space. So we have had to buy some more packs for it and they have deployed fine and it has increased smoothly."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe cons

"Its interface is very simplistic. It is a good thing for people because of the ease of use, but at times, I find it too simplistic. It is hard to find advanced options. They should eventually expand it and provide additional drop-down lists or menus with advanced feature sets."

"We would love to see the analytics and ransomware protection extended beyond just file servers to virtual machines, but they have a different product that covers that."

"The escalation process with technical support could do with some improvement."

"I believe that one of the most complicated parts of Nutanix Unified Storage is the configuration of the DNS issue in Active Directory. Sometimes it is a bit complicated to troubleshoot or detect an error when integrating it with Active Directory."

"There are still some gaps in the solution's synchronization that could be improved."

"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."

"The interface is not logical. It should be a little simpler."

"The analytics part of Nutanix Unified Storage is too big and should be made smaller and less resource-hungry."

More Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) cons

"The read/write ratio is an area in the solution with some flaws and needs improvement."

"The write performance could be improved because it is less than half of the read performance."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The tool's pricing is cheap; I rate it a six to seven out of ten. Most of our sales are not subscription-based. We sell the hardware, and customers keep using it. They only renew the service part annually. The support can be a bit pricey, but the solution is more cost-effective than anything else out there."

"We pay approximately $50,000 USD per year in licensing fees."

"The product is expensive."

"With Pure Storage, we would like to continue seeing price reductions with flash storage. I don't think we're any different than anybody else when we continue to look to the industry for price reductions of both NVMe and traditional SSD storage. We would like to see these prices continue to decline and erode, even displacing large spinning disks."

"Pure FlashArray X NVMe’s pricing is cheaper than other products."

"Its price could be better. It is not too expensive, but it is the high-end cost. It is kind of a Rolls-Royce. You pay a lot, but you get a lot out of it. So, the price pressure on the way down would be great, but at the end of the day, if you need to do the work, you just pay for it."

"With VMware, we pay $300,000 annually."

"Our licensing fees are $500,000+ USD."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pricing and cost advice

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

"The price of the license is expensive when comparing it to traditional storage."

"I find Nutanix Files Storage competitively priced, even its feature set. Its price is seven out of ten."

"Compared to other solutions, NUS is cost-effective and efficient. It also has good performance."

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

"I hope that it will stay the way it is. We have seen the changes in VMware and what happened to them. I have heard that Nutanix will raise the prices, but I hope that they will not do that."

"The cost of Nutanix Unified Storage can be prohibitive for some small and medium-sized businesses, making it challenging for them to adopt the product."

"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

"Price-wise, VAST Data is not the cheapest, not the most expensive one."

"We acquired VAST Data as a one-time, capital purchase."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Government

Computer Software Company

32%

Educational Organization

23%

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

16%

Manufacturing Company

14%

Financial Services Firm

12%

University

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Pure FlashArray X NVMe?

Pure FlashArray X NVMe helps to improve our processing speed. It is user-friendly and easy to use.

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure FlashArray X NVMe?

I am an engineer and am not aware of the setup cost.

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What needs improvement with Pure FlashArray X NVMe?

Adding some functions to the product would be beneficial. Storage replication should be essential, and the analytics ...

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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.

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

Nutanix Unified Storage isn't expensive.

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What needs improvement with Nutanix Unified Storage?

The dashboard could be more customizable

See all answers

What do you like most about VAST Data?

The solution is useful for machine learning and scientific applications, including computer simulations.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for VAST Data?

Price-wise, VAST Data is not the cheapest, not the most expensive one.

See all answers

What needs improvement with VAST Data?

The read/write ratio is an area in the solution with some flaws and needs improvement.

See all answers

Comparisons

Dell PowerStore vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 33% of the time

TrueNAS R-Series vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 16% of the time

Pure Storage FlashBlade vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 14% of the time

IBM FlashSystem vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 12% of the time

Dell Unity XT vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 8% of the time

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe Competitors

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS)

Compared 20% of the time

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

Compared 18% 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

Dell ECS vs Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS)

Compared 4% of the time

More Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) Competitors

Pure Storage FlashBlade vs VAST Data

Compared 11% of the time

Dell PowerScale (Isilon) vs VAST Data

Compared 10% of the time

NetApp AFF vs VAST Data

Compared 10% of the time

Qumulo vs VAST Data

Compared 9% of the time

Dell PowerStore vs VAST Data

Compared 2% of the time

More VAST Data Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Pure FlashArray X NVMe

March 2025

Download Pure FlashArray X NVMe product report

Buyer's Guide

Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS)

March 2025

Download Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) product report

Buyer's Guide

NVMe All-Flash Storage Arrays

March 2025

Download VAST Data product report

Also Known As

Pure FlashArray//X NVMe, Pure FlashArray//X, FlashArray//X

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

No data available

Overview

Pure Storage FlashArray//X is the world’s first enterprise-class, all-NVMe flash storage array. It represents a new class of storage – shared accelerated storage, which is a term coined by Gartner – that delivers major breakthroughs in performance, simplicity, and consolidation.

Pure Storage

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.

Nutanix

Innovation to break decades of data storage trade-offs.

VAST Data

Sample Customers

Fremont Bank, Judson ISD, The Nielsen Company

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

Norwest Venture Partners, General Dynamics Information Technology, Ginkgo Bioworks

Buyer's Guide

Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) vs. VAST Data

February 2025

Free Report: Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) vs. VAST Data

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