Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) Reviews

We use Unified Storage for file sharing, application access, and backups.

The model at Dicegsa involves many sellers storing their information on Nutanix Unified Storage from different places in various ways. Nutanix allows us to avoid silos of information by consolidating everything into Unified Storage, so no data is lost and users have high trust in it. Phones, laptops, etc. get lost, but the data remains protected. 

Nutanix Unified Storage has enabled us to reduce the number of storage nodes. When it comes to renewing the technology, I prefer to buy NUS because it works better than traditional storage. In terabytes, we have reduced about 80 terabytes into two little boxes. It has affected us positively in that we do not have any outages. We have lost devices but the information is still available. 

The best Nutanix Unified Storage features are its recovery and data speeds. It has resolved the issue of accessing information quickly. NUS's throughput is quite good. However, our model still requires optimization for better results. It isn't the solution's fault but rather how our data is organized. The throughput is excellent, especially the data analytics, it has many conversions. A lot of information comes and goes, which is analyzed differently. The result is perfect.

It has immutability functionality within the backups that is out of the box. Nutanix delivers it and offers us an additional layer of security. I did not know the feature existed, I was pleasantly surprised when I found out about it.

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.

We have used Unified Storage for three years.

In the three years we've used Nutanix Unified Storage, we've never had any issues aside from the ones we've generated. 

We are not yet at our limits, and what we purchased still supports our data, but I believe Nutanix Unified Storage has no problems scaling. It's a highly stable platform.

I rate Nutanix customer service nine out of 10. It's only nine because I do not believe in perfection. This is a critical subject for us. Normally, our suppliers deliver and leave. However, we have maintained a relationship with Nutanix for three years. We started with a single solution and decided we wanted to continue working with them. 

We recently renewed three other servers and will continue to grow with the same provider. We know each other, so it's easier to trust someone you've known for a while. Indeed, a community is growing and more clients join every day.

We previously had a Dell that was expensive and incomplete. We would have to complete it with something else that made it even more expensive and have the dependency on a resource. This was ultimately reduced thanks to NUS.

Deploying Nutanix Unified Storage was simple for the IT team, and we quickly integrated it in compliance with the minimum security mechanisms. We updated, migrated, and implemented it, so it wasn't too chaotic. There was a learning curve, but it wasn't so bad because our IT staff members aren't rookies. They already understand the concepts and how things are implemented, so it was fast.

We started with certain important people, focusing on the business aspects, not technology. We took advantage of technological renewal, the fact that it was time to renew and change components. In every deployment, people always react differently to change. At first, you don't trust the technology, but once you start realizing its potential, things become much more fluid. 

A consulting integrator called Mtsolutions, which is in Latin America. The name of the integrator was Ronald Paniahui, the experience was very positive.

It is difficult to say because we have never measured the ROI of Nutanix Unified Storage, but I can provide a concrete example. For example, a salesperson had a problem in January when her laptop stopped working. That loss of information costs a lot of money. We implemented Unified Storage in March, and something similar happened to another person in May, but they didn't lose their information. There was only minimal physical damage to the device.

We know there is operational efficiency and the information is easier to recover. If we were working the same old way, we would have needed people dedicated to many issues. Maybe this measurement has not been from a human resources perspective of how long it takes for a person to recover their information, where they do it, what they recover, etc. The business flow would not be the same if we still used another solution.

The price can always be improved. As a customer, you always seek reasonable solutions within your budget, and they give us little to do a lot. My IT team always has to justify that we are choosing an optimal solution, so the price could be a little lower.

I rate Nutanix Unified Storage nine out of 10. The platform sells itself without forcing you to like it.

I use the solution in my company mainly for tax data, which we use for some user orders.

The tool is easy to use. My company preferred Nutanix Unified Storage to replace old storage systems, which is good for our company's purpose.

The solution's most valuable feature is the range of files we use it for in our company. My company also uses Nutanix Volumes.

The aspect of the product that I like the most is its simplicity.

The throughput or latency of Nutanix Unified Storage for data-intensive workloads can be handled by the tool, but our workloads are not so intensive since they consist of data, some user files, and so on, but it works fine. The tool does a good job with what you need to do with it.

In our company, our second session with Nutanix Unified storage involves using it to detect and block ransomware threats and then using Nutanix Data Lens. I can monitor with the tool's help, which is an interesting part.

I do not use Nutanix Data Lens, but I plan to use it in the future.

The tools that we currently use to protect unstructured data in your organization revolve around the area of disaster recovery for some of the other sites in our company, along with its use for backup. My company is in the healthcare industry, a reason why I believe that the aforementioned tools are important for my organization.

