Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) vs Zadara comparison

Nutanix and Zadara are both solutions in the All-Flash Storage category. Nutanix is ranked #6 with an average rating of 9.0, while Zadara is ranked #26 with an average rating of 10.0. Additionally, 98% of Nutanix users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Zadara users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 18, 2024

Zadara and Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) compete in the unified storage market. Zadara has an edge with its flexible pricing models and support, while NUS is viewed as superior due to its robust features.

Features: Zadara offers scalability, control, and flexible pricing. NUS provides advanced data protection, seamless integration capabilities, and sophisticated solutions tailored for enterprises.

Room for Improvement: Zadara needs better documentation and improved user-friendliness. NUS could improve on its high costs, complexity in the initial setup, and ease of use. Documentation issues in Zadara are minor compared to the complexities noted by NUS users.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Zadara deployment is straightforward with responsive customer support. NUS has a more complex deployment but offers extensive resources and professional guidance. Zadara’s ease of deployment is favored, although NUS compensates with excellent post-deployment support.

Pricing and ROI: Zadara has flexible, pay-as-you-go pricing and good ROI. NUS has higher setup costs, which are justified by its comprehensive features. Zadara’s flexible pricing gives it an advantage in terms of initial investment and ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) vs. Zadara Report (Updated: August 2024).

Buyer's Guide

Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) vs. Zadara

August 2024

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Categories and Ranking

Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Featured Reviews

Paul Pearson

Storage and Backup Architect at Concentrix

Apr 25, 2022

Works well, is easy to implement, and has upgrade analysis capabilities

Currently, it's our tier-one storage. We use it mostly for our Oracle databases It has drastically improved the performance of our high-end Oracle databases and allows us the ability to replication to a DR location with ease. We love the product. Pure Storage works really well. The CAT tool and…

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Rajadurai Mani

Storage and Backup Administrator at a manufacturing company with 5,001-10,000 employees

Jul 10, 2024

Easy to manage and provides a centralized management console

There is no tagging concept in Nutanix Unified Storage where you can tag the servers. It is more useful for backups because I manage backups as well. In other solutions, you can group servers in the backup. Although we can do a complete cluster of VMs in Nutanix, we cannot tag the server to a particular tag ID or number you can pull from the backup solutions. If you call for that number, the server should ideally take the backups irrespective of the cluster in which it is present. We faced issues with those things. We have to protect the entire cluster manually. The server tagging feature could be added to the solution's future releases. We didn't face any issues in Nutanix after the upgrade, but we had issues with the Cohesity backups. We consistently work with both the vendors, and that has been fixed. So that is the only thing that we had faced up to the upgrade.

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Steve Healey

CTO at Pratum

Aug 10, 2022

We're able to scale up or down almost instantly, and changes are handled efficiently by their managed services team

One of the most valuable features is its integration with other cloud solutions. We have a presence within Amazon EC2 and we leverage compute instances in there. Being able to integrate with compute, both locally within Zadara, as well as with other cloud vendors such as Amazon, is very helpful, while also being able to maintain extremely low latency between those connections. We have leveraged 10-Gig direct connections between them to be able to hook up the storage element within Zadara with the cloud platforms such as Amazon EC2. That is one of the primary technical driving factors. The other large one is the partnership and the managed service offering from Zadara. That means they have a vested interest and are able to understand any issues or problems that we have. They are there to help identify and work through them and come to solutions for us. We have a unique workload, so problems that we may have to identify and work through could be unique to us. Other customers that are just looking to manage a smaller amount of data would not ever identify or have to work through the kinds of things we do. Having a partner that is interested in helping to work through those issues, and make recommendations based on their expertise, is very valuable to us. Zadara's dedicated cores and memory provide us with a single-tenant experience. We are multi-tenant in that we manage multiple organizations and customers within our environment. We send all of that data to that single-tenant management aspect within Zadara. We have a couple of different virtual, private storage arrays, a couple of them in high-availability. The I/O engine type we're leveraging is the 2400s. We also have disaster recovery set up on the other side of the U.S. for replication and remote mirroring. Being able to manage that within the platform allows us to add additional storage ourselves, to change the configuration of the VPSA to scale up or scale down, and to make any changes to meet budgetary needs. It truly allows us to manage things from a performance standpoint as well. We can also rely upon Zadara, as a managed-services provider, to manage those requests on our behalf. In the event that we needed to submit a ticket and say, "Hey, can you add additional storage or volumes?" it's very helpful to have them leverage their time and expertise to perform that on our behalf. It is also very important that Zadara provides drive options such as SSD, NL-SAS, and SSD cache, for our workload in particular. We require our data to not only be accessible, but to be fast. Typically, most stored data that is hotter or more active is pushed onto faster storage, something like flash cache. The flash cache we began with during our first year with Zadara worked pretty well initially. But our workload being a little unique, after that, the volume of data exceeded the kind of logic that can be used in that type of cache. It just looks at what data is most frequently accessed. Usually the "first in" is on that hot flash cache, and our workload was a little bit more random than that, so we weren't getting as much of the benefit from that flash cache. The fact that Zadara provides us with the ability to actually add a hybrid of both SSDs and SATA allows us to specifically designate what volumes and what data should be on those faster drives, while still taking into account budget constraints. That way, we can manage that hybrid and reduce the performance on some of the drives that are housing data that is really being stored long-term and not accessed. Having that hybrid capability has tremendously helped with the flexibility to manage our needs from a performance standpoint as well as a cost perspective. As far as I know, they also have solid support for the major cloud vendors out there, in addition to some others that I hadn't heard of. But they certainly support Amazon EC2 and Google and Rackspace, among others. Those integrations are very important. Most organizations have some sort of a cloud presence today, whether they're hosting certain servers or compute instances or some other workload out in the cloud. Being able to integrate with the cloud and obtain data and store data, especially with all these next-generation threats and things like ransomware out there, is important. Having backups and storage locations that you can push data to, offsite, or integrate with, is definitely key.

