We performed a comparison between Dell PowerFlex and Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two HCI solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."It has great free trials that allow end users to test a large variety of their products before deciding to buy the full product."
"We like their high availability. It reduces the downtime for our entire organization's environment."
"The failover protection and the ability to expand storage and nodes with no downtime are by far the best physical features we have benefited from."
"StarWind Virtual SAN for vSphere is a software-defined storage solution that has reduced administration time for storage. It's pretty straightforward to install and setup it and so far it has been robust and worked as advertised from StarWind."
"For those basic uses, it's simple to set up and manage, and it seems to do a fine job."
"The vSAN provides full redundancy for storage while reclaiming some rack space."
"Ten gigabit Ethernet compatibility, support, ease of use, and management are some positive features."
"Virtual SAN runs on iSCSI, which is free and easy to configure. It's easy to manage from StarWind's GUI console, and it only required a few extra switch ports."
"The resiliency and data protection are the most valuable features."
"Perfectly suits customers dealing with the combination of future storage needs and, at the same time, keeping up their computing power."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is integration."
"The solution is scalable."
"It has reduced downtime. Before, on our previous solution, we used to have downtime on some of the servers because of the sort of convention. But currently I've not experienced any downtime on any of the servers, and there is no more resource congestion."
"The support team responds quickly."
"The support is highly responsive."
"The solution is quite stable."
"Nutanix Acropolis AOS is stable. We didn't receive any concerns regarding any problems, The customers have no concerns about the reliability."
"Nutanix Acropolis AOS is easy to use, it is a great platform."
"Its low maintenance is a key feature. It is easy to install, upgrade, and scale by adding more blocks."
"Karbon is a must-have as it drastically simplifies the deployment of Kubernetes."
"We are suggesting Nutanix to the management because of scalability and time efficiency."
"The most valuable features of Nutanix Acropolis AOS are storage and hyper-converged. The solution is easy to use and the administration is very good."
"I like NCI's dashboard. If there are any infrastructure issues, we'll get alerts inside the dashboard. NCI provides a single platform for managing all of our databases. We are running SQL and Linux databases."
"It consolidates our servers, and improves our electricity consumption and cooling as well."
"An update caused a syncing issue and it took over a month to resolve it"
"The software could benefit from more tooling to help with initial deployment."
"I think the setup could be streamlined a bit."
"The cluster configuration is time-consuming and tedious."
"The documentation could be clearer in terms of explaining the installation."
"StarWind offers the Enterprise-level high availability (HA), deployed and easily configured .maintain and update and with little to no fuss, even the free version is incredibly capable whilst it brings a the cost of a Highly Available HCI solution down to a very cost effective point" Having used Starwind Virtual SAN for many years both for clients and for internal systems it has always done exactly what it set out to do, provide a cost effect way to run a HCI storage platform for almost any hypervisor, but it is most effective with Hyper-V, simple, easy to use, -.software monitoring should be web based to be reachable from any workstation in VLAN."
"I had to buy upgraded support, which was not a problem, but it wasn't a prorated amount, so I paid for the support, the full upgrade, but I only got a couple of months out of it because it was only good until renewal time."
"Diagnostics information or alerts on the state of systems could also be implemented to give more visibility."
"I think there might be some room for improvement when it comes to pricing, because although I know how to convert customers, at the end of day, it's quite expensive. Sometimes your feature architecture is still coming out much cheaper than hardware costs for your infrastructure."
"They need to work on improving the overhead for protecting the data."
"We're also running Hyper-V virtual machines. But we recently discovered that migration of the Hyper-V virtual machines is a bit challenging. Maybe if Dell EMC can come out with a tool that will make it very easy for us to migrate the Microsoft Hyper-V machine, that may be an improvement."
"Licensing restrictions can be frustrating."
"Needs some more monitoring tools."
"The biggest issue with the solution is that it doesn't support Hyper V. It's a big problem."
"We've had some issues around the licensing."
"Exporting data from the dashboard is not very user-friendly. It's just designed in a way that it's going to cover let's say 90%, 80%, of the end-users needs. If you need more sophisticated reporting it's not easy to have."
"NCI's pricing is expensive."
"USB dongle-based licenses do not allow us to directly locate the USB ports on Nutanix."
"The storage and back-up facilities could be improved. We need day-to-day encrypting of the database."
"Native File-Services are under heavy development and Container Services just came out."
"Nutanix Acropolis AOS could improve by having an auto-update feature. At this time I have to update each system manually. However, I bought the standard license and I did not buy the maximum license they have available. There could be a certain license that does the updates automatically."
"Nutanix Acropolis AOS could improve by adding some NAS features, similar to the ones that are available in the NetApp solution."
"Our client had some old Citrix Xen servers for which there is no direct migration. Nutanix has a move utility for Microsoft Hyper-V clusters or VMware clusters. You can easily migrate them using the move utility, but the Xen clusters cannot be migrated in a simple way. That is the only thing that is lacking, but nowadays, no one uses the Citrix Xen server for their clusters. Everything else is already there. Nutanix keeps on upgrading its hardware's or hypervisor's capability to be able to support new technologies."
"This product would be improved if it included a hybrid cloud solution."
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Dell PowerFlex is ranked 8th in HCI with 20 reviews while Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is ranked 3rd in HCI with 194 reviews. Dell PowerFlex is rated 8.0, while Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Dell PowerFlex writes "Is very resilient and protects our data, but the solution is complex". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) writes "A powerful solution with easy deployment, upgrades, and management". Dell PowerFlex is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, HPE Alletra dHCI, HPE SimpliVity and HPE Hyper Converged, whereas Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, VMware vSphere, Hyper-V and HPE SimpliVity. See our Dell PowerFlex vs. Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) report.
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