From an improvement perspective, maybe some features can be rolled out in the GUI, especially the ones we can do only in CLI as of now. There are some processes, like if I like to change the data storage to another place, I have to use CLI, and I don't like it since I believe that it could have been simpler in GUI.

I have been using Nutanix Unified Storage for about five and a half years.

It is a stable solution. I don't remember any crashes when it comes to Nutanix Unified Storage.

It is a scalable solution. My company has multiple file instances, and the tool has the minimum amount of file servers, which is available for free. In our company, whenever we need, we can scale up, but our use is not so intensive, so it works fine for us from the beginning.

The solution's technical support is good, especially compared to other vendors. When you raise the ticket with Nutanix's support team, they reply quickly with a solution. I rate the technical support an eight or nine out of ten.

Positive

I have experience with Dell PowerScale (Isilon). My company switched to Nutanix Unified Storage from Dell PowerScale (Isilon) as the latter had reached the end of the support phase at a time when we had to renew the license.

The product's initial setup phase was simple.

My company did not have any strategy while deploying Nutanix Unified Storage since it was the first time that my company had deployed it.

The solution is deployed on an on-premises model. My organization is in the healthcare business, so we are allergic to the cloud.

My company deployed the product with the help of the product's partner, Proact. Nowadays, the tool is installed by our company's sales team.

The ROI I have experienced from using the solution revolves around disaster recovery,, which is good since if one of the sites goes down, it serves as an easy and quick tool to recover it.

The product is neither cheap nor expensive, making it a solution offering a price range that is in the middle. The use of licenses offered by the product is an area that is complicated, especially since my company has so many clusters, for which a couple of different licenses are required for different companies with different licenses. With so many clusters in place, the licensing part gets complicated. Previously, with EBX, my company had to deal with license-related expenses from the US end. My company is learning how to deal with the tool's licensing model so that it can be made easier for us to deal with in the future.

I rate the tool an eight out of ten.

I use the solution in my company since I have two or three users, specifically cloud customers, who use Nutanix Files and subnets for backup storage and for a common shared folder.

The product's benefits stem from the ease of use and management it offers to its users.

The most valuable feature of the solution stems from the fact that I like the object sizes. The tool's infrastructure is quite easy to implement. I know that I would like the product's licensing model to be much cheaper, especially if I tried to make another type of cluster. When you have huge data, the tool is cheaper.

Nutanix Unified Storage for detecting and blocking ransomware threats is a good option offered by the tool to users for objects and storage. Users can access the right technologies offered by the product so that it is more secure for our company.

Nutanix Unified Storage offers large space per node. The tool does not help reduce the number of nodes used in my company. Usually, my company needs to expand the number of nodes used.

In terms of the tools my company is currently utilizing to protect unstructured data, I would say that there is one option that you can use for your data protection. You can have two or three implementations to develop a disaster recovery for unstructured data, especially for the ones on file servers.

The product does not offer one console. From an improvement perspective, it should offer one console. With Prism Central, Nutanix tried to manage all the stuff, but I believe that it can be made easier.

I have been using Nutanix Unified Storage for three or four years. My company is in partnership with Nutanix.

My company deals with the product's customers who work in the government sector who use it at a massive level. The product is also used in the banking sector. The product is very stable in general.

The solution's technical support is awesome, quick, and effective. I don't really use the product's support services. Whenever I use the product's support services, it has always been good. I rate the technical support a nine to ten out of ten.

Positive

Before bringing Nutanix Unified Storage into our company, files and objects were stored in separate products. My company used to use one solution named Nutanix Mine. All the licenses gained by our company work in a different manner.

Some of my company's clients used to use QNAP's NAS solutions. My company's client changed to Nutanix Unified Storage since it offers more reporting options, making it more cost-effective in terms of management.

The solution is deployed on an on-premises model.

The licensing model the tool has is cheaper than an HCI storage solution. You can get a straightforward compression feature in Nutanix Unified Storage, which is better than buying a SAN solution of eight terabytes for 1,000 USD. If you have some complexities and some requirements, or if the users operate in a government agency or in a VDI environment, depending on how you like to use it, it is better to use a solution from Nutanix instead of an all-modern block storage tool.

As my company is in partnership with Nutanix, we cannot consider another product against Nutanix Unified Storage.

I have never used anything in the tool associated with AI, so I don't know about Nutanix Unified Storage's throughput or latency for data-intensive workloads, such as AI or data analytics.

I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

We sell it. We are an MSP. Nutanix Unified Storage is for our customers who need storage outside of our environment that runs on Nutanix. 

The benefit that our clients see is the security of the whole Nutanix platform where they have simplified usage.

