We performed a comparison between Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) and SwiftStack 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."We have been able to use more on-prem hardware to reduce cost and also use old disks that we do not trust enough for ordinary RAID or usage."
"StarWind support has been great in helping resolve other issues not caused by their software."
"It includes every feature that a traditional SAN offers and so much more."
"The best part is the easy way it operates with a very clear GUI without any unnecessary items."
"The StarWind Virtual SAN provides a clever and unique solution to the Computing Split Brain problem."
"Active-active work mode leads to true redundancy of storage and allows us to distribute the load between multiple nodes."
"StarWind Virtual SAN is essentially hardware agnostic, allowing us to build out a specific hardware layer based upon the customer's unique requirements."
"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."
"Ease of deployment"
"To receive a performance enhancement by merely clicking the one button upgrade is the true value of the platform and what I look forward to the most."
"You need to send commands through the command-line interface(CLI). This could be improved. The commands are done better in VMware."
"We like that the size of the box is 1U or 2U only, and all the servers are fit into that box. The ease of operation is there. All the servers and the SAN storage are inside the box."
"The most valuable aspect of Nutanix is the performance of the storage, which is excellent. And controlling compute, storage, the network, and security all together in one box is very efficient for us. It gives us a single platform to manage our all infrastructure."
"The most valuable features are simple management and one-click upgrades."
"The architecture of Nutanix is the best, and the virtualization we get, out of the box, is an advantage. Also, dedupe and compression are done natively, inside the platform, so there are no additional licenses. That adds value to it."
"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."
"SwiftStack is also quite flexible when it comes to hardware. It depends, of course, on the use case and the kind of hardware you want to buy. But you have quite a bit of choice in hardware. The SwiftStack software itself does not impose anything on you."
"The scalability is phenomenal. It seems infinite, as long as you put enough storage in place, add enough nodes."
"It has helped us with the ability to distribute data to different data centers. As part of our DR strategy, we have nodes automatically replicating data from one data center to the other. This makes it easier for us to not have to shift tapes around."
"The SwiftStack Controller, which is the web UI, provides out of band management. This has been one of the best features of it. It allows us to be able to do upgrades and look at performance metrics. It is a top feature and reason to choose the product."
"The graphs are most valuable. They have a lot of graphs and reports that you can run to see what's happening in the background to configure OpenStack Swift."
"The biggest feature, the biggest reason we went with SwiftStack, rather than deploying our own model with OpenStack Swift, was their deployment model. That was really the primary point in our purchase decision, back when we initially deployed. It took my installation time from days to hours, for deployment in our environment, versus deploying OpenStack Swift ourselves, manually."
"In terms of the hardware flexibility, with SwiftStack not being a hardware company, I literally buy any hardware that's the least expensive, from any vendor... from a flexibility standpoint, I think it's fantastic. I can go to anybody, anywhere - any vendor - and get my hardware."
"The performance is good. It is a secondary storage platform designed for archive and backup, so performance for the right use cases is very good. We have been pretty happy in that regard."
"I found that certain browsers are not fully compatible with the administration web access portal."
"I would like them to invest time in reducing the complexity of the startup and shutdown procedure."
"If there was a way to automatically put disks in maintenance mode when shutting the host down and exit maintenance mode automatically, that would simplify things."
"I would say that the documentation is mostly great, however, some features could be expanded upon a bit."
"Server-side snapshots are one thing the Linux appliance can't do yet."
"I would like to see more user-friendly dashboards in future versions."
"The configuration can a bit cumbersome."
"It would be great to have more automated tooling around managing the iSCSI connections in Windows"
"It's lacking in some features but overcompensating in others."
"The latency needs improvement"
"In the next release of this solution, they could improve by being more competitive with VMware. I would like all third-party solutions to work well with Nutanix Acropolis AOS."
"I would like to see Acropolis add the ability to migrate VMs between storage containers. I don't know if they've added this in the latest versions, but I haven't seen it yet. It's mainly about AHV. When we use VMware, we can move between storage containers. In VMware, it's just like regular storage, and we can move it."
"We did have some integration issues."
"In a hybrid cloud setup, we should be able to port our floors from on-premises to the public cloud and from the public cloud to on-premises."
"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."
"I would like better integration of XenServer into the AOS and Prism Central."
"They should provide a more concise hardware calculator when you're putting your capacity together."
"[One] thing that I've been looking for, for years as an end user and customer, for any object store, including SwiftStack, is some type of automated method for data archiving. Something where you would have a metadata tagging policy engine and a data mover all built into a single system that would automatically be able to take your data off your primary and put it into an object store in a non-proprietary way - which is key."
"On the controller features, there needs to be a bit more clean up of the user interface. There are a lot of options available on the GUI which might be better organized or compartmentalized. There are times when you are going through the user interface and you have to look around for where the setting may be. A little bit more attention to the organization of the user interface would be helpful."
"The file access needs improvement. The NFS was rolled out as a single service. It needs to be fully integrated into the proxy in a highly available fashion, like the regular proxy access is. I know it's on the roadmap."
"At the moment we are using Erasure coding in an 8+4 setting. What would be nice is if, for some standard configurations like 15+4 and 8+4, there were more versatility so we could, for example, select 8+6, or the like."
"It's very well done for what it's supposed to do, and I don't have anything to add, but I would like them to keep it available to the public. SwiftStack is going out of the market. NVIDIA purchased SwiftStack a couple of years ago, and they won't be making it available to the public anymore. Our license is up to March 31st."
"I would like to see better client integrations, support for a broader client library. SwiftStack could be a little bit more involved in the client side: Python, Java, C, etc."
"The biggest room for improvement is the maturity of the proxyFS solution. That piece of code is relatively new, so most of our issues have been around the proxyFS."
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Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is ranked 3rd in HCI with 194 reviews while SwiftStack is ranked 18th in File and Object Storage. Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is rated 8.6, while SwiftStack is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) writes "A powerful solution with easy deployment, upgrades, and management". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SwiftStack writes "It has helped us with the ability to distribute data to different data centers". Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is most compared with VMware vSAN, VxRail, VMware vSphere, HPE SimpliVity and Dell PowerFlex, whereas SwiftStack is most compared with MinIO, Red Hat Ceph Storage, Dell ECS and Cloudian HyperStore. See our Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs. SwiftStack report.
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