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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

"I use the tool for Oracle databases, Oracle virtual machines, and Oracle Linux databases. I'm on the storage side, not a database administrator."

"The most valuable feature of this solution is reliability."

"It's helped us because we've changed fundamentally what we talk about. We don't talk about storage and different tiers of storage anymore nor do we talk about servers. We talk now about applications and how applications impact the business and end users."

"One of the best features is the support, which is excellent."

"What I really like about this program, is that it is easy to use and easy to configurate."

"Pure FlashArray X NVMe will quickly overcome all the hurdles you face, including network and latency issues."

"The system allows for seamless learning experiences, facilitating quick and easy cloning of environments within minutes."

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

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pros

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

"Nutanix Unified Storage is a simple, user-friendly, and stable solution."

"Nutanix Objects is reliable."

"It gives more security that the data isn't going to get lost."

"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."

"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."

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

"The inclusion of it in the Nutanix Objects Storage platform simplifies my process as I am no longer required to acquire a separate platform. Instead, I can simply purchase additional licenses as needed. All management can be performed from a single unified interface, making it a convenient and streamlined experience."

More Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) pros

"The processing is much faster with this product."

"Being able to scale on demand, and being able to get out of our security operation center, and not having to purchase hardware upfront, has drastically reduced the overhead that was required to maintain our information. We have also gained additional capabilities in terms of speed of replicating that information."

"The most valuable features of Zadara are its visibility and simplicity to use."

"It's very easy to expand and compared to other storage systems that we've used, it's a lot more expandable and a lot more flexible in how it's deployed."

"A nice feature is the immutable object storage, which can be used in conjunction with Veeam."

"The most valuable feature is the flexibility in terms of deployment options."

"One of the most valuable features is its integration with other cloud solutions. We have a presence within Amazon EC2 and we leverage compute instances in there. Being able to integrate with compute, both locally within Zadara, as well as with other cloud vendors such as Amazon, is very helpful, while also being able to maintain extremely low latency between those connections."

"Zadara Storage Cloud having 24/7 management saves me support and engineering costs because the storage and computing are managed by a third-party. We are able to focus more attention on the customer, which is truly our core business. Even at 1:00 AM or 2:00 AM at night, someone will answer, which is important."

More Zadara pros

Cons

"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."

"It is on the expensive side."

"It's more multi-tenant functionality in their Pure1 manage portal that is lacking."

"There is room for improvement in the pricing of the product."

"In the next release, I would like to see real-time analytics for further insight into consumption models."

"We would like to see more visibility into garbage collection and CPU performance in the GUI."

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

"Managing data isn't difficult for me. The performance is usually perfect, but we sometimes have capacity problems."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe cons

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

"While Unified Storage has evolved a lot over time, its database handling needs to improve a little. There could be an improvement in terms of costs. It's a little expensive for Brazil but still delivers a lot of performance."

"There is some confusion in the reporting when I have to create the report for statistics. I find it is not so user-friendly."

"Perhaps Unified Storage could be improved by including artificial intelligence to make searches more effective. Also, if someone has access who shouldn't, it could automatically update, so I do not need to physically remove permission. The platform could do it automatically. AI could make it more self-service."