Nutanix has helped to reduce our customers' number of nodes because it has a larger storage capability. It definitely helps to save costs. 

The most valuable feature is the snapshots. 

I have heard that there have been latency problems. 

We have used it for two years. 

We haven't had any problems with stability. 

Technical support is superb. They're always there and give our engineer suggestions. They follow up. 

Positive

We use Rubrik and Cohesity to protect our unstructured data. These solutions are very critical because we store customer data.

We chose Nutanix ten years ago and have stuck with them.

The deployment is very easy. It can take one day to deploy and have it up and running. 

The main ways we see ROI is through management and storage space. 

The pricing and licensing could be hard. The customers have a problem with the pricing model. Customers don't understand the core licensing model. 

Most of our data analytics and AI functions are running on a separate system.

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

We use Nutanix Unified Storage for virtualization with Acropolis and have approximately 120 servers on Nutanix.

We replaced our entire infrastructure with Nutanix, greatly reducing data center space and consumption, which has helped the company. Everything we have today runs on top of Nutanix.

Unified Storage has reduced the number of storage nodes needed by about 60 percent. We had nearly two racks in the data center, and now we have less than half a rack. It has helped us put fewer resources into data center expansion, and by reducing them, we can put more computing power in the same space.

We have virtually zero downtime with Nutanix. It updates itself, and we can easily move machines from one cluster to another. Through its hyperconvergence, Nutanix performs comparably to traditional hardware or better.

I think that recently, about two years ago I imagine, Nutanix added a better feature on the platform and now it competes with the best on the market. I think the add-on feature they used is very good.

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.

I have used Nutanix Unified Storage for eight years.

Nutanix Unified Storage is highly stable. We haven’t had any issues.

Over time, Unified Storage's versions changed, and its capacity also increased a lot. Eventually, you also need to upgrade the hardware version, but it is highly scalable and easy.

I rate Nutanix nine out of 10 for support. Nutanix support is one of the best on the market. They respond quickly, and the technicians are knowledgeable and professional. 

Positive

It's easy and transparent to deploy servers on Nutanix. We started with some servers to test. Once we saw there were no major problems and the installation was quick, we implemented the entire load..

We use a consultancy from Brazil called Tech Channel, which supports us to this day. We are here at the event with them.

The biggest benefits are performance, security of use, and a single management platform.

Nutanix's licensing model isn't too difficult, but the price is high for Brazil, and the software renewal is considerable. 

I rate Nutanix nine out of 10. It is extraordinary, and the price is okay.

Everybody calls it three-tier, but we came from traditional Big Iron, so app hosting was on clustered Unix or Linux systems. It was nothing to have SAN, NAS, iSCSI, and all kinds of disparate storage in the environment. When we did a run-off of HCI products, we did VxRail, HyperFlex, and Nutanix. It was only a benefit to realize that there was a storage element that we did not account for. 

I was trying to beat out having to have all these products to do VMware. In the long run, there was this benefit where we started to think about what other things we could do now that we had this storage. There were files, objects, or whatever you wanted to turn on, so to me, it was a huge win for no money. It was just available. You just took advantage of it when you needed to.

We scaled out the second or third cluster in anticipation of removing EMC CLARiiON products at the time, which then became Dell EMC CLARiiON products. We scaled out a ten-node cluster. It had 300 or 400 terabytes in it, so we were able to migrate from traditional SAN-based infrastructure. I got rid of the SAN-based infrastructure. I got rid of the refrigerator full of disks and power cooling. We did not have only storage; we could also run compute on it, and everything runs local. We did some storage-centric nodes for a while. They were fun, but they were just large disk arrays that presented themselves inside the cluster. I figured that it was easier to have FAT nodes with enough storage in them to take advantage of both compute and memory versus having any sort of storage-centric nodes, but you could not run any workloads on them. It was a nice Flex environment where you could move stuff into a cluster because it has a ton of storage, but when you tried to uplift it or were close to it, you discovered that some of these nodes do have limitations. In the long run, it was better to have all the compute nodes with memory storage and an all-in-one compute platform for our use cases. Now that disks are fast and everything like that, it does not hurt in the long run. There is no downside.

In the long run, there was money savings. In simple terms, you had to continue either to pay maintenance for the SAN infrastructure and storage environment and then present that to physical nodes that just get shared out when all of that is rolled into one bottle of wine. Imagine taking two-thirds of your infrastructure away with no impact. It is a no-brainer that you are going to save a ton of money. In the long run, you did not have to convince your customer. It would probably be termed as reinvesting into this product. Do not just buy one and consider it done. Start to do the evolution—no more stack delivery, which is also a benefit. You do not have to forklift anything in. Just buy a few nodes every year. It is easy. It is a no-brainer. It saves tons of money.

