We performed a comparison between NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays 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 helps simplify storage. When you're running Pure all-flash, you don't have to do a lot of the old Oracle best practices. You don't have to worry about putting log files on a different disk channel than the data files, and those types of issues... That has made it vastly easier to do large volumes, rapid provisioning in databases, without taking a performance hit."
"The connections are a lot faster than what we had in the past. One InfiniBand does what we did on all of our Fibre Channels."
"Their support system has insight into errors on our SAN fabric that we can't see. They've brought attention to and raised awareness for us about things that we couldn't see, when we were experiencing problems."
"We've had different types of storage, and three things of this solution are valuable. The first one is its outstanding performance. The second one is its stability. In the about three years that we've had it, we've had component failures, but we never had a service interruption or any data loss. The third one, which is really critical, is that it is super easy to use in terms of provisioning, storage, and managing the arrays. I'm able to maintain a multi-site environment with a couple of dozen arrays with a single mid-level storage admin."
"It's actually very stable"
"It upgrades in place which means we'll be using it well into the future."
"NVMe data storage platform that's easy to set up and easy to use. It's stable, with a lower response time, and quick technical support."
"The support team is available all the time and they seem to know what they are doing."
"The hardware and software of NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays are easy for us to use."
"One of the most valuable features is the overall performance it provides. You're able to throw a pile of IOPS at it and it will handle that without much issue."
"Compared to Dell Unity XT, what I see as an advantage in NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays is the fact that it is more scalable...The performance of the product is good."
"The stability, speed, and reliability are the solution's best features. The information is also very secure."
"Rapid deployment, easy integration management and cloning of areas."
"We do a lot of in-house, application-dependent type things, where we find the different niches to the different things. Certain things they do better. We've found that it actually does very well on some of our higher-end applications."
"The speed is the most valuable feature."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to set a specific margin of performance to a specific workload."
"It is all-in-one. The compute processing, storage, and network altogether make it convenient. We don't have to have different modules for expansion."
"It has a user-friendly dashboard and interface."
"Nutanix has several unique capabilities to ensure linear scalability."
"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."
"The most valuable features are simple management and one-click upgrades."
"Great flexibility and scalability."
"In general, being able to patch and not having to pay for SanDisk is the best thing about hyper-converged."
"The interface is very good. Before we used this solution, we had separate storage and switches, but with the hyper convert, it's all in one."
"In the configuration, which we brought in or tested it in, it has a very limited config as far as the array goes. That said, it still did more than our anticipation."
"The initial setup was a little complex. We had some initial issues with the design and had to help correct some of the white papers for it, but it wasn't your standard use case."
"We haven't seen ROI."
"The one major gripe I have is that there is no snapshotting enabled by default on the SAN."
"I would like to see data tiering to AWS."
"I would like to get a weekly report of how our storage has been used, and if there is any storage sitting there not being used."
"I would like to see more detailed reporting on the data. However, it would be nice to know what are the exact VMs usage after deduplication and/or what that VMs actual latency and bandwidth is, outside of VMware."
"Pure Storage FlashArray could improve the recent file storage capabilities because it is lacking a lot of features."
"Their problems are on the software and