Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Reviews

Our customer is utilizing Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure for a significant project involving VDI and servers.

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure runs on an SQL server. Customers utilize it as a private server. However, it cannot be considered a true cloud service since it operates on virtual infrastructure without provisioning orchestration.

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure provides a unified platform for managing databases. We used this platform to install numerous virtual machines, including SEBD, and never encountered any issues.

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure has helped reduce downtime.

We have migrated various services into Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure for our clients.

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

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure lacks compatibility with certain older processors. When a customer purchases five or six nodes and two or three of them intend to buy two additional nodes, there can be compatibility issues with the hardware configuration.

The price is high and has room for improvement.

The maintenance can be improved.

I have been using Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure for ten years.

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure is stable.

Based on my customers' feedback, the technical support is good.

Positive

The initial setup is straightforward, and the deployment is quick, taking only a few days to complete.

All of our clients are satisfied with the returns from Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure.

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure is expensive.

I give Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure an eight out of ten.

Upgrading is easy but modifications can be difficult. 

We use NCI in the transportation domain. 

The tool is simple, stable, and easy to upgrade. It also requires few resources to manage, which simplifies our work. The solution's ease of upgrading is its valuable feature. AHV, provided by Nutanix, is excellent in performance and ease of use. It's based on an open-source product called KVM, which I also use for other services.

Data protection and disaster recovery features have been beneficial for our work. With these features, we're able to create a high-availability environment where if one node goes down, another one takes over.

NCI's pricing is expensive. 

I have been using the product for six years. 

I rate the solution's stability an eight out of ten. 

I rate NCI's scalability an eight out of ten. My company has 1500 users. 

The solution's support is excellent.

Positive

The deployment process usually takes around a week, depending on whether you need to migrate your systems to a hypervisor environment. It can be quite easy if you already have that setup, especially with something like VMware.

For me ROI is the tool's stability. 

Reconsidering the licensing packages could reduce the price, especially for companies that may not need all the bells and whistles. Many of the features are based on open-source software, so there's potential to offer more flexible pricing options. Additionally, with the right expertise, companies could potentially create similar environments themselves, reducing the need for extensive support and licensing costs. I rate its pricing a six out of ten. The tool costs around 300,000 dollars per year. 

I rate the tool an eight out of ten. I am exploring new technologies because the market was different when I implemented NCI six years ago. Keeping up with changes is important, so I'm currently evaluating new options. I am looking to KVM. You should use NCI if you can afford it. 

We use the solution in a growing industry where the expansion of servers is critical. The expansion power is pretty accomplished. I can add a node or change hardware easily.

The web application on the servers has been a game changer. It was expensive before. It used to be a headache. It used to take weeks if we had a crash. Now, we can fix everything and put everything as it was within hours. 

The management is very easy. You can see everything within a single platform to manage your databases. Everything is there on a single dashboard. 

NCI's features helped our organization reduce downtime greatly. We use it effectively for replication as well. 

The ability to restore within seconds is great. It takes a few seconds to rewind back to a previous marker and have everything up and running again. 

We migrated other services over to Nutanix. For example, we migrated over from Microsoft Hyper-V. This allows us to manage everything from one single platform and to save on licenses. We no longer have to license all of these different types of hardware. 

It's easy to launch on demand if you are using a newer OS. 

The feature that is lacking right now is the backup. It does not have good backup feature tools, like having templates or being able to back up every two or three days. 

I've been using the solution for almost five years.

The solution is very stable. We haven't had any issues. 

We have the solution in one central location. Everyone connects to it remotely. the number of end users fluctuates. It could be 200 to 300 users. 

It's very easy to scale. It's the main reason we chose it. It's easy to add nodes and resources. 

They assign you according to the time you call. If I'm calling after hours, I'll be assigned to someone in another country.

Positive

We used to use XenServer, Hyper-V, and vSphere among other solutions. We decided to consolidate everything under one console to save on licensing and having to check multiple places. It makes manageability and the ability to extend easier. 

I was involved with the deployment. There were five people involved. The deployment itself was pretty straightforward. That said, it did take some time. We gradually moved the servers. We kept both operating to make sure everything was running, then moved off the older servers slowly.

In the case of hardware failures, we'd inform the supplier. Otherwise, the software is upgraded every six months. There is very little maintenance required beyond that. 

We did use a reseller to assist us with the initial setup. Our experience with them was very positive. 

