Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) Reviews

We use Nutanix Unified Storage for object and file storage.

We wanted to improve the availability of our storage solution by implementing Nutanix Unified Storage.

Nutanix Unified Storage is a flexible solution that is efficient.

Nutanix Unified Storage has enabled our organization to consolidate our storage needs, eliminating the need for multiple storage solutions.

Nutanix Unified Storage helps us with file and object storage on the same platform.

We are able to easily manage Nutanix Unified Storage from any location.

Nutanix Unified Storage effectively eliminates the silos in our storage and provides centralized access to all our locations across the country from a single location.

Nutanix Unified Storage integrates well with other Nutanix solutions.

The most valuable features of Nutanix Unified Storage are the unified dashboard and the ease of administration.

The integration could be improved by addressing the outstanding tasks that need to be completed before implementation can begin.

The documentation on the support site needs to be improved.

I have been using Nutanix Unified Storage for one year.

I would rate the stability of Nutanix Unified Storage ten out of ten.

I would rate the scalability of Nutanix Unified Storage ten out of ten.

The technical support is quick.

Positive

We previously used Azure NetApp Files.

The initial deployment was intricate due to the comprehensive set of requirements that needed to be fulfilled prior to implementation. It took four weeks and five individuals to complete the deployment.

Nutanix Unified Storage was cheaper than other solutions we evaluated.

I would rate Nutanix Unified Storage nine out of ten.

We have 1,000 users in our organization. Nutanix Unified Storage is currently deployed for a small group of people, but it will be deployed across the organization soon.

Nutanix Unified Storage requires some maintenance.

I recommend Nutanix Unified Storage.

Some of the features that we use include replication and snapshot capabilities, especially from remote locations to our data centers. The main benefit our company sees from using Nutanix Unified Storage is simplification. In the past, we used three-tier solutions with a lot of complexity and operational overhead. Now, we want to focus on the layers above. I want to have storage available, but I don't want to have to think about it. I want it to work without any issues.

The solution needs to be more open to integration with other vendors. Sometimes, we struggle with the support process. Our skilled engineers must explain our problems to everyone, even though we've already done preliminary investigations. The support team follows standard procedures, which can be painful. We're not a small customer, especially in the life sciences sector, so we'd appreciate more specialized support. I've heard Nutanix Unified Storage has teams dedicated to life sciences and healthcare; we should be part of that.

I have been using the product for five years. 

The solution's stability is good. We haven't heard about any issues with it, which is great. We have had issues related to hardware. 

We have used the tool's technical support and found it good. It's one of the best support services in the market. While some tech support experiences can be painful, Nutanix Unified Storage's support has been solid.

Positive

We see time and money savings from using the product. The simplification means we no longer need to worry about configuring small pieces. It's just a few clicks, and it's done. This saves us a lot of time and helps us avoid human errors. It's hard to put an exact number on the savings, but overall, it's a really simple process.

The solution's pricing is fair. 

The tool has been good so far. Our company has thousands of clusters installed, which we're using for virtualization and VMware. I want to explore whether there's a way to eliminate VMware. We want to try using AHV together with storage as a complete solution. 

Over the last five years, we don't have any other use cases with Nutanix Unified Storage. We're new to NetApp. We use NetApp extensively, and everything is connected to our NetApp ecosystem. We'll try the solution, but there are special use cases where we use some specific NetApp features that aren't available in Nutanix Unified Storage. 

One limitation we faced was the inability to use external storage, but I've heard that it's on the roadmap and should be delivered soon, which is awesome. Another important feature I learned about is the ability to scale up storage and compute independently. This is crucial for us because we've struggled with this in the past. It's good to see that you're listening to your customers.

We haven't been able to reduce the number of storage nodes so far because our systems are distributed worldwide. We need capacity everywhere, so it's hard to consolidate. However, we have been increasing the storage capacity in our storage nodes. I'm happy the tool allows us to think about storage and computing separately. We can grow each independently, which is good for our needs.

We initially used VMware virtualization, but we adopted a dual strategy by introducing Nutanix Unified Storage about five years ago. We saw great potential in it from the start. While there were some aspects we weren't fully satisfied with, we actively engaged with the tool, providing feedback. Our goal was to help make Nutanix our primary infrastructure solution.