When it comes to latency or throughput improvements, most of our infrastructure runs on what you would consider just traditional factors. If we had a database or if people had hosted apps, it all ran in the local environment. We rarely separated the infrastructure where we had a database server living somewhere in the environment, and then we had the front-end web servers living somewhere else. A lot of times, they were just combined, but with the all-flash capabilities that Nutanix has in Unified Storage, if you want to move workloads in or tier it, there are no issues. Nutanix has solved all of the problems. I never experienced any issues. I never heard any complaints. No one ever came to me. We have moved things to it. It is hard to get compliments when you are the cloud for your customer, but very frequently, you get asked if something changed. If you ask them why they're asking, they say. "It is a little faster." When it works a little faster, I pat myself on the back. We have been using it significantly, and we never ran into any problems.

In terms of a reduction in the number of storage nodes due to increased storage capacity per node, by being able to be clustered in the same process, we get some benefits from it as compared to traditional tiering. However, at least in my world, as soon as you make some savings, someone will take advantage of it. There might have been some savings, but I would not know. As soon as there is some space to be had, somebody needs space. The customers like it because any benefits that I somehow garner out of the infrastructure, or as I add, they win. If they give me money and I buy something, they instantly see a benefit. They never argue when I say that it is the time to buy. Nutranix MAKES it easier. It is not me. I just do the implementation.

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. If you have networking and you buy the cluster, you are done. The flexibility it provides with growth is a no-brainer. It could be node-based or cluster-based. We have multiple clusters. We DR to different sites. We have now bought specific clusters for high-end compute for data analytics and data lakes. There is nothing that it cannot do, and it does everything better than ITS COMPETITORS. 

A pet peeve of mine is the integration with the hardware platforms. Each one of them presents its own use case. They have let Cisco on stage and they are bragging about it. Generally, when you buy UCS products, they want you to have FIs. FIs are nothing more than just fancy and smarter switches with a GUI. Now that they are partners with each other, you get LCM. LCM did not exist for UCS before. HPE is similar, but the integration points could be made better. 

At the surface level, they have done the handshake, and all those are wins. We are able to pick the platform of our choice and deploy it with the confidence that Nutanix is going to back it, but after having used almost all of the products that they have, except for Lenovo and Dell, I would still go with Supermicro. I would still go with the x nodes all day long. The flexibility is there. We only go to one vendor when something breaks. It just makes life easier. There is no short side to it. It is not deficient in some way based on the other ones. They are all equal, and there is more flexibility at a different price point. I don't integrate with extra partners and have to deal with whatever they have. In the long run, it would be just the devil in the details when it comes to hardware.

It was the second cluster we wanted. We started using it in 2017 or 2018.

The customer service from my partner and from Nutanix directly is unrivaled. At Nutanix NEXT 2024, somebody was on stage saying that he treats Nutanix as a part of his business, and that is probably the most apt way of phrasing it. I implement it. I see it as an extension of my knowledge or support, so I get to call people and people show up. I do not call hotlines and put in tickets. It is like having two extra guys on your staff that you do not pay for. 

I would rate them a ten out of ten. If possible, I would even rate them an eleven. There is not one bad instance that I can think of. 

Positive

We used other products, but it would have been ad hoc.

It is all on-prem. Its initial deployment was pretty straightforward. We had deployed a few clusters before, so it was not a big deal to get the cluster up, but it was interesting to learn the lessons. You think you have all the storage and you can outsmart the unified storage environment by creating a FAT VM, and then I will give it a bunch of storage space. What you realize is that you do not get the benefits of unified storage without using unified storage. Just because you have storage does not mean that it works the way it is supposed to. You learn those lessons. You think that you can outsmart these guys and realize that you cannot. In the long run, it was easy. Once the cluster was up and running, it was just making sure our licenses and other factors were in place.

It is very intuitive. There is a wizard guide for creating shares, objects, etc. It is pretty easy.

The biggest return on investment is that it frees up revenue and the data center space cost of dealing with power, cooling, etc because now I can just put more Nutanix in there when needed. It never outgrows itself. As these nodes get denser and smarter, racks stay the same. When I scale out, I never need ten more racks of equipment. I can just fill out some older nodes, and they are now denser, so I stay in the same footprint. That to me is the biggest benefit.

We are not using Nutanix Data Lens. It is probably something I should do.

We are not using much to protect unstructured data in our organization. Most of the infrastructure data that we get is in huge datasets. We store that on larger storage platforms that are designed specifically to hold petabytes of data and then it is read into Nutanix clusters for analytic purposes. I do not have to deal with it. I am pulling from somebody else who hosts huge data frames.

