Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs VMware vSAN vs Vblock [EOL] comparison

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Executive Summary

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

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Questions from the Community
Top Answer:It is easy to use and can monitor system synchronization and check Storage status. StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN) combines… more »
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:You can maintain and update it with little to no fuss, even the free version is incredibly capable whilst it brings 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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Top Answer:While both run on the vSAN technology from VMware, vSAN needs to be deployed on vSAN ready nodes while VxRail is an… more »
Top Answer:HPE SimpliVity is a hyper-converged infrastructure solution that is primarily geared to mid-sized companies. We… more »
Top Answer:We found VMware’s vSAN was easy to set up, configure, and manage compared to other solutions we considered. It is best… more »
Comparisons
Also Known As
StarWind SAN & NAS
Nutanix Acropolis AOS, Nutanix AOS, Nutanix Acropolis
VCE Vblock
vSAN
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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.

VCE Vblock Systems is an all-in-one virtualization platform that integrates the leading storage, network, and compute technologies from the likes of EMC, VMware and Cisco. VCE Vblock allows organizations to easily and securely deploy cloud computing and virtualization in their environments, supporting these multiple technologies and providing flexibility and agility for changing business needs.

VMware vSAN is a software-defined storage product that is used in collaboration with VMware ESXi hypervisor and that provisions and manages storage based on policies, regardless of the underlying hardware. The solution enables you to prime your business for growth through its seamless evolution (it is integrated with vSphere and requires no new tools), its flexibility, and its multi-cloud capabilities. As an industry-leading software, VMware vSAN provides high levels of performance with minimal impact on CPU and memory.

VMware vSAN Features

VMware vSAN has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

  • Storage policy-based management (SPBM): VMware vSAN supports storage policy-based management for automated management of storage profiles.
  • Software-defined data-at-rest encryption: With this VMware vSAN feature, you can prevent unauthorized access of data at rest.
  • Multiple nodes: VMware vSAN provides clusters that can include as few as 2 nodes or as many as 64 nodes.
  • High security and availability: VMware vSAN offers stretched clusters, allowing more than one virtualization host server to be used in the same setup, promoting higher security as well as availability.
  • Deduplication: VMware vSAN’s deduplication compresses data to ensure efficient storage management and security.
  • HCI mesh updates: VMware vSAN clusters can share storage capacity with non-HCI Sphere clusters and can adopt HCI without having to scale computing resources and storage or replace existing servers.
  • Simplified file services: With VMware vSAN’s file services, backup of file shares is simplified. You can use APIs that allow backup and recovery software vendors to integrate with your VMware vSAN file services, which enables backup software to track new data and add scalability enhancements to files.

VMware vSAN Benefits

There are many benefits to implementing VMware vSAN. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

  • Reduced total cost of ownership (TCO): VMware vSAN helps you reduce upfront costs for businesses because it can be easily deployed on inexpensive x86 servers. In addition, its highly scalable infrastructure and quick deployment also save organizations time and money, making it an efficient storage solution. 
  • Good manageability: VMWare vSAN is easy to set up, manage, and provision, without sacrificing performance. 
  • Scalability: VMware vSAN is agile and allows administrators to scale storage on demand, quickly, and efficiently via policies and rules.
  • Simplicity: VMWare vSAN is simple to configure since it is embedded in the vSphere hypervisor. Installing it using the vSphere Web Client can be done quickly. 
  • Reduced risk: VMWare vSAN reduces the risk associated with digital transformations by utilizing existing tools, skill sets, and solutions.

Reviews from Real Users

Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by PeerSpot users currently using the VMware vSAN solution.

PeerSpot user Yves S., CEO, Cloud Evangelist at Comdivision Consulting GmbH, says, “vSAN gives us a lot of advantages when we need to expand resources. We have an overall larger host infrastructure, and we split that up for specific customer test and use cases. In that specific scenario, we can easily add more hosts or reduce the number of hosts in the environment.”

A reviewer who works in Infrastructure Security explains, “The ease of use is great. The initial setup and upgrade process was pretty straightforward. And, technical support is great.”

Laurent N., Director at Softlogic, comments, "The feature that I have found most valuable is that it is easy to deploy. It is easy to create and delete virtual servers. It is easy to create the load balancing and the clustering."

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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.
Xerox, ACS, and Columbia Sportswear.
Read Some Case Studies At Home Cloud CaribCINgroupDiscovery Check out the Rest of our Customer Stories Here
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 Firm19%
Pharma/Biotech Company13%
Construction Company13%
Retailer6%
REVIEWERS
Computer Software Company16%
Comms Service Provider12%
Financial Services Firm11%
Healthcare Company9%
VISITORS READING REVIEWS
Educational Organization45%
Computer Software Company9%
Manufacturing Company6%
Financial Services Firm5%
Company Size
REVIEWERS
Small Business64%
Midsize Enterprise22%
Large Enterprise13%
VISITORS READING REVIEWS
Small Business25%
Midsize Enterprise17%
Large Enterprise58%
REVIEWERS
Small Business36%
Midsize Enterprise30%
Large Enterprise34%
VISITORS READING REVIEWS
Small Business17%
Midsize Enterprise36%
Large Enterprise47%
REVIEWERS
Small Business33%
Midsize Enterprise17%
Large Enterprise50%
REVIEWERS
Small Business34%
Midsize Enterprise22%
Large Enterprise44%
VISITORS READING REVIEWS
Small Business13%
Midsize Enterprise53%
Large Enterprise34%
Buyer's Guide
HCI
March 2024
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, Nutanix, VMware and others in HCI. Updated: March 2024.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.