The key factors driving us to adopt Nutanix Unified Storage fully are simplification and end-to-end coverage. We don't have to worry about building the solution or dealing with integrations.

I rate the overall product a nine out of ten. 

The Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) is for multiple use cases such as S3 for application use and providing files for users, including file servers; additionally, we are using the NUS for the cluster and other purposes.

For data-intensive workloads such as AI and ML in hybrid cloud environments, we have a different cluster where we are using NVMe and storage nodes that provide storage capacity with high performance; we are using the storage node as capacity from the Nutanix side to support this.

Overall, we see many benefits from using Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) for multiple purposes; we use Nutanix for our database automation, where we use the storage to store data, and we also use it for AI/ML workloads.

One of the best features of the Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) is that I find everything, all the solutions, in one single box; if you look into Nutanix, the HCI plus whatever storage is required as part of the requirements, such as if applications are hosted on Kubernetes or container platforms requiring S3, NFS, or any other protocol, we can access everything from a single system, eliminating the need to manage multiple systems and different storage in the data center, as one system from one OEM provides everything.

I have never seen any performance issues with the Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) for high-throughput and low-latency requirements in AI and ML workloads because we are using all NVMe as part of the storage.

The Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) has helped us consolidate our systems, thereby reducing our overall TCO significantly; we only deal with one OEM for any issues, allowing us to consolidate our infrastructure and reduce our data center footprint, so the overall TCO is a benefit to us.

While there are good aspects, I would like to see improvements in networking configuration, particularly regarding overlay and underlay, plus enhancements in micro-segmentation, as that would provide added advantages in security and data availability.

I have been working with the Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) for around six, six-plus years.

I have not had any performance issues with the Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS).

The Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) is scalable.

My experience with customer service and technical support of Nutanix is positive; the technical support is good and I do not encounter any challenges with it.

Positive

I have not used any different solutions before Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS).

We evaluated other options before choosing Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS); we previously worked with NetApp as our storage solution for a 3-tier architecture but not in the HCI context.

We did not purchase Nutanix through the AWS Marketplace; instead, we directly obtained it from a partner for our on-premise needs.

My experience with the pricing, setup cost, and licensing of the Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) is that it is competitive compared to other solutions available.

From a security point of view, my impression of the cybersecurity features in Nutanix when dealing with unstructured data like ransomware threats is positive; we are using the snapshots feature to ensure protection from ransomware and Flow for micro-segmentation as part of data security and segregation.

I have not had any issues with the security aspect or any challenges so far.

My advice to other organizations considering Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) is that if they are looking for consolidation and better TCO, or they want to run applications in their systems, Nutanix will be the right choice for them.

On a scale of one to ten, I rate this solution an eight.

We use the solution more for Citrix profile VDI. We also have some Windows servers running, and we use Nutanix Unified Storage more for the server platform. If I remember correctly, we have more than 1,200 servers running on the Nutanix cluster.

Our company is a product-based company that performs order processing. Most of our applications are on the web. We also get invoices and a lot of files. It generates a lot of files and keeps them on the server, and the application is posted on some of Nutanix's servers as well.

In my experience, we haven't had any outages so far. The virtualization of the memory is based on the usage, and it consumes a lot. The previous tools were not as efficient as compared to Nutanix Unified Storage.

Nutanix Unified Storage is a cluster. Compared to any other virtualization environment, Nutanix Unified Storage doesn't require any downtime to upgrade and doesn't experience storage outages. So, things are going smoothly with Nutanix, and that's the best part of the Nutanix cluster for storage.

The solution's most valuable feature is the Prism Central centralized management console. We have close to eight to nine clusters and also remote sites. Compared to other tools, the solution is easy to manage. I would also like to mention the solution's ActiveDR concept and replication.

We have sites from different locations, and we are in the process of procuring ultimate licensing. Even if one cluster goes down, we can bring it up and have the application operating from the other site. That's the beauty of the tool, which makes it more efficient.

We use Cohesity from Nutanix to protect our organization's unstructured data. We also have a cloud-based Rubrik tool. Cohesity has the same infrastructure as Nutanix Unified Storage. I am an administrator for both Nutanix Unified Storage and Cohesity. We take snapshot-level backups. Since we are implementing ultimate licensing for remote sites, we will use an internal snapshot feature to replicate to the other sites.