We can easily provision servers and add nodes on the fly without shutting down. There are no limitations either, beyond having the proper licensing. It's the easy extension of resources where we see the ROI. 

They were pretty aggressive coming into the market and the solution started as a cheap option, however, the price is now going up as they mature. 

We looked into Simplivity. The main difference was the cost between the two options. 

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten overall. 

I'd advise people to try it out. However, ensure that you lock in your price over the next three to five years so that incremental changes do not affect your contract.

We use backup and restore as a service via this product.

The solution has helped us protect against attacks. If someone is going to attack the network, it will come on the network site as an agent. We will get notifications of certain behaviors and we can easily check and block effectively.

We like the pay-as-you-go model. 

The solution has many valuable features. There's 24/7 support and a dedicated account manager.

The solution is easy to use and the pricing is affordable. 

It provides a single platform from which to manage the databases. Applications of any category can be run on Nutanix. 

It's reduced downtime for our customers. We can monitor all of the servers from one place and get notifications and alerts to help with workflow.

The product has helped us prevent and block attacks effectively.

Applications are consolidated thanks to Nutanix. It's nice to have consolidation. We were able to eliminate some of our client's legacy infrastructure.

We're able to use VMware and Nutanix infrastructure in parallel with ease.

We have been able to migrate services to Nutanix easily. It's helped clients save money. Clients who have not been satisfied with the costs and high expenses have been pleased with the cost savings by moving to our Nutanix cloud. 

It is important for our customers that Nutanix Cloud offers a variety of cloud operating models across on-premises, Edge, as well as multiple hosted managed and public clouds. It provides good security. We can effectively prevent attacks. There's less chance of hacks or threats. 

The support could be improved.

Some customers who use Oracle on-premises would like something similar. They don't want to migrate their dedicated server, which is on-premises. They would like it tied to Nutanix on their premises, however, right now, we can only offer a migration for them from their on-premises Oracle model to our Nutanix cloud. For security reasons, they aren't allowed to do this. They can't move to the cloud.

We'd like to have more resource management.

I've been using the solution for more than ten years. 

I've never had any issues with stability.

We can scale the solution without issue. There are no limitations. 

Support is very good. It's a very strong service.

Positive

The initial setup is not complex. It is straightforward. How long it takes to deploy depends on the requirements. We can deliver 100 servers or VMs within half an hour. Generally, implementation takes about 24 hours. The client can go with a physical model or a fixed cost. Cloud services usually take 24 hours to deploy.

You only need one or two people to deploy the solution. 

There isn't really any maintenance necessary.

The pricing is not expensive. We've had clients that have paid 50 lakh rupees to AWS and now that they have migrated to us, they are only paying 10 lakh rupees.

We have seen many clients looking for an AWS data center as there are a lot of issues related to billing and latency. We can provide very similar solutions to what Azure and AWS provide at less cost.

There are fixed costs or pay-as-you-go models. 

We are Nutanix partners. 

I'd rate the solution six out of ten. I'd recommend others to check certifications before purchasing the product.

We replaced our three-tier-solution with Nutanix and kept our VMware ESXi licenses. These will be gone with the new cluster.

We use it for general virtualization, host our Windows fileserver virtually, and do VirtualDesktops with Citrix there.

We have two nodes equipped with one nVidia M10-GPU each to get 3D-acceleration to boost the CAE-Terminal servers. This means that VMs like AD-Domain controllers, Exchange-Servers, SQL-Servers, and various Application Servers are running side-by-side with our SAP-Systems leveraging the  SAP ASE Database (no HANA, yet) virtually on vSphere 6.

We were content with the previous solution, which was NetApp Storage and Dell Blade-Servers for compute. We did not miss a thing besides the performance. Now, after three years in production, we would not go back to that solution.

Nutanix gives us fewer headaches with managing and other administrative operations. Having a single-vendor-solution is much more straightforward. We don't have to deal with VMware because it simply is not necessary, besides setting up new GPU-machines.

Creation of VMs can be done with Prism Element, the web management for each Nutanix Cluster. Nutanix also covers any problems we have with the ESXi software. 

The integration with their own AHV hypervisor is awesome. Talk about invisible infrastructure.

The most valuable feature is the integration of all parts in Prism Element, the browser-based management tool. It gives you detailed information about the environment, helps you drill down on alerts, and keeps the solution up to date with LCM (Life Cycle Manager).

