What is our primary use case?
Nutanix Unified Storage will mostly be used for home folders and departmental shares. We do a lot of research, and we use this solution for research storage. There are several instruments that generate a lot of data, and we needed a place to store this data during analysis. We needed long-term storage as well.
Our previous system was a large lake of storage, and it worked well for shares and home folders. One of the things the researchers wanted to do once the file sets were placed was to analyze the data. We mounted those volumes on a server to be analyzed, and it wasn't performing enough. It couldn't keep up with it. With Nutanix Unified Storage, however, we can tailor different file servers for different workloads.
How has it helped my organization?
Nutanix Unified Storage will allow us to be more agile when deploying storage for the different use cases that we need. Also, with DR, the failover and failback between the two clusters are very simple in Nutanix Unified Storage compared to most solutions. You click, answer a question, and let it go. In other systems, you have to do a lot of reconfiguring and synchronization, which can take hours or days depending on the length of time that you need to fail back from. However, with Nutanix Unified Storage it's very simple. It makes life a lot easier for us.
What is most valuable?
One of the things that really sold us on Nutanix Unified Storage was File Analytics and Data Lens. We could always tell how much storage we were using, how many files we had, and even the age of the files, but we could never get a good handle on who was doing what with them. This has been a huge issue for us. For example, if someone moved a folder, we would not be able to tell who did it. We did not have a good way of auditing what was going on with the systems. This could become an issue in a ransomware attack. It would make it more difficult to figure out when we got infected and where we need to roll back to in order to recover. Nutanix File Analytics and Data Lens give us that information. In addition, Data Lens has a mechanism built in to prevent a ransomware attack from getting a foothold on the system. It can shut it down before it does a lot of damage.
Nutanix Unified Storage does a very good job of unifying our organization's block, file, and object storage. It puts it all in one place. From one platform, we can deploy S3-type buckets. We can provide iSCSI-level block storage if we need to. It does a great job with home folders and departmental shares, which is what we mostly use Nutanix Unified Storage for.
We can manage and run its storage from any location. Nutanix Unified Storage does a really good job of that, especially with the newest version of Files, 4.3. You can run it on NC2. That opens up a whole new possibility for us down the road when it comes time to do a refresh on the hardware. As our data centers age, it also gives us another option. We would have to decide whether we want to spend millions of dollars updating our data centers or looking at a cloud-based solution. NC2 provides a lot of advantages over just a standard native AWS or Azure deployment.
As part of our organization's ransomware protection strategy, our security department has a number of ransomware appliances that do scanning. We have antivirus running on the various shares and workstations. What's really exciting for us with Nutanix Unified Storage is that we get another tool to help prevent a ransomware attack. In case something gets through the security's appliances or something slides in through the back door, we have an additional tool to look for that ransomware attack and recover from it quickly.
Other than testing Nutanix Data Lens, we haven't gotten into it yet. However, it looks very promising. We're very excited about it, and so is our security team.
In terms of removing silos in our organization, Nutanix Unified Storage does a good job. My team manages the virtual infrastructure, and that was one of the reasons why we went with Nutanix Unified Storage over some of the other competitors. We're familiar with Nutanix and the platform. It's easy to deal with, and it makes managing a large system with a small number of employees a lot easier.
What needs improvement?
The current hardware is not as dense as it could be. In our deployment, we have 2 PB per site, and we have to have 24 nodes. That's a lot of cabling and network ports that we use up. More dense nodes would be better.
For how long have I used the solution?
We tested Nutanix Unified Storage for a couple of months before we purchased it. Last week, we spun up the clusters, and we're starting to deploy the file servers in the shares right now. We're in the very early stages of deployment.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
The solution scales pretty well. Once it gets denser nodes, it'll scale better. There are options when you hit limits, especially using objects. You can scale that out, and they have excellent tiering options as well. I'm pleased with it.
How are customer service and support?
Nutanix's technical support is excellent. That was one of the drivers in picking Nutanix. I would rate their support a nine out of ten.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We used a large lake of storage, and it did well for us. However, as technology moved on, we found that it wasn't meeting all of our needs. Nutanix Unified Storage gives us more flexibility to provide better solutions for our users. We evaluated other solutions and went with Nutanix Unified Storage because of the analytics that it provides and Data Lens. The simplified DR failover was a big factor as well.
With Nutanix Unified Storage, you can deploy file servers either vertically or horizontally. For a large departmental share, we can size it, scale it out, and have a large number of servers so that you can have thousands of users on it. If we're doing an export or a share that's going to run on an analysis server and more speed is needed, we can scale vertically and add more CPUs to add more memory to the file server. This is something we couldn't do with our previous system.
How was the initial setup?
Once we had Nutanix Unified Storage racked, stacked, and everything cabled up, the actual deployment went very smoothly. We deployed 24-node clusters in about three days. We were ready to start building file servers and sharing on them. I was really pleased with how well it went.
What about the implementation team?
Our partner, Choice Solutions, helped us with the deployment.
What was our ROI?
At this point, it's too early to tell, but I think we will see an ROI. We will probably see a reduction in support costs. We will be able to provide better resources for our researchers, which is the main driver. They're the primary users of the storage.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
It's not the cheapest solution. It's in line with other solutions, but it offers features that the competitors don't have at any price point, especially with regard to analytics and ransomware prevention. No one else has any sort of object-based storage available. Nutanix Unified Storage is a lot more feature-rich. This is a situation where you get what you pay for.
What other advice do I have?
My advice, if you're looking into Nutanix Unified Storage, is to definitely do the test drives. Do the research, and compare Nutanix Unified Storage with some others. Look at File Analytics and Data Lens, and compare how well DR works. Take a look at the various options that Nutanix Unified Storage provides and compare them to those offered by other solutions.
I haven't had enough time to really get a good feel for it, but from what I've seen so far, I'm pleased with Nutanix Unified Storage. Thus, I would rate it a nine out of ten.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.