The solution's storage and scalability features have improved our data operations. Our storage is increasing daily for business purposes. Nutanix Unified Storage has good scalability. We recently received some orders, and some nodes were added.

I like Nutanix's data locality feature because it improved our data accessibility and availability.

Implementing Nutanix Unified Storage has tremendously reduced the number of storage nodes by around 20% to 30%.

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.

We have been using the solution in my current organization for four years, and I used it for over a year in my previous organization. So, I have a total of five years of experience with Nutanix Unified Storage.

Nutanix Unified Storage is a stable solution. That's what we need. I see. As a customer, we look for such solutions to stabilize our environment and storage. Our day-to-day business requires that.

I rate the solution’s stability a nine out of ten.

Around 784 users use the solution in our organization.

I rate the solution’s scalability ten out of ten.

The solution's technical support is good and pretty responsive. We contact the support for small issues, and their problem-solving is the highest.

I rate the solution’s technical support a nine or ten out of ten.

Positive

The solution's initial setup is straightforward. The upgrade from a previous version to the latest version is also easy. I wasn't involved in the solution's initial setup because it already existed when I joined the company. However, I was involved in increasing the nodes, which took around three to four hours. I don't remember exactly because it's been a while since we added storage.

From what I hear from the management, Nutanix Unified Storage has comparatively decent pricing. I think we are in pro licensing and have yet to get ultimate licensing.

We are not into AI yet. I'm an administrator and not an authorized personnel for those things. We are a product-based electronic components reseller. From what I have heard from management, we will be implementing AI soon.

We are mostly concerned about and focused on security hardening. Some internal solutions, like SentinelOne, have been recommended for security hardening. However, we are not dedicatedly using anything. We are also checking Cohesity DataHawk, and we are still in the process of finalizing it.

The solution is deployed in eight locations. We have multiple nodes in our main data center and DR data center. We mainly use the solution for VDI profiles and server virtualization.

I told my old colleagues that we are using Nutanix Unified Storage, and they were pretty impressed with its features. I would recommend Nutanix Unified Storage to users as a unified storage solution.

Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

My colleague and I are currently trying to migrate from the old-style file server to the new Nutanix Files feature. We have bought and organized some sessions with their technician to be able to migrate the files to the new structure and see if we can meet the compliance needs of our company.

We migrated our whole infrastructure based on HPE and VMware to HPE and Nutanix. This powerful and new type of structure has taken our workload to the next level.

We have seen fast recovery time and the ability to quickly move the model machine from one to another. We are proud to be here at .NEXT 2024 and having bought the Nutanix Infrastructure.

Fortunately, we did not have any attacks, and we did not have to manage any attacks. However, with a good recovery point, it would be easy to recover data with Nutanix.

Nutanix Unified Storage has not resulted in a reduction in the number of storage nodes due to increased storage capacity per node, but we have the possibility to utilize more VM servers to synchronize any workload. We can move a VM from one node to another in a fast and secure way based on our needs. We have different types of nodes. We have different configurations, and we can move the servers from one to another based on our needs and the workload.

Nutanix Unified Storage has saved us money because many activities are completely automatic. It surely saves money and time for our IT team. It has saved about 30% of their time.

The scalability, data redundancy, and security are valuable.

The dashboard can have more details and be more useful.

I started using it when we put the Nutanix infrastructure in our company in 2021. It has been about three and a half years.

We have chosen Nutanix just for scalability. We are planning a new installation of the cluster. We have to create a new cluster due to the workload needs. We have to put a cluster in the full flash mode and not hybrid mode. We will put new nodes and attach them to the cluster. It will work great.

Their technical support is great. We opened a number of cases. We had a problem with licensing, and we also wanted some information about launching the shell in CVM. We absolutely had a great experience with the tech support.

Positive

We did not use a similar solution for storage. We moved from hyperconvergence and we had the standard structure.

It is quite easy to deploy.

We had help from Nutanix. Their technical architect came to help us during the migration. He helped design the configuration of the new clusters because we had new clusters. It was great. We had no problem with that.