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

We use it for our application servers. We have company applications for the casino, hotel, and food and beverage. 

The cost has been the main benefit. It is a cheaper cost than what we used to use, which was VMware and Dell. Now it is cheaper in terms of hardware and licensing, and that has helped financially. It being up and available helps too.

The throughput is really good, and it has low latency. I would describe it as good on speed and good on not being latent. We have not had any problems with data-intensive workloads.

Implementing Nutanix Unified Storage will eventually result in a reduction in the number of storage nodes due to increased storage capacity per node. We are still migrating, so I cannot say that it has done that yet, but it appears that it will. We are still in the process of putting it in. Overall, it would be nice to reduce by 50%.

Redundancy and availability are valuable. We have several nodes, so it stays up, and there is redundancy. Then there is availability. We have all those nodes, so it is always on 24/7.

There should be more information. If it gets used more by more people, they will have a bigger community to share ideas. It is still kind of newer. It is not as big as Dell and other companies. It is still newer. The older it gets, the better it will get.

We have been using Nutanix Unified Storage for about one year.

It is pretty stable. We have not had any outages, so it has been stable so far.

Its scalability is probably pretty good. I would rate it an eight out of ten for scalability. It seems that we can scale up pretty large if we want to.

We only have one main data center, but we are going to have a newer data center in the next year, and we are going to use it there too.

It can be slightly improved, but mostly, it is good.

Positive

We were using VMware and Dell. We switched mostly because of the cost. VMware increased the cost by 110%, so it was not economical to have anymore, whereas with Nutanix, once you buy the hardware, the hypervisor is included for free, so it is a better deal.

It is on-prem. Everything is on-prem.

Its deployment was easy. The tenants' move was pretty seamless. It was not necessarily a hard thing to do to migrate over. Now we were worried about the more intensive servers and databases and whatnot that may potentially have an effect on our company, but for all the smaller applications that are not as revenue-generating, they have been good so far.

In terms of the implementation strategy, we analyzed and defined levels of how critical and revenue-generating the applications were. We first did everything that was not supercritical, such as a very small database and whatnot, and then started to increase from there.

We use Nutanix Consulting, not a third party.

The ROI is in terms of the yearly cost or maintenance cost.

Its pricing is good to okay. It is not super inexpensive, but it is still competitive. Everything could always be lower.

We evaluated other solutions a little bit. We were not going to go to Citrix or anything else, so it was only Nutanix. That was our only option. 

We use NetApp MetroCluster to protect unstructured data in our organization. It has its own set of ransomware security. I do not have the exact details about it, but NetApp products have some ransomware capability to detect environments. These tools are very important for our organization. In our industry, there are lots of ransomware attacks, and they happen to all our competitors. That is why they are super important.

I would rate it an eight out of ten. It seems very good, but it needs to get slightly better.

My company started off without Nutanix Acropolis Hypervisor initially. After three years we migrated to Nutanix Acropolis Hypervisor and started to increase it in our company's environment with other clusters during the designing phase.

The product has been helpful for my company because we deal with big projects in the data center infrastructure, and we see that with Nutanix Unified Storage, we can improve and get better results for the company.

The most valuable features of the solution are replication and backup and our company needs a tool to help us with disaster recovery and the security of our data.

Some of the new features in the tool cannot be used with just one click, as was possible in the past. The aforementioned area can be considered for improvement in the product.

The throughput or latency of Nutanix Unified Storage for data-intensive workloads, such as AI or data analytics, is better in the present compared to the past. In the past, my company faced some small problems with the latency part, but nowadays, it works very well.

In terms of the use of detecting and blocking ransomware threats, I would say that my company applies some configurations to all the data so that the other people in the environment involved in the administration part can't delete them. If someone tries to attack and delete some data, then my company has a feature in the tool to enable the protection of data so that no one can delete any data.

Implementing Nutanix Unified Storage resulted in a reduction in the number of storage nodes due to increased storage capacity per node. In the past, my company had more servers and appliances, but nowadays, we have reduced the number of appliances in the data center by around six percent. The reduction in storage nodes has affected our company's operation and business in terms of the cost of energy, environment, administration, and contracts for continuing the business in the data center.

In terms of the tools used to protect unstructured data, my company replicates the environment in one data center to another and one Nutanix cluster to another Nutanix cluster.

It is very important to use the data protection features offered by Nutanix in our company because we can have another point of data in a separate cluster of Nutanix.

My company analyzed a traditional architecture, but we saw a better solution in Nutanix because it is small, and we can run the same appliance everywhere.