When using Nutanix AHV as a hypervisor, it is the management tool for that too. When you chose another hypervisor it just does basic tasks like VM creation, reconfiguration, and start/stop. It is just enough to keep everything in this "single-pane-of-glass" tool.
Going AHV is just easier. No additional management for VMs. Everything you need is done with Nutanix Prism Element or through an SSH connection.
We are beginning to leverage Powershell and their REST API to do things which integrates more tightly with our own process.

I would enjoy an advanced mode where experienced users can leverage their knowledge to do advanced things currently only allowed using the command line tools on the CVM.

While using the Shell is okay for such advanced things like take a disk image as a ground for a Calm blueprint it would be easier to get it done via GUI. Even more so if you just follow the directions of a colleague.

Currently, that kind of task is limited to the shell.

We have been using Nutanix Acropolis AOS for over five years and are in the process of switching to a new cluster.

Unless you opt for the short-term support path (STS), stability is a given with LTS versions. You get not every feature available, immediately, but that is no concern for stable systems.

You cannot download older versions with known critical bugs. The Life Cycle Manager (LCM) supports you with checks to hint at known compatibility issues. I noticed the hint to update Nutanix Files in order to support the AOS upgrade I was planning. Directly in Prism Elements!

That is simply amazing. Of course, one would visit the "upgrade paths" and "software interoperability" pages in the support section of https://my.nutanix.com .

Scalability is the true nature of HCI solutions like Nutanix AOS. Just add a node. Done.

Nutanix support is the most amazing. Sure, you pay big bucks for that but it is worth every dime. Fast pick-up times even for lower rated tickets, great knowledge of the support team. If your question is not support related they connect you with a sales engineer to talk about it.

Positive

We used NetApp Storage in conjunction with Dell Blade-Servers for compute and we switched from vmWare to Nutanix AHV as a hypervisor.

My advice is to get your first cluster up and running with a partner experienced to do so. We got lucky with our Nutanix partner company but ask for their level of experience. Don't get me wrong: it is not hard to set up but you should have support from experienced consultants who are familiar if something goes south.
If anything goes south, call in to Nutanix support. Your partner can help with that

We implemented with a nutanix partner where we did the PoC with. The setup is quite straight-forward and done in a matter of 3-5 hours. 
Their knowledge was really helpful to guide through some of the questions that came up.

The pricing of Nutanix is not cheap but there are options available. Don't cut short on support contracts, as the (pricey) ultimate support offering is worth every buck.

You have to realize that Nutanix AOS is the basic platform for your environment. If you need to cut costs then use Nutanix AHV as a hypervisor free of charge. Most applications are running with that. If it runs on ESXi then it most likely runs on AHV, but check with your other application vendors.

We explored the options by re-iterating our previous solution and came short of delivering support for additional demands like VDI. Re-Iterating also meant up-staging storage because of the ONTAP-OS upgrade. So, a change was due, either way.

It is difficult for me to point to areas that need improvement. AOS is constantly on the move to new heights. It is considered even on a feature level with vSAN, while far ahead of that in regards to performance and resilience.

See Nutanix Principal Architect Josh Odgers CloudXC | By Josh Odgers – VMware Certified Design Expert (VCDX) #90 for a detailed explanation on that topic.

Again - can't say this enough - talk to Nutanix support if you have trouble determining the exact order in which product to update/upgrade. A call beforehand spares you a headache. Literally.
But, again, the support area is massive. Onboard with your block/node serial there and you are welcomed with an extra onboarding page on what is what. Best I have ever seen!

It's an infrastructure product that we mostly use to manage virtual services.

The DR solution in Nutanix has helped us reduce downtime. There are periods of downtime, intentional as well as unintentional, but because we have another site already replicated, our downtime is minimal. The protection policies have the greatest impact in reducing downtime because they help us replicate our data. We're able to do synchronous replication to the remote site and that keeps our machine ready there in case of the need for DR. We just go there and manually power it on.

Nutanix has also helped us free up IT staff. Since I joined this company, I have been the only one managing the solution. Prior to that, there were multiple people involved. The more we move toward Nutanix from vCenter, the more we reduce the number of resources needed. We have freed up almost half of the time we used to need.

There are a lot of things I really like. Perhaps the best part is taking a snapshot of a virtual machine. It's very quick. Another useful part is replication and creating a protection domain: using the protection feature to replicate a machine to a remote site for DR purposes.

I also like Nutanix Flow. It is quite a control mechanism. Other than external firewalls, Nutanix Flow is a good feature to control your traffic and not allow the infra to create two-way contact with any location other than what we specify.

