Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs VNX [EOL] comparison

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) and VNX [EOL] based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, Nutanix, VMware and others in HCI.
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Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"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.""The vSAN provides full redundancy for storage while reclaiming some rack space.""The most valuable feature is the fact that the nodes are Active/Active, and allow us to do upgrades on any node without any downtime.""The main benefit is that StarWind is almost maintenance-free.""The support team is available to solve any problem efficiently.""Having the ability to scale horizontally if needed is a huge plus for future growth.""The best part is the easy way it operates with a very clear GUI without any unnecessary items.""It has a nice, simple control panel. You can clearly see the state and health of storage along with the synchronization."

More StarWind Virtual SAN Pros →

"It is a good solution and it is easy to work on their platform.""Most beneficial feature is simplicity, ease of use.""Ability to create multiple VMs.""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.""Hyper-convergence is the most valuable feature for me as it allows me to scale the hardware according to project requirements.""One-Click Upgrade and Foundation is the most valuable feature. One-Click Upgrade makes upgrades and LCM a breeze. Prior to Nutanix One-Click Upgrade, upgrades and LCM were overly cumbersome and time-consuming. Foundation provides an easy, yet very structured, approach to cluster modification (adding or removing nodes).""It has centralized management. It is easy for an engineer to manage. More work goes to patching, upgrades, and maintenance. Nutanix is very easy to upgrade. It takes one click. Engineers do not need to spend additional time with Nutanix for upgrades. With one click, it will complete the upgrade and show the results. Other hypervisor solutions are not like this, specifically since you must do all the components one by one.""It's easy to use and has a very smooth onboarding process."

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"The implementation of both block and file system storage in a single GUI provides is better situated than most other storages.""The most valuable feature is the auto-tiering, which helps in the speed of data access.""One of the best features of the VNX is the ability to combine drives of different types into a virtual Storage Pool. By combining small but fast flash drives, SAS drives, and high-capacity but slower NL-SAS drives, the VNX can intelligently move data to the different tiers of storage based on usage.""It is very stable, even during multiple power failures.""Multi-tiering, positively affects the efficiency of the storage space.""Good performance for VM environments""The most valuable feature is the tight VMware integration, due to the migration from bare metal to virtualized environments and then on to the cloud.""FAST (auto-tiering): Doesn't require configuration and is managed by the array itself."

More VNX [EOL] Pros →

Cons
"It would be great to have more automated tooling around managing the iSCSI connections in Windows""Other vendors such as VMware vSAN have a bigger community of users, so it is easier to find more pre-sale or post-sale information from users.""The software could benefit from more tooling to help with initial deployment.""Initially, when we first started, the sync was horrible.""Sometimes documentation on their site can be out of date.""The documentation is good yet is still lacking in a few areas.""If there are domain controllers inside the cluster, there needs to be some sort of logic allowing them to boot independently so all the rest of the domain clients can gain the authority they need to come online.""I'd love to see native export of metrics (via Prometheus or something of that nature) to allow us to get more metrics available on our existing dashboard software."

More StarWind Virtual SAN Cons →

"In Thailand, there really isn't a cloud version of Nutanx available to us.""The licensing cost could be lower.""To have internal stability, we needed to network the solution ourselves. Performance depends on the application. Performance could be the lack of IOPS, memory and CPU and configuration issues.""There is room to enhance the micro-segmentation.""I would like them to update their licensing to provide more features with their basic license.""The new features are not free. You need to pay for each feature.""It would be great if it could emulate some of the features that their competitor VMware has, for example port mirroring or Netflow output at hypervisor level.""Nutanix now supports four hypervisors but they are not all at feature parity."

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"There is an easy replication process between distinct data centers via VPLEX and/or RPA. But I hope in the future that EMC/Dell could replicate this with other types of storage.""Based on our workloads, we see repeatedly in performance reports that the built-in controller (SP) cache of our VNX model is not sufficiently large, resulting in forced cache flushing.""It would be very helpful to get an automated report that shows you the size of the checkpoints and get warnings when a checkpoint is reaching either maximum capacity per a file system or hitting the ceiling on the SavVol pool consumption.""The scalability is average because the storage has some hardware limitations and, obviously, operating system limitations.""There is no easy way to defrag a RAID group. It would be nice to be able to reduce the size of a storage pool if the storage is not needed anymore.""EMC VNX needs to support bigger SSDs. Next generation EMC Unity will do this.""The management software used for the VNX is Unicenter. While it is an improvement over Navicenter, used in older EMC SANs, it still feels outdated in comparison to other SAN management software.""EMC VNX needs to support bigger SSD and the Next Generation EMC Unity does this."