The new solutions that users have been seeing for the past one or two years don't have features available in one click like they were in the past, but they do work, though it is not as easy as it was in the past.

I have been using Nutanix Unified Storage for eight years.

It is a stable solution. My company did not have to stop anything in our environment due to any problem associated with Nutanix Unified Storage.

During the eight years that we have had the product in our company, we haven't seen any problems during the three times we used the tool's scalability feature in the environment. During some moments, we were able to improve the same clusters. At times, our company had to buy or order new clusters, but every cluster is actually used for replication, and it has never been a problem.

During the eight years my company has used the product, I would say that we have had some experience with the tool's support team. Whenever my company requires help with the product, we have received good support. I rate the support team a nine out of ten.

Positive

In the past, my company used to use some other solutions for replication purposes, but it was not a native solution of the appliances used. My company used to use another solution like a backup solution, which was a tool to restore a queue manager from IBM.

The product's initial setup phase was easy, especially because my company was planning to move some small workloads on it to see how it works and then continue with the other biggest work.

The solution is deployed on an on-premises model.

My company sought help from a partner company in Brazil named TechChannel to help our organization with the deployment.

The security of the data and replication are areas where I see an ROI from the use of the solution. I think the best ROI is in terms of security since we can save the data in other appliances.

My company is in Brazil, and making the payments in dollars is tough for our organization.

I rate the tool a nine out of ten.

We use it for daily operations, primarily to store our enterprise data.

In the beginning, when we first started using Nutanix, we wanted a single solution that could handle both file and block-level data. So it's a single platform, and we also needed inbuilt ransomware protection.

So, we found that Nutanix was the best solution for that. We also researched the deployment process and found it to be quite easy. 

Additionally, we had a POC with them and saw that the interface is user-friendly, making it possible to use it without extensive training.

Nutanix successfully adapts to difficult or challenging life experiences

When it comes to resiliency, Nutanix has built-in redundancy. We can create snapshots with detection, de-duplication, and completion of all the data. So, it's very easy to have replications of free data. If any attacks happen, we still have the data with us.

We are able to store a large amount of data without needing multiple solutions. Nutanix can be scaled for storage and computing independently, which makes us more cost-efficient.

It also simplifies data management operations, giving the speed and flexibility to build more modern applications in on-prem, cloud, and edge environments.

It also protects unstructured data from ransomware and other cyberattacks.

Unified Storage has a remote feature that allows you to manage data from various geographical locations.

Our sales representative can direct us to the appropriate resource, whether it's a PSC, an SE with the system, or someone else who can help. Additionally, if we create a ticket directly with their support team, they have very good product knowledge and are really helpful.

If we are stuck a problem – not necessarily a bug, but just need help navigating something – do we contact our sales representative first, and they can route us to the right resource.

If bugs occur, they work on them and release fixes as early as possible.

First of all, we like the user interface, which is quite easy. And it helps our day-to-day operations very easily; we can do it very easily. 

And afterward, the pre-sales guys are very supportive whenever you get stuck in anything. They will help you on that day. I really have good hands-on experience with the product, and also the support team is very strong.

The flexibility is great. We can easily integrate it with other products as well. Like, it is designed to scale up and scale out easily, allowing the organization to store as much capacity as they need.

We can easily store and manage unstructured data, such as audio and video, in Unified Storage without any extra work.

From a management side, the one thing I would prefer is if it were a bit less expensive for smaller enterprises. It's a bit costly. 

If they provided flexible modules where you could pick and choose features, and only pay for what you use, that would be an improvement.

I've been using it for about two and a half years.

We've observed some occasional lagging when transferring large amounts of data – many GBs at once. This could be due to network factors or something else, but it's not severe. 

For smaller datasets, the transfer happens in real time with no lag.

Nutanix has a good team of people on the technical support side. Usually, when we log a ticket, a support engineer promptly assists us through a remote session or email. 

One thing I want to highlight is that they have excellent product documentation available on their portals, written in simple, easy-to-understand language.

Positive

We used a storage solution from Dell. My company has a policy that requires us to change our security products every five years. 

So, we were looking for a stable and superior product, and after thorough research on the community, we found that Nutanix offered the best solution with its single-platform approach.

We also use the Nutanix Hypervisor (AHV). However, we haven't done the integration because we keep our storage separate.

We had a POC first. During the POC, we worked closely with the sales team alongside the engineers, and it was pretty easy to deploy. 

Once we decided to purchase, the full deployment only took about one or two months. If all prerequisites are ready, it can even be done in under 20 days.

We use the cloud deployment model.

On the Nutanix team, we probably needed around two people. We also had support from our network and security teams, in addition to someone managing the Nutanix deployment itself.