Nutanix Files is also good. It's a little immature but it's still good. I use it more than Windows for files.

And the fact that Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure offers a variety of cloud operating models is also significant for us. Based on the good number of application products that we are using, having multiple options is going to be a benefit for us.

Nutanix Files is a new feature and, as I mentioned, it's immature, although it's a good tool. I have already given this feedback to the engineering team. 

In terms of automation, I know there are ways to do it, but it's not very user-friendly. I've been working for the last three years with Nutanix and I've managed to automate certain things, but it's a somewhat more complex job than it should be. I would like to see more documentation or knowledge base articles. There should also be some pre-built, basic tasks that are shared by Nutanix. That would be helpful. I understand the other side of the picture, that we might hamper production, but some basics that can be shared by Nutanix, for automation, would be good.

There are a lot of things to be worked on. They need to provide more features and certain features that have been released need to be made more mature.

I have been using Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) for three years.

There have been one or two bugs reported in the past one and a half years, but other than that, I don't see any issues with the product. It's quite stable.

It is quite easily scaled.

The user base, the people who are benefiting from the product in our organization, is more than 25,000.

As soon we have issues, we report them and their engineering team comes in and works toward a solution. Their technical support is quite good. There are times when I would rate them a 10 out of 10 because there have been engineers who have very good knowledge and who know what they're doing. Other engineers have also tried to do their best.

Positive

Earlier, we were using VMware on Nutanix hardware, but for the last year we have been using the Nutanix built-in virtualization technology, Nutanix AHV.

The switch to Nutanix was a decision that came completely from senior management. Initially, we were using a different environment, HPE and then VMware, and then we moved to Nutanix plus VMware. We had licenses available from VMware so we didn't switch to AOS and AHV. But gradually, as the licenses for vCenter expired, we moved to Nutanix AHV. Most of our jobs are done using it.

Our deployment is on-prem. There are discussions happening about moving a part to private cloud, but that's future planning. As of now, it's just on-prem. We have it in multiple locations. It started with South Africa, then we added Germany, Italy, and Singapore. So it's now in multiple data centers.

The initial deployment was slow, to be honest. Before the day of deployment, there were a lot of tasks to be done, prerequisites that had to be fulfilled. But on the day of deployment, it went very smoothly.

We started with keeping vCenter in place, so at first, it was just deploying the hardware and getting the foundation set up done. It didn't take much time, although there was a lot of hardware to add. But it didn't take not more than three or four hours for the actual deployment part.

We did a lot of planning, obviously, even before purchasing the solution, regarding how much hardware and how many resources would be required. That was the most important consideration and, in the backend, there was the networking. We wanted to keep everything on the same network. We added the hardware, the engineers helped to deploy and move things so that everything was on the same network. The virtualization technology itself was the same. It wasn't a very difficult task for us to migrate our VMs from the old hardware to Nutanix hardware. We used the basic migration tools, either vMotion or SvMotion of vCenter. At a later stage, we moved to Nutanix virtualization and we're still migrating but we are now using the Nutanix Move tool.

Nutanix Move is one of the very good tools I've come across. I've been using it quite a lot for the last few months.

There were different tracks and technologies involved in the deployment, including the networking and data center guys, and we needed to have somebody from offshore with access to all the infra. Other than the Nutanix engineers, there were not more than seven or eight people on our side. One person was part of the planning, and one or two people from the networking, server, and virtualization teams. I was part of the virtualization and server teams.

We now have one person dedicated in each region to taking care of the solution. We do regular upgrades of the hardware. It has never incurred any downtime because it's always in the cluster. One of the best parts about Nutanix is that it automatically does all the upgrades and firmware one by one, so we don't have to bother about it. We just initiate it and go for a tea break or lunch. I've done it three times and I haven't found any challenges. It's quite easy and very smooth. It shouldn't be made so easy for such an experienced analyst like me. People like me could lose their jobs, that is how easy it is.

We did come across one scenario two years back in which we had to get additional storage. We are using iSCSI technology and it wasn't that difficult from a technical point of view. We had to purchase additional hardware because the demands from those specific applications were quite high.

Pricing is not my area of expertise. But 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. I have added some hardware recently and we got the licenses added for it. That was quite simple and very straightforward.

Evaluating other products was not my call, that was also for senior management. I was asked to review Nutanix only. Before we started implementing it or the sign-off happened, I did find the product suitable. When something is new in the market, you have to get used to it and you feel uncomfortable. That's normal for everybody and that happened to me. The only differences were that the GUI did not have certain features that were in vCenter, but I think we have everything covered now. There have been improvements while creating the current version of the product.