We had someone working in a supplier company who had experience with Nutanix. One day, we were discussing that our company had decided to go to a new type of infrastructure, and we realized that Nutanix was the right decision. We also started using AHV. We left VMware completely and used the hypervisor on Nutanix.

We are currently considering a new cluster of three new nodes, full flash to NVMe, because we have some new needs for the ERP of our company. If the management approves it, we can put it in our company and take our infrastructure to a new level.

We are starting to analyze the flow with micro-segmentation to protect unstructured data in our organization. We have not yet put it into production. We need to study more and go deeper into it. These tools are absolutely important for us. In our company, security or cybersecurity is put at a very high level. It is considered important. We have to manage it and put the correct configuration with things like micro-segmentation.

I would rate Nutanix Unified Storage a nine out of ten.

We use it for servers and files for internal use. We also use it as a partner because we are also proposing it to clients for S3 anti-ransomware storage and so on.

It is helping us better understand the solution so that we can sell it. We are Nutanix partners, so this is the most relevant for us.

We have not tested Nutanix Unified Storage for data-intensive workloads, such as AI or data analytics, but because we know the latency of the Nutanix clusters, my understanding is that it will be good.

The simplicity of management is valuable because, in more traditional environments, the platform updates are much more complex.

I do not have any input as such. It is a robust and simple solution. Perhaps when it comes to deploying NUS virtual machines on top of CVMs, it should not be necessary for them to be in all of them or they should require fewer resources on the servers.

We evaluated it about two or three years ago and deployed it internally last year.

Its stability is very good.

Its scalability is spectacular.

Nutanix’s support is very good.

Positive

Before Nutanix Unified Storage, we did not work with anything similar.

It is pretty simple. We do not have any deployment strategies.

Infrastructure management is greatly reduced, and that is a quick return on investment.

We are Nutanix partners, so it is pretty good. With the free terabyte that comes with the Nutanix clusters, we have started to build proposals for the clients. The price adjustment with the new policy of Nutanix Unified Storages seems attractive. Let us see if it has results.

We did not evaluate any other solution.

On paper, Nutanix Unified Storage looks very good for detecting and blocking ransomware threats, but we have not tried it. From what we are seeing and hearing, it can be very interesting and powerful.

Implementing Nutanix Unified Storage can result in a reduction in the number of storage nodes due to increased storage capacity per node, but our use case is not very big. We had a more or less small environment, and now with the Nutanix cluster also, it is not very big. It has not affected us in that sense.

For protecting data in our organization, we have backup tools and antivirus tools. We are backing up the clusters with the NAKIVO solution in addition to taking snapshots of Nutanix itself. We also apply the Microsoft security part in the environments. These tools are very important for our functionality to guarantee business continuity in the event of a disaster.

I would rate Nutanix Unified Storage a nine out of ten.

The price was unmatched for us. We got the pricing down. We had an issue where we already had two copies of the data, but we needed to get the third to be compliant. We were looking at alternatives with a backup vendor, but we couldn't get the pricing to that level. They had an archiving function to S3 or NFS, if you wanted to use it. In this case, we went with S3.

The most valuable feature is the storage density of the nodes. We went with the HP's low-density nodes. 

The installation is set and forget. We didn't really have the personnel staffing to be able to handle more storage systems, we were already running in Nutanix as a primary driver for a virtualization platform. It was just a matter of setting up another cluster.

Nutanix enables us to reduce the amount of nodes. We had the coding and data reduction features. We had the larger, hard-density nodes and we were able to decrease the amount quite a bit. Had we built it another way, we would have ended up with larger traditional storage vendors. Nutanix is really perfect.

We just installed it, set it up, and then we forgot about it. We do quarterly patching. We just set up the alerting and it just works. That's the benefit that we want all IT systems to have.

It could be more user-friendly. You can abstract the technical details. If you look at the IP plans and the services running underneath it, it's quite a simple product. As a customer, you get exposed to a lot of the decisions, which is not always necessary. That should be able to exist for some customers who have special needs but in general, the complexity could be lower. It looks scarier than it is.

At my last place, we used it for two years. It's still running. We used it as a secondary target for data security backups. We were using S3 buckets which were exported to the primary backup cluster.

Support is excellent. It has a fixed delivery value. We know we're going to get good people.