Every product needs maintenance, but with Nutanix, it's mostly about software upgrades. They provide an excellent user interface, and with every release, they resolve issues from previous versions.

It is worth the price. Your investment will be in safe hands. 

The pricing is a bit too high. I would like more flexibility. 

We considered Commvault, but our management and overall team felt that Nutanix was a better solution.

On a scale of ten, I'd give Dell an eight out of ten for security features. And Nutanix a nine out of ten rating.

I'd definitely say go for it. It's a great product. My main advice is to negotiate the pricing with the vendor. Beyond that, it integrates well with your current network environment and should work without needing major changes or disrupting your existing setup.

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

It is a great solution for small enterprises looking for storage options. While it is a bit expensive, the value provided by Nutanix justifies the investment. Your investment will be in safe hands.

We run our entire production environment on the HCI Nutanix cluster, including SQL servers, web servers, on-prem exchange, hybrid Active Directory, and essentially, our entire virtual infrastructure.

The biggest problem we had was with an old aging vendor and our three-tier architecture. We had to constantly spend a lot of money on purchasing storage to meet our demands, making it quite expensive. Additionally, our data center's power consumption was increasing rapidly. To solve these issues, we decided to replace the old vendor with a four-node cluster of about 8U, significantly reducing our footprint and the cost of buying various components for virtualization, CPU, and SAM solutions separately. This was achieved by implementing Nutanix Unified Storage.

Nutanix Unified Storage handles unstructured data effectively. Currently, we are using Citrix, which works well for audio and other tasks. However, apart from that, we don't have a significant amount of media of that type in our organization's environment.

Nutanix Unified Storage is incredibly flexible and scalable. It has made troubleshooting CPU spikes, memory, and network issues very easy for us. We can easily fix and remedy any problems that arise. The interface is user-friendly, and we can easily expand and add additional clusters when we run low on resources. Overall, it provides us with great flexibility in managing our storage needs.

The resiliency of Nutanix Unified Storage is impressive, with excellent uptime. We faced numerous issues with our previous three-tier architecture. However, with our current Nutanix solution, we have experienced no downtime in the last three-plus years. It appears to be very reliable.

Nutanix Unified Storage has significantly improved the performance of our virtual machines. We can now supply data faster to our end users without experiencing long waits and lag. Additionally, we save a lot of money by purchasing a server that contains all three components, storage, computing, and everything else at a much cheaper price, rather than buying them individually. Switching to Nutanix from a three-tier architecture has also allowed us to save considerable money on electricity consolidation in our data center.

We immediately recognized the benefits of Nutanix Unified Storage after its deployment.

We have integrated the Nutanix file system to consolidate our files and object storage. Previously, we had a CIFS share from a different vendor, which resulted in significant lag and poor performance. However, after implementing Nutanix and its file analytics component, the speed improved drastically. As a result, we are now able to share numerous files with our end users, enabling seamless collaboration. We no longer experience network bottlenecks or performance problems like before.

Nutanix Unified Storage helps our organization manage and operate its storage from any location. Currently, we have two campuses where we utilize this technology. With the challenges brought about by COVID, our employees in the healthcare profession have shifted to remote or teleworking, and Nutanix has played a significant role in enabling them to access all critical systems just as if they were in the office. It has allowed our end users to work from home and connect seamlessly to their workstations.

Before switching to Nutanix Unified Storage, we had a three-tiered architecture with siloed individuals who only knew specific components of that architecture. This led to a highly compartmentalized organization, with separate individuals responsible for storage, virtualization, and VDI. Now, with Nutanix Unified Storage, all these tasks can be handled by a single administrator as they are integrated into the same system. This centralization makes management much easier as everything is now consolidated within the organization.

We have a Nutanix cluster with four nodes. Additionally, we use File Analytics and Nutanix Files for managing our files. The integration between these solutions and Nutanix is excellent. We can easily manage them through their respective management UIs, which are very user-friendly. There are numerous add-ins and third-party products that we can incorporate into their system, although we haven't explored this option much yet. However, the products we currently utilize, such as Files and File Analytics, seamlessly integrate into a single management interface.

The scalability, ease of use, and technical support are the most valuable features of Nutanix Unified Storage. Whenever we encounter an issue, we call their support team and they are great in assisting us. We are able to quickly scale our environment to meet our annual demands without incurring high costs for replacement or addition. We do not have to remove anything, we simply add on as needed.

The graphical user interfaces could benefit from more attention to detail. Simplifying some menus and incorporating a few sub-menus would enhance the ability to manage the clusters through Prism and Prism Element.

I have been using Nutanix Unified Storage for a couple of years.