I have good friends in the field from different organizations because I have more than 12 years of experience. I've been recommending Nutanix to them. I'm not sure about the cost part, but I'm quite sure about the administrative part.

My primary use case is to deliver cloud services. This is for our cloud infrastructure. Nutanix is deployed on-premises, but I have six locations that I manage remotely, so it's like they're cloud-based. 

Nutanix has improved my company because it's 100% stable and the simplicity of management is amazing. It's my favorite product. We set it up here in Israel, then remote technicians in Africa just plug in the cables, start it up, and everything is running.

One of the most valuable features is the One-Click Upgrade. When I need to update the system, I do it with one click. This product is amazing because everything is easy to manage, from network management to snapshots. 

Nutanix needs to improve network features like Passthrough – SR-IOV. It could be improved by supporting SR-IOV, if they had that support, I would not have needed to implement the VMWare vSAN.

SR-IOV give the ability for a VM to use the physical NIC as its own NIC with all the network featuers on that NIC.

I have been using this solution for five years. 

This solution is very stable. I'm 100% satisfied with the stability. 

For maintenance, one person is enough. If you're looking at an IT environment, the same person who does the Active Directory can manage Nutanix as well. You don't need to hire a person who specializes in Nutanix. 

The scalability of this solution is linear. We have already done two or three scales in two of our locations. We just send two nodes to each location, they connect it, we run Auto-discover, and boom, it's configured. 

At my company, there are many people using our cloud products running on Nutanix. In Ghana there are more than 10,000 users; in Uganda, it's around 30,000 people; in Israel, it's about 200 people; but in London, there are around 20 million people using it. Because we provide cloud services to mobile network operators, each mobile network operator has millions of users and to manage the traffic, we use Nutanix. 

Currently, we have five clusters, twenty-four nodes, and we have plans to increase next year. 

I have a direct phone number that I call and someone immediately answers—you can't get better support than this. I've never needed real support, only clarification on how to use it better. For example, we wanted to do an upgrade and we were on an old version in one of the clusters, so we contacted them for guidance. There were a few steps on the upgrade, so we asked to make sure we were doing it correctly. We got an immediate answer, ran the upgrade, and everything was okay. Their support is great. 

The initial setup is very simple. You turn on the servers, enter the IP configuration, and that's it. You're good to go. The whole deployment—fixing the cables, mounting the equipment under the rack, setting up the cluster—is simple and once the equipment is plugged in, it's up in 15 minutes. 

I implemented through an in-house team. I didn't need any external support. For deployment, I did it all by myself five years ago, but today there are two people to manage the full IT. These two people also run Nutanix. 

I'm a telecom, so I don't see a direct ROI on the IT. I use Nutanix to run a product that brings me money, so the return on investment takes a few months. For example, I have to buy a server (VMware), pay out, I run some virtual machines to run the product, and from that income I calculate ROI. It's not regular IT, so you can't compare it with other scenarios. 

I purchase a license for this product every five years. At the beginning of our work, we purchased the Ultimate edition that included everything. Over the years, they developed some features that require licenses, like Nutanix Flow. But we keep purchasing our five-year license with all the features included. 

I use VMware vSAN as well. I outsourced a team of five to help me configure the servers. I'm not sure if it's better or not because we just started the new cluster of VMware vSAN, but I needed to pay for their knowledge. One product that we are implementing requires the use of VMware. That one product is the reason why we implemented VMware. 

I would rate Nutanix Acropolis a ten out of ten. It's an amazing product. If you are looking into implementing Nutanix, I recommend going to their website (my.nutanix.com) and enjoying the information there. 

As a systems integrator we use Nutanix on a daily basis since 2013 as our main, strategic and only infrastructure solution for virtualization and it's our related storage component. We can offer most use cases today on Nutanix including VDI, server virtualization, big data and mission critical.

As a system integrator, Nutanix offers a highly standardized solution that can be deployed in a timely fashion compared to legacy three-tier, generation one converged, and most competing hyper-converged solutions. This allows us to move quickly with a small team of architects, and implementation specialists for large projects.

Some years ago when we started working with Nutanix the solution was essentially a stable, user-friendly, hyper-converged solution offering a less future-rich version of what is now called the distributed storage fabric. This is what competing solutions typically offer today and for many customers, it isn't easy to understand the added value (I would argue they should in fact be a requirement) Nutanix offers today in comparison to other approaches.