More VNX [EOL] Cons →

Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "The setup cost is very low. The pricing is great."
  • "We are happy with the price."
  • "The license is reusable. We can always rebuild it and apply the license. Then, boom, we get new servers, apply the license, and we're back up and running."
  • "The pricing is fine for the work that it does."
  • "When we did all the analysis for StarWind, it was approximately 20 percent less than any of the other solutions that we looked at."
  • "The scalability limitation for us is its licensing. At some point in the fairly near future, we will probably have to upgrade our license so we can store eight terabytes instead of four. We are currently at four terabytes, but we're starting to knock on the door of that capacity."
  • "The pricing is excellent. It will run on anything. You don't have to buy a $100,000 server, with hardware you don't need. You just pay for the license and you're good to go."
  • "The licensing is a bit weird. If you license the standard version of StarWind, it allows you four terabytes. Then, they have a pro version, but with the pro version, the only difference is it doubles the terabytes to eight."
  • More StarWind Virtual SAN Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "Able to grow with smaller, more linear increments of investment"
  • "The basic license that comes with the box allows basic virtualization features but advanced automation features would require an upgrade of licenses."
  • "I know Nutanix and VxRail have similar prices and licenses. Nutanix is a go-ahead if AHV is used as hypervisor because it is already embedded in the price."
  • "While cost may seem higher than your traditional 3-tier architecture, you need to look at the bigger picture. You're not just buying hardware here. You're buying a complete environment."
  • "Setup cost is minor, pricing is quite a bit (we have a 7-node-cluster for about 450K EUR with 2 vGPU-nodes for Citrix) but that includes hardware, software, and support."
  • "The price is good but I think there is still room for improvement on the price."
  • "Extra features should not be so expensive. We would love to be able to use or even just try some of the extra features without having to buy them. Buying those features is just as expensive as buying vSphere licenses, so the cost savings is nullified."
  • "Work close with your InfraTeam and discuss with Nutanix the best way to achieve sizing and price that are right for you."
  • More Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "The initial pricing and licensing are reasonable. Yearly EMC is more expensive."
  • "While EMC tends to be on the expensive side, the stability and support of their products are top-notch and I feel are worth the cost."
  • "Make sure you understand how the licensing works and that you are getting the right set of licenses if you need array-to-array replication."
  • "Over time, VNX has become pricier than its competitors, and we have turned enthusiastically to Unity."
  • "Pricing is somewhat higher, especially in Zambia, perhaps due to the low sales volume."
  • "The initial pricing and licensing are reasonable, the yearly EMC is more expensive"
  • "​Reducing dependency on JavaServer Pages​ (JSP) could improve the administrative overhead.​"
  • More VNX [EOL] Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:We test live failovers every week, and so far, everything has been running smoothly without anything unexpected.
    Top Answer:The cost of this is less than you expect. Since they're selling a software stack, you do need to consider your own… more »
    Top Answer:Pricing is a bit high. That said, the support is worth it. It's really hard to point out any other negatives. The… more »
    Top Answer:We found the reduced power consumption with Nutanix Acropolis AOS a very attractive feature. We also like the interface… more »
    Top Answer: Cisco HyperFlex HS series vs Nutanix Acropolis AOS Cisco HyperFlex gives extended hyper-convergence functions from… more »
    Top Answer:We found the reduced power consumption with Nutanix Acropolis AOS a very attractive feature. We also like the interface… more »
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    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    StarWind SAN & NAS
    Nutanix Acropolis AOS, Nutanix AOS, Nutanix Acropolis
    VNX
    Learn More
    Overview

    StarWind Virtual SAN provides high availability and fault tolerance for virtualized environments without the need for dedicated SAN hardware. It allows for real-time replication between servers, shared storage for Hyper-V clusters, and enables vMotion and High Availability features for VMware vSphere. The solution reduces costs and leverages existing hardware while providing a scalable and reliable infrastructure. Valuable features include ease of use, scalability, top-tier support, hardware agnosticism, and the ability to use off-the-shelf standard servers to increase storage space. StarWind VSAN has helped organizations improve performance, data availability, and data security while reducing downtime and providing cost-saving storage options.

    Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is a top-ranking HCI software, cloud management tool, and Software Defined Storage (SDS) tool that is marketed as the foundation for users' hybrid clouds. It offers a powerful and secure hyperconverged infrastructure to deliver all data and applications at any scale and on any cloud. The solution offers a complete software stack that allows users to unify their hybrid cloud infrastructure. 

    NCI’s services include computer, storage and network, hypervisors and containers, and deployment in public or in private clouds. The product also comes with built-in resilience, disaster recovery capabilities, self-healing, and high-security capacities. It provides further deployment flexibility through several software and hardware options and platforms. NCI includes a full set of enterprise capabilities. It can also be deployed on a wide range of servers from popular manufacturers.