Nutanix Unified Storage is extremely stable. In the past three years, I have never encountered any issues that resulted in downtime. The storage system has multiple resiliency and backup features, ensuring that we do not experience any outages. Occasionally, we have come across some software bugs, but when we contact their engineers, they promptly provide solutions and guide us through the process of fixing them. Through screen sharing and phone calls, we quickly resolve these minor issues without any significant impact on our operations or data loss.

What I like about Nutanix Unified Storage is the ability to easily add the amount of space it would save in our data center. With our previous vendor, we needed almost an entire rack full of hardware to accommodate what we are now able to do with just four servers sitting at the top of our rack. This takes up very little space, leaving plenty of room underneath for expansion and growth. All we need to do is buy one server if we want to expand, as it contains the CPU, memory, and storage in one small unit, all being solid-state drives. We can easily expand our current cluster by adding on an additional one, and if we run out of space, we can simply buy and add more servers until our rack is full. This level of flexibility and ease of expansion is something I haven't experienced with their competitors or other solutions we've tried in the past. It requires a lot less effort and work on our end.

I have never encountered tech support that is better than theirs. Whenever I call their main number, I am always connected with an engineer. The person who answers my call is always the engineer who then opens a ticket and ensures they have all my contact information. Once the engineer receives the information and inputs it into their computer, we are already on a screen share. This means there is no waiting involved, and I have never had to wait for a callback, regardless of the criticality of the issue. Whenever I call, I immediately get on the phone with an actual engineer, and I am never transferred. They always manage to resolve the issue efficiently.

Positive

We used to use NetApp before switching to Nutanix Unified Storage. NetApp had much slower disks and did not have solid-state disks. It was essentially just a 10K RPM storage shelf that we kept having to add on to, and it eventually reached the end of its lifespan. The performance was no longer good, and we experienced some outages as a result.

The initial setup is straightforward. I had never worked on an HCI solution before, but I found it very intuitive once the engineer contracted to help us install the solution and showed us how to do it. It didn't take very long at all. He was there for only two days, and we had an entire cluster and all of our production stuff migrated over to it. It was simplistic.

The deployment was completed by two network engineers, including myself and the consultant.

We hired a consultant from Converge Technology Solutions who was helpful in assisting with the implementation.

We have definitely seen a return on investment, particularly from an uptime perspective. It has proven to be more cost-effective and efficient. Our users have been able to be more productive due to the increased uptime with our old solution. Previously, we experienced quite a bit of downtime, which hindered our users' ability to perform their jobs. Therefore, Nutanix Unified Storage has undoubtedly been beneficial for us.

The only concern I have about the cost of Nutanix Unified Storage is the buyout between VMware, as we still use VMware instead of Acropolis. I believe Broadcom now owns VMware, and Nutanix has its own hypervisor, Acropolis. We are considering migrating to Acropolis due to the increased cost imposed by VMware since being acquired by Broadcom, which raised their virtualization pricing. However, in terms of pricing, Nutanix is very competitive. They offer one of the better pricing schemes compared to their competitors, providing many included products at the base level that other companies charge extra for.

Considering our origins and the benefits we gained from Nutanix Unified Storage, we explored other vendors such as Dell VxRail and another NetApp three-tier solution. However, we ultimately found that Nutanix was the best fit for us. Currently, I am the main administrator for this product. In terms of its functionality, I find that it works wonderfully and has several fail-safe features. For instance, if updates are done, it can easily roll them back or identify and fix any issues. Personally, I haven't encountered any problems with it. Additionally, I appreciate their tech support as they are always very responsive.

I give Nutanix Unified Storage a perfect score of ten out of ten.

When I compare the security offered by Nutanix Unified Storage to Dell VxRail, the two solutions are very similar. However, it seemed that Nutanix had a slightly higher level of granularity and more control over the security features and options available to us.

I am the person responsible for managing the environment, particularly in terms of maintenance and patching. I take care of these tasks using either Prism Element or Prism Central. Occasionally, I update our VMware hypervisors through VMware VirtualCenter.

I'm not sure about all the various vendors currently in that field, but when we installed Nutanix Unified Storage, there weren't many other competitors. I recommend researching different solutions, checking their pricing, ensuring a fair comparison of features, and considering their potential future needs. Additionally, it's essential to evaluate how easy it is to support the solution, decide who will administer it, and select a vendor with excellent tech support. Nutanix offers new training at Nutanix University, and I've never seen anything like it. They provide a lot of free videos, training, certifications, and similar resources. I think that's also important for the decision-makers evaluating other vendors to ensure they have some sort of good training documentation or utilities as Nutanix does.