Over the years Nutanix has added lots of enterprise functionality like deduplication, compression, erasure coding, snapshots, (a)-sync replication and so on. While they are very useful, scale extremely well on Nutanix and offer VM granular configuration (if you don't care about granularity do it cluster wide by default). It is other, maybe less obvious features or I should say design principles which should interest most customers a lot:

Upgradeable with a single click

This was introduced a while ago, I believe around version 4 of the product. At first, it was mainly used to upgrade the Nutanix software (Acropolis OS or AOS) but today we use it for pretty much anything from the hypervisor to the system BIOS, and the disk firmware and also to upgrade sub-components of the Acropolis OS. There is, for example, a standardized system check (around 150 checks) called NCC (Nutanix Cluster Check) which can be upgraded throughout the cluster with a single click independent of AOS. The one-click process also allows you to use a granular hypervisor upgrade such as an ESXi offline bundle (could be a patch release). The Nutanix cluster will then take care of the rolling reboot, vMotion etc. to happen in a fully hyper-converged fashion (e.g. don't reboot multiple nodes at the same time). If you think how this compares to a traditional three-tier architecture (including converged generation 1) you do have a much simpler and well-tested workflow which is what you use by default. And yes it does automatic prechecks and also ensures what you are updating is on the Nutanix compatibility matrix. It is also worth mentioning that upgrading AOS (the complete Nutanix software layer) doesn't require a host reboot since it isn't part of the hypervisor but installed as a VSA (regular VM). It also doesn't require any VMs to migrate away from the node/host during and after the upgrade (I love that fact since bigger clusters tend to have some hiccups when using vMotion and other similar techniques especially if you have 100 VMs on a host) not to mention the network impact.

Linearly scalable

Nutanix has several unique capabilities to ensure linear scalability. The key ingredients are data locality, a fully distributed metadata layer as well as granular data management. The first is important especially when you grow your cluster. It is true that 10G networks offer very low latency but the overhead will count towards every single read IO so you should consider the sum of them (and there are a lot of read IOs you get out of every single Nutanix node!). If you look at what development is currently ongoing in the field of persistent flash storage you will see that the network overhead will only become more important going forward. 

The second key point is the fully distributed metadata database. Every node holds a part of the database (the metadata belonging to its current local data for the most part and replica information from other nodes). All metadata is stored on at least three nodes for redundancy (each node writes to its neighbor nodes in a ring structure, there are no metadata master nodes). No matter how many nodes your cluster holds (or will hold) there is always a defined number of nodes (three or five) involved when a metadata update is performed (a lookup/read is typically local). I like to describe this architecture using Big O notation where in this case you can think of it as O(n) and since there are no master nodes there aren't any bottlenecks at scale. The last key point is the fact that Nutanix acts as an object storage (you work with so-called Vdisks) but the objects are split into small pieces (called extends) and distributed throughout the cluster with one copy residing on the local node and each replica residing on other cluster nodes. If your VM writes three blocks to its virtual disk they will all end up on the local SSD and the replicas (for redundancy) will be spread out in the cluster for fast replication (they can go to three different nodes in the cluster avoiding hot spots). If you move your VM to another node, data locality (for read access) will automatically be built again (of course only for the extends your VM currently uses). You might now think that you don't want to migrate that extends from the previous to the now local node but if you think about the fact that the extent will have to be fetched anyhow then why not save it locally and serve it directly from the local SSD going forward instead of discarding it and reading it over the network every single time. This is possible because the data structure is very granular. If you would have to migrate the whole Vdisk (e.g. VMDK) because this is the way your storage layer saves its underlying data then you simply wouldn't do it (imagine vSphere DRS migrates your VMs around and your cluster would need to constantly migrate the whole VMDK(s)). If you wonder how this all matters when a rebuild (disk failure, node failure) is required then there is good news too! Nutanix immediately starts self-healing (rebuild lost replica extends) whenever a disk or node is lost. During a rebuild, all nodes are potentially used as sources and targets to rebuild the data. Since extends are used (not big objects) data is evenly spread out within the cluster. A bigger cluster will increase the probability of a disk failure but the speed of a rebuild is higher since a bigger cluster has more participating nodes. Furthermore, a rebuild of cold data (on SATA) will happen directly on all remaining SATA drives (doesn't use your SSD tier) within the cluster since Nutanix can directly address all disks (and disk tiers) within the cluster.