Positive

We also use VMware to protect unstructured data. Unstructured data is a horrible mess. You need to ship it and you need to ship it fast. We're very happy with the tools we have in place to protect it. 

We used to use an old Dell system which was fine in terms of data reduction, but we had issues when we needed to rehydrate the data and get it back into production. The RTOs and RPOs just didn't work for us anymore. Nutanix is so much faster in comparison. 

We switched to Nutanix as part of a lifecycle management. We noticed that even if the data reduction was good with the Dell system, we couldn't get the data out fast enough. That's the primary reason why we ended up going with Nutanix.

The deployment was easy. It took two days for us to be up and running. 

We looked at the Data Lens in our POC but we didn't end up putting it into production.

I would rate Nutanix Unified Storage a seven out of ten. They could simplify the user experience. Technically it's a ten, but there's still some work we have to do for it.  

I use the solution in my company mainly for file shares and also in conjunction with objects to provide persistent volume claims with Kubernetes.

In terms of benefits, my company has reduced costs by using free trial storage. Cost reduction, along with simplicity, means only fewer hours are required from manpower in configuration and day-to-day administration.

The most valuable feature of the solution is its simplicity because managing installations sometimes involves defining, undoing, and configuring phases, which are not very easy, but Nutanix makes it straightforward. The tool is very stable. It doesn't come to my mind that I have seen the tool in our company's infrastructure for four years.

According to the keynotes announced by Nutanix the previous day or this morning, the data storage for Kubernetes requires improvement as it has a few shortcomings in the area of operations.

I have been using Nutanix Unified Storage for four years. I am a customer of Nutanix.

It is a stable solution.

Scalability-wise, it is quite a simple and straightforward tool. If you need more storage, you just get a new node, and everything gets done in the background, so you don't have to configure anything much.

The technical support for the solution is the best I have seen in my life. I rate the technical support a nine out of ten.

Positive

In the past, my company tried to use an early version of vSAN, and we found that its performance was not good. After my company performed a PoC phase, we deployed Nutanix Unified Storage.

The product's initial setup phase was simple.

When it comes to the product's deployment phase, my company defines the strategy along with the PoC because we are a manufacturing company that has a large and sparse site with more than 100 factories, which we have to take into account. My company started off with the PoC, and then we expanded.

The solution is deployed on a hybrid model, but the majority of the storage is on an on-premises model. My company uses the cloud services offered by Azure.

Nutanix does provide my company with a technical consultant and a pre-sales engineer to help us deal with the implementation part, after which we perform a small test and then go ahead with everything. In Germany and the United States, my company has worked with a third party that Nutanix recommended we approach in order to deploy, install, and configure.

My company pays money for the tool's licensing fees, but we are saving quite a lot of money by getting to have our own resilient storage device.

In my opinion, the product is fairly priced. I would not be surprised if, in the near future, there is a rise in the prices associated with the tool's licensing models.

My company did not evaluate any other solutions against Nutanix Unified Storage. After Nutanix Unified Storage was presented to our company at a meeting, it would be a good idea to do a PoC before choosing the product.

The throughput or latency of Nutanix Unified Storage for data-intensive workloads, such as AI or data analytics, is not an area my company considers a use case in our infrastructure. In our company, we are exploring and migrating some AI and LLM models while also testing them on an on-premises model in order to have a little more control of the data that we are training and so that we can reduce some costs associated with the public cloud, but in general, it is a medium-term project we have in our operations. The product is also capable of working with big projects.

My company has not faced any use cases where we had to use the product to detect and block ransomware threats.

Implementing the tool has certainly resulted in a reduction in the number of storage nodes due to an increase in storage capacity per node. I don't have the specific number because storage is not my main area, but I say from the top of my head that it could be at 3:1 or 4:1 consolidation. You should not take my word for granted because it is not my main area. The aforementioned area has affected my company's operations and business, especially in terms of simplification, by allowing us to save hours for our providers in the storage area for our administrators while also covering a reduction in incidents.

I don't have any idea about Nutanix Data Lens, but in the future, I am interested in working with the cybersecurity team to have a look at the tool's PoC phase, if possible. I think it could be a good use case for us.

I rate the tool an eight out of ten.