"The biggest thing for me, which is a pet peeve of mine, is the integration with the hardware platforms."

"While they are good and they do work, some of the snapshotting and tiering features are not as simple to set up as they could be."

"The product does not offer one console."

"The solution is very expensive."

More Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) cons

"The initial setup of the solution is complex."

"Having iSCSI over the internet using a VPN, the IPSec tunnel is really the only thing that I find missing from this product."

"In the next release, there can be some improvements to the web console by adding more features because the console is simple. Additionally, the calculator could improve."

"There are still some storage features that they lack. For example, other vendors implemented the auto-tiering feature a long time ago, while Zadara Storage Cloud is just coming out with this feature today. So, they are a little bit late compared to the market."

"The management interface is more geared towards end-users rather than a service partner like ourselves, and there are improvements that can be made around that."

"The range of support of VMware could be better. It can support Windows, however, it cannot support other operating systems like IBM AIX. This needs to improve."

"I would like to see them be a little bit more proactive in terms of the patches and updates that are available. I would like to see more disclosure and information around what fixes or what enhancements are available within a patch, and help in coordinating and scheduling that. Right now, it's driven more by the customer in reaching out via a support ticket."

"Some of the features are a little bit slow to come to market."

More Zadara cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Given its price, Pure is not the first option."

"The licensing is on a yearly basis."

"They can tout the functionality and cutting edge technology that they have, but that's where the price tag comes in. The cost is high, but I think as they grow their business and get more customers that it will probably go down a little bit."

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

"The support cost per array is about $20,000 a year for 24/7 support."

"The tool is an investment that we've budgeted for. While the prices may be higher than those of other vendors, we see it as a market leader with benefits. We don't regret purchasing it."

"The product is expensive."

"Pretty much everything that you need is licensed when you buy the product. Licensing to me is different than the maintenance cost, but they can bleed into one another. We buy the product, and we expect three years of support bundled into what we negotiate on our storage arrays. I would start to see maintenance costs going into the fourth year, but we're not there yet."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pricing and cost advice

"The product is neither cheap nor expensive, making it a solution offering a price range that is in the middle."

"With all of the Nutanix equipment, the licensing is expensive. We operate in the enterprise space, but we're a midsized company. At times, the price tag is a little bit shocking for a company with only 35 employees. We're not a Fortune 500 company, but we deal with Fortune 500 drug and energy companies. We have to play in that enterprise space if we're going to have enterprise customers. I'm very price-conscious, but I understand that if I want the best, I've got to pay the price."

"Nutanix offers different pricing options, including Ultimate and Ultimate Pro."

"The solution's pricing is better compared to other products."

"The solution is highly-priced."

"The pricing is a bit too high."

"In my opinion, the product is fairly priced."

"The licensing model the tool has is cheaper than an HCI storage solution."

More Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) pricing and cost advice

"The pricing and licensing are very simple and the cost is predictable, although, like everything that you pay for as you use, you have to be mindful of what you're using."

"It is a nice licensing model and it makes it quite simple because we just pay for what we use, and the bill that comes shows us exactly what customers are using what resources."

"If you just take the street price of Zadara Storage Cloud and look up the price or cost per hour, then you could think that Zadara Storage Cloud is extremely expensive or a solution only for enterprise use. That is not true. You need to compare the entire system. This means that you don't stop looking at just the street price, but you need to consider all the features, requirements, and costs of support as well as the extra cost that other vendors have. Other players just play with hidden, additional costs. Everything is included in Zadara Storage Cloud's licensing cost; what you get is what you pay for."

"The price of Zadara is very good and it covers everything. There is no subscription needed."

"One of the factors that ruled out several providers was cost. They were way too expensive for the volume of data that we needed and the speed at which we needed to be able to manage it. There aren't a lot of providers that can do that."

"For our use, it's appropriately priced and overall, it's proved to be very cost-effective against other tier-one vendors."

"The pricing is very competitive and the fact that they have very compelling discounts for multi-year commitments is great."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

17%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Government

Educational Organization

30%

Computer Software Company

30%

Manufacturing Company

University

Computer Software Company

21%

Manufacturing Company

13%

Financial Services Firm

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

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.

See all answers

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

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 se...

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What needs improvement with Pure FlashArray X NVMe?

Managing data isn't difficult for me. The performance is usually perfect, but we sometimes have capacity problems.

See all answers

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.

See all answers

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

Nutanix Unified Storage isn't expensive.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Nutanix Unified Storage?