Predictable

Thanks to data locality a large portion of your IOs (all reads, can be 70% or more) are served from local disks and therefore only impact the local node. While writes will be replicated for data redundancy they will have second priority over local writes of the destination node(s). This gives you a high degree of predictability and you can plan with a certain amount of VMs per node and you can be confident that this will be reproducible when adding new nodes to the cluster. As I mentioned above, the architecture doesn't read all data constantly over the network and uses metadata master nodes to track where everything is stored. Looking at other hyper-converged architectures you won't get that kind of assurance especially when you scale your infrastructure and the network won't keep up with all read IOs and metadata updates going over the network. With Nutanix a VM can't take over the whole cluster's performance. It will have an influence on other VMs on the local node since they share the local hot tier (SSD) but that's much better compared to today's noisy neighbor and IO blender issues with external storage arrays. If you should have too little local hot storage (SSD) your VMs are allowed to consume remote SSD with secondary priority over the other node's local VMs. This means no more data locality but is better than accessing local SATA instead. Once you move away some VMs or the load on the VM gets smaller you automatically get your data locality back. As described further down Nutanix can tell you exactly how much virtual disk uses local (and possibly remote) data, you get full transparency there as well.

Extremely fast

I think it is known that hyper-converged systems offer very high storage performance. There is not much to add here but to say that it is extremely fast compared to traditional storage arrays. And yes, a full flash Nutanix cluster is as fast (if not faster) than an external full flash storage array with the added benefit that you read from your local SSD and don't have to traverse the network/SAN to get it (that and of course all other hyper-convergence benefits). Performance was the area where Nutanix had the most focus when releasing 4.6 earlier this year. The great flexibility of working with small blocks (extends) rather than the whole object on the storage layer comes at the price of much greater metadata complexity since you need to track all these small entities throughout the cluster. To my understanding, Nutanix invested a great deal of engineering to make their metadata layer extremely efficient to be able to even beat the performance of an object-based implementation. As a partner, we regularly conduct IO tests in our lab and at our customers and it was very impressive to see how all existing customers could benefit from 30-50% better performance by simply applying the latest software (using a one-click upgrade of course).

Intelligent

Since Nutanix has full visibility into every single virtual disk of every single VM it also has lots of ways to optimize how it deals with our data. This is not only the simple random vs sequential way of processing data but it allows to not have one application take over all system performance and let others starve (to name one example). During a support case, we can see all sorts of crazy information (I have a storage background so I can get pretty excited about this) like where exactly your applications consumes their resources (local, remote disks). What block size is used random/sequential, working set size (hot data), and lots more. All with single virtual disk granularity. At some point, they were even thinking of making a tool that would look inside your VM and tell you what files (actually sub-file level) are currently hot because the data is there and just needs to be visualized.

Extensible

If you take a look at the upcoming functionality I wrote about further down you can see just some examples of what is possible due to the very extensible and flexible architecture. Nutanix isn't a typical infrastructure company but is more comparable to how Google, Facebook, and others engineer and build their data centers. Nutanix is a software company following state-of-the-art design patterns and uses modern frameworks. Something I was missing when working with traditional infrastructure. For about a year now they heavily extended what they call the app mobility fabric which comes on top of the distributed storage fabric I mentioned above. This layer allows moving workloads between local hypervisors (currently KVM<->ESXi) and soon between private and public clouds as well. You can for example use KVM-based Acropolis Hypervisor clusters for all your remote offices to get rid of high vSphere licensing costs without losing the main functionality and replicate the VMs to a central vSphere-based cluster. The replicated VMs can then be started on vSphere and Nutanix takes care of the conversion. The hypervisor is a commodity just like your x86 servers.

Visionary

When Nutanix released version 1 of its hyper-converged product in 2011 it was a great idea and a good implementation of the same. Most people in IT didn't however expect that it will become the approach with the highest focus throughout the industry. Today the largest players in IT infrastructure push their hyper-converged products and solutions more than any other and while there are still other less radical approaches (e.g. external all-flash storage), it is foreseeable that they will be less and less important for the big part of IT projects. Nutanix is the leader in the hyper-convergence space but having converged storage within your x86 commodity compute layer is by far not the only thing Nutanix has done since then. Their own included hypervisor is a pretty interesting alternative for all those who don't want to spend lots of dollars on vSphere licenses. While it will not yet suit all of your use cases you might actually be surprised at how much of the functionality vSphere offers today (distributed switch, host profiles, guest customization, HA etc.) you care about is already included out of the box with the added value of greatly reduced complexity (yes I am calling vSphere complex compared to Nutanix Acropolis Hypervisor).