    The capabilities of the product are categorized into three main groups:

    • AOS storage
    • Flexible and open compute
    • Automated and secure networking

    Outside of these categories, NCI also offers other capabilities:

    • Integrated disaster recovery
    • Full-stack lifecycle management
    • VMware with Nutanix
    • Intelligent operations

    Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Features

    Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) offers its customers various features and tools in each of the previously mentioned categories. The available features for users currently include:

    • High-performance: This set of features utilizes hardware advances such as NVMe and RDMA to accelerate users' most demanding applications with consistent performance. The tools in this feature category work alongside data locality to ensure successful results.

    • Foolproof resiliency: These Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure features protect data and keep it available by facilitating advanced distributed consistency algorithms. Users can utilize these features to protect their data from issues like bit rot, hardware failures, and even entire site failure.

    • Flexibility: This set of features allows storage to be sized for the needs of each organization and expanded promptly and easily so that the organization and its data can grow. The features offer flexibility to users in terms of applying storage policies logically on a pre-workload basis, instead of being tied to hardware.

    • Hypervisor choice: Users can choose from the leading hypervisors - Microsoft Hyper-V or VMware ESXi. They can also leverage the built-in hypervisor AHV that Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) provides.

    • Integrated virtualization: These features offer simplified automation and AHV streamlined operations. The services in this category are optimized for high performance and reliability.

    • Kubernetes: Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) offers features to build and deploy cloud-native applications on intelligent distributed infrastructure. Apps can be integrated with cloud-compatible storage and both building and deployment can be achieved within the same platform.

    • Microsegmentation: Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) offers features to prevent malware spread and reduce attack surfaces by leveraging machine learning (ML).

    • Virtual networking: This set of features allows users to easily implement multi-tenancy in their environment or stretch networks across clouds.

    • Centralized network management: Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) provides organizations with a way to manage networking configurations centrally. Users can utilize it across their human-computer interaction (HCI) environment with simple virtual switch management.

    Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Benefits

    The product offers various benefits to users who utilize its capacities. Some of these include:

    • NCI reduces technology sprawl and frees up technical resources to allow organizations to focus on other activities, potentially reducing costs for the business.

    • The product allows customers to deploy, scale, and bridge to the public cloud to be able to react in evolving business environments.

    • Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure improves data availability while simultaneously protecting it against several kinds of failures and attacks.

    • The solution offers high-performance, resilient distributed storage for all workloads.

    • Working alongside Nutanix Cloud Platform, NCI offers simple management of data from one console.

    • Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure works by the zero trust philosophy, protecting users' apps and data through specially designed security protocols.

    Reviews from Real Users

    According to Gerhard J., an IT manager at Q4 Fuel, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) provides serious reliability and stability across the entire system makes for ROI.

    A solutions architect at a computer software company describes NCI as a stable, straightforward to set up, and scalable solution.

    With EMC VNX you'll have the right blend of flash, capacity, and application-aware software. Scale up storage for midrange workloads, optimized for virtual applications and cloud environments.

    Offer
    30-days for free

    Try it today

    Learn more about Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI)
    Learn more about VNX [EOL]
    Sample Customers
    Baker Tilly BVI, CMS Internet, Board Harpeth Hall School
    St. Lukes Health System, the City of Seattle, Yahoo! Japan, Sligro, Empire Life, Hyundai AUS, and many others.
    Samsonite, Comanche County Memorial Hospital, Kindred Healthcare
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Manufacturing Company10%
    Construction Company8%
    Educational Organization8%
    Computer Software Company8%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company18%
    Manufacturing Company9%
    Government9%
    Financial Services Firm8%
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company17%
    Comms Service Provider10%
    Manufacturing Company10%
    Financial Services Firm9%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization26%
    Computer Software Company14%
    Financial Services Firm7%
    Government6%
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm21%
    Retailer16%
    Healthcare Company11%
    Security Firm11%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Financial Services Firm16%
    Real Estate/Law Firm12%
    Computer Software Company11%
    Comms Service Provider9%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business64%
    Midsize Enterprise22%
    Large Enterprise13%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business25%
    Midsize Enterprise17%
    Large Enterprise58%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business36%
    Midsize Enterprise30%
    Large Enterprise33%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business17%
    Midsize Enterprise36%
    Large Enterprise47%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business15%
    Midsize Enterprise18%
    Large Enterprise67%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business23%
    Midsize Enterprise23%
    Large Enterprise53%
    Buyer's Guide
    HCI
    February 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, Nutanix, VMware and others in HCI. Updated: February 2024.
    763,955 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is ranked 2nd in HCI with 29 reviews while VNX [EOL] doesn't meet the minimum requirements to be ranked in HCI. Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is rated 8.6, while VNX [EOL] is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) writes "What you might not know about Nutanix that makes it so unique". On the other hand, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is most compared with VMware vSAN, VxRail, HPE SimpliVity, VMware vSphere and Hyper-V, whereas VNX [EOL] is most compared with .

    We monitor all HCI reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.