The dashboard could be more customizable

See all answers

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Comparisons

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Compared 30% of the time

Dell Unity XT vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 15% of the time

Pure Storage FlashBlade vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 14% of the time

TrueNAS R-Series vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 12% of the time

Dell PowerMax NVMe vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 10% of the time

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

Compared 22% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS)

Compared 19% of the time

MinIO vs Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS)

Compared 8% of the time

VAST Data vs Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS)

Compared 7% of the time

Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct vs Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS)

Compared 5% of the time

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MinIO vs Zadara

Compared 20% of the time

Amazon S3 vs Zadara

Compared 17% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs Zadara

Compared 13% of the time

Wasabi vs Zadara

Compared 10% of the time

Google Cloud Storage vs Zadara

Compared 7% of the time

More Zadara Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Pure FlashArray X NVMe

August 2024

Download Pure FlashArray X NVMe product report

Buyer's Guide

Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS)

August 2024

Download Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) product report

Buyer's Guide

Zadara

August 2024

Download Zadara product report

Also Known As

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

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

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Pure Storage

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Nutanix

Zadara

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.

Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) is a software-defined storage solution that consolidates seamless access and management of siloed block, file, and object storage into a single platform. Leveraging the Nutanix Cloud Platform, NUS is built for scale, performance, and integrated data security requirements of modern applications deployed on core, cloud, or edge.

Zadara is a powerful enterprise-level storage solution whose design enables it to handle every aspect of a user’s data storage needs. It can be deployed in any location, using any protocol, and storing any data type that an organization requires. With Zadara, organizations can do everything that they were able to do with more traditional systems in a cheaper and more efficient way.

Zadara Benefits

Some of the ways that organizations can benefit by choosing to deploy Zadara include:

Security. Zadara is built with data security in mind. All of a user’s data is heavily encrypted by Zadara’s software so that it is safe both while it is in storage and while it is being transferred somewhere else. It comes with role-based access controls that prevent a user’s data from being seen by those who lack the proper level of authorization. It also comes with dual-factor authentication and other similar methods of identity management.

Reduced costs. While Zadara offers enterprise-level storage capabilities, the costs associated with utilizing it are far less than those of similar solutions. Some of the resources that it offers are totally free of cost. The model that it utilizes is a pay-as-you-go model. Organizations only pay for the resources that they use and nothing more. Users are not required to sign up for any particular period of time. They are in complete and total control of what they spend on the solution.

Storage efficiency. Zadara ensures that users are able to store their data in the most efficient way possible. It takes a number of approaches that prevent insufficient data storage. These approaches are:

1. Thin-provision volumes. This method only allows actually written data to be counted toward the storage capacity that is consumed.

2. Pattern removal. Zadara searches a user’s stored data for repetitive binary sequences. Once it identifies the repetitive binary sequences, it deletes them.

3. Inline deduplication (all-flash only). This method ensures that Zadara only stores unique data blocks in its system.

4. Inline compression. Zadara takes data that is stored in its system and compresses it. This keeps larger blocks of data from taking up too much room.

Zadara Features

Centralized management. Zadara comes with a centralized dashboard that enables organizations to monitor and control their storage operations from a single location.

File analytics. Organizations can leverage a powerful analytics package that can provide them with critical insights. These tools can help users sort through their data and make more informed data management decisions.

Remote mirroring. This feature enables users to replicate data in two remote locations at the same time. This makes it easy for data to be recovered in the event of an unexpected loss. It also aids remote teams in their collaboration efforts by giving them access to the same data at the same time.

Reviews from Real Users

Zadara is a highly effective solution that stands out when compared to many of its competitors. Two major advantages it offers are its extensive suite of cloud solution integrations and its object storage capability.

Steve H., the chief technology officer at Pratum, writes, “One of the most valuable features is its integration with other cloud solutions. We have a presence within Amazon EC2 and we leverage computer instances there. Being able to integrate with computing, both locally within Zadara, as well as with other cloud vendors such as Amazon, is very helpful, while also being able to maintain extremely low latency between those connections.”

Mauro R., the CEO of Momit SRL, says, “The object storage feature is wonderful. With traditional storage, you have a cost per gigabyte that is extremely high or related to the number of disks. With Zadara Storage Cloud, you have a cost per gigabyte that you can cut and tailor to your needs independent of the number or size of the disks.”

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

Time, Inc. A&E Network, The Washington Post, News UK, McGraw Hill, Gilt, Toshiba, Deloitte, VMware

Buyer's Guide

Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) vs. Zadara

August 2024

Free Report: Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) vs. Zadara

Find out what your peers are saying about Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) vs. Zadara and other solutions. Updated: August 2024.

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