Standardized

Since Nutanix is purchased solely as an appliance solution (even though they are only making the software on top). You are always dealing with a pretested, preconfigured solution stack. You do have a choice when it comes to memory, CPU, disk, and GPU and you get to select from three hardware providers (Nutanix directly, DELL, and Lenovo) but they are all predefined options. This allows to guarantee a high level of stability and fast resolution of support cases. As a Nutanix partner this is worth a lot since the experience we get from one customer is valid for any other customer as well. It also allows us to be very efficient and consistent when implementing or expanding the solution since we can put standardized processes in place to reduce possible issues during implementation to a minimum. Once the Nutanix hardware is rack mounted at the customer their software automatically installs the hypervisor of choice (KVM, Hyper-V or ESXi) and configures are necessary variables (IP addresses, DNS, NTP etc.). This is done by the cluster itself, the nodes stage each other over the local network.

And last but not least: With outstanding support

The support we get from Nutanix is easily the best from all vendors we work with. If you open a case you directly speak to an engineer who can help quickly and efficiently. Our customers sometimes open support cases directly (not through us) and so far the feedback was great. One interesting aspect is the VMware support we receive from Nutanix even if the licenses are not sold by them directly. They analyze all ESXi/vCenter logs we send them. If the bug isn't storage related we also open a case with VMware to continue investigating. They do have the possibility to directly engage with VMware by opening a support case directly (Nutanix->VMware) which we saw on multiple occasions. The last case we witnessed was a non-responsive hosted process (vCenter disconnects) where the first log analysis by Nutanix pointed out a possible issue with the Active Directory Integration Service. We then opened a VMware case which was handled politely but after two weeks when there wasn't much progress other than collecting logs and more logs we remembered what the Nutanix engineer suggested and there was our solution. Disabling Active Directory Integration did the trick. I wouldn't say VMware support isn't good as well but we are always glad that Nutanix takes a look at the logs as well because at the end of the day, you are just happy if you can move on and work on other things, not support cases. 

Note: I strongly encourage you to take a look at the Nutanix Bible (nutanixbible.com) where all mentioned aspects and many more are described in great detail.

Nutanix has the potential to replace most of today's traditional storage solutions. These are classic hybrid SAN arrays (dual and multi-controller), NAS Filers, newer All-Flash Arrays as well as any object, big data etc. use cases.

For capacity, it usually comes down to the price for large amounts of data where Nutanix may offer higher-than-needed storage performance at a price point that isn't very attractive. This has been addressed in the first step using storage-only nodes which are essentially intelligent disk shelves (mainly SATA) with their own virtual SDS appliance preinstalled. Storage nodes are managed directly by the Nutanix cluster (the hypervisor isn't visible and no hypervisor license is necessary). While this is going in the right direction, larger storage nodes are needed to better support "cheap, big storage" use cases. For typical big data use cases today's combined compute and storage nodes (plus optionally storage-only nodes) are already a very good fit! 

The Nutanix File Services (Filer with active directory integration) are a very welcomed addition customers get with a simple software upgrade. Currently, this is available as a tech preview to all Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV) customers and will soon be released to ESXi as well. This is one example of a service running on top of the Nutanix distributed storage fabric, well integrated with the existing management layer (Prism) offering native scale-out capabilities and One-Click upgrade like everything else. The demand from customers for a built-in filer is big, they are looking to not depend on legacy filer technology any longer. We are looking forward to seeing this technology mature and offer more features over the coming months and years.

Another customer need is to be able to consume Nutanix storage from outside the cluster for other, non-Nutanix workloads. These could include bare metal systems as well as non-supported hypervisors (e.g. Xen Server etc.). This functionality (called Volume Groups) is already implemented and available for use by local VMs (e.g. Windows Failover Cluster Quorum) and will soon be qualified for external access (already working from a technical point of view including MPIO multi-pathing with failover). It will be interesting to see if Nutanix will allow active-active access to such iSCSI LUNs (as opposed to the current active-passive implementation) with the upcoming release(s). Imagine if you upgraded your Nutanix cluster (again this would be a simple One-Click software upgrade) and all of sudden you have a multi-controller, active-active (high-end) storage array. (Please note that I am not a Nutanix employee and that these statements describing possible future functionality are to be understood as speculation from my side which might never become officially available.)

We have been using this solution for three to five years.