We performed a comparison between NetApp AFF and Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two All-Flash Storage solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."It's helped us because we've changed fundamentally what we talk about. We don't talk about storage and different tiers of storage anymore nor do we talk about servers. We talk now about applications and how applications impact the business and end users."
"It's incredibly easy to use and greatly simplified our ability to both deploy and manage our storage subsystems."
"Pure FlashArray X NVMe helps to improve our processing speed. It is user-friendly and easy to use."
"One of the best features is the support, which is excellent."
"What I really like about this program, is that it is easy to use and easy to configurate."
"We're able to get higher-density workloads on the same infrastructure, and we have a smaller physical footprint. The performance is excellent – during our test the bottlenecks are never on the X array, it just keeps picking up the pace to match what you need. The real-time visibility is a differentiator in my opinion."
"Pure FlashArray X NVMe will quickly overcome all the hurdles you face, including network and latency issues."
"It is very easy to install and configure. It has got excellent diagnostics. If you really need to see how the box is performing, the console gives you a lot of information. You can set thresholds as well as alerts based on the thresholds, which is a very powerful functionality. They are very proactive. They know how to monitor and manage the systems. They see a problem, and they are all over it before us. They see the problem before we see it, which is very good."
"We reduced our floor space by reducing 44 racks units to four rack units. It has helped us with our data center economies of scale. It reduces our support costs too, which is great."
"The performance is outstanding when it's all Flash. That's the biggest bang for the buck that we get."
"Technical support has been okay."
"The initial setup is very simple."
"AFF has opened our eyes in a different light of how storage value works. In the past, we looked at it more as just a container where we could just dump our customer dBms and let the customers use it in terms of efficiency. Today, to be able to replicate that data to a different location, use that data to recover your environment or be able to have the flexibility with the solution and data. These are things which piqued our interest. It's something that we're willing to provide as a solution to our customers."
"I like how easy it is to discover an issue and either resolve that issue or fine-tune that app to premium support to find that resolution."
"It supports our virtualization, our VMware environment."
"It is a stable solution."
"The most valuable feature I have found to be the Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV)."
"The management interface of this solution is great."
"The most valuable feature is the solution's ease of upgrading."
"It is easy to use. One of the things they have as a design goal is to reduce complexity and simplify things."
"Nutanix Acropolis AOS is easy to use, it is a great platform."
"In terms of scalability, adding a number of nodes, I find that it will not be any issues."
"The speed of the operations and of creation of VM is fantastic."
"It gives us a single dashboard to control multiple sites and multiple zones. It helps to do things on a single platform and data sharing is quite easy. The network and the security are easy to manage."
"It's more multi-tenant functionality in their Pure1 manage portal that is lacking."
"I want to see Pure Storage not only be for fast storage, but I want to see it be for the entire data center."
"There is room for improvement in catering to midrange storage needs, especially for customers seeking Enterprise-class features."
"In the next release, I would like to see real-time analytics for further insight into consumption models."
"The tool's pricing is higher than competitors."
"You cannot tag a LUN with a description, and that should be improved. What I like on the Unity side is that when I expand LUNs or do things, there is an information field on the LUN. This is the Information field that you can tag on your LUNs to let yourself know, "Hey, I've added this much space on this date". Pure lacks that ability. So, you don't have a mechanism that's friendly for tracking your data expansions on the LUN and for adding any additional information. That's a downside for me."
"If the customer only needs 500 terabytes and doesn't care how much data they'll put in the server, IBM is cheaper than Pure."
"Our use cases require more multi-tenant capabilities and additional VLAN interfaces for separating different customers. We currently use it to provide storage, sometimes shared storage, to different customers, but it is less flexible in comparison to a dedicated solution."
"The scaling needs improvement. NetApp is limited for scaling options."
"This is an expensive solution that could be cheaper."
"In future releases, I would like to see the ability to automatically mount SMB shares and file systems."
"In terms of improvement, the support could be a little better."
"With some of the larger clusters being able to do a patch upgrade is helping. They still take three, four hours by the time you get the night started, finish things up, do the upgrade."
"To be more competitive in the industry, they can develop deduplication, compression, and smarter features in the same array instead of all-flash."
"I would like to see better tutorials available, beyond the basics, that cover subjects like MetroCluster and automation."
"It would be very useful if we could do the NFS to CIFS file transfer, but it is not supported at this time."
"One disadvantage of Nutanix Acropolis AOS is it doesn't support external storage. Connecting external SAN storage to Nutanix, it's not supported."
"The ability to create clusters faster would be nice to see in a future release."
"We did have some integration issues."
"Some clients find the solution's cost to be too high."
"As of now, Acropolis and VMware cannot talk to each other. Until we have some kind of interface, it would be much better for Nutanix if they built an interface which can talk. Otherwise, if I have a VMware stack and I already have a Nutanix stack, I create containers, I create clusters on VMware, I create clusters on Nutanix. All of these clusters cannot talk to each other. Then it has to be then subverted as a parallel execution. What happens then is that I have to work in two different environments within my data center. Practically, they are two different data centers but physically and logically, they are one. If they cannot talk to each other that creates a lot of issues. That is something which Nutanix has to develop because for Nutanix it is very simple. For example, Oracle is using a function called GoldenGate. They have a feature called GoldenGate which allows them to talk to various different environments which must really help."
"In the future, I would like Acropolis to add support for publishing external storage."
"The initial setup can be a bit difficult."
"The licensing cost could be lower."
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NetApp AFF is ranked 2nd in All-Flash Storage with 280 reviews while Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is ranked 3rd in HCI with 194 reviews. NetApp AFF is rated 9.0, while Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of NetApp AFF writes "Since switching, our clients have reported improved performance and reduced latency". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) writes "A powerful solution with easy deployment, upgrades, and management". NetApp AFF is most compared with Dell PowerStore, Dell Unity XT, Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series, Pure Storage FlashArray and VMware vSAN, whereas Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is most compared with VMware vSAN, VxRail, HPE SimpliVity, VMware vSphere and Dell PowerFlex. See our NetApp AFF vs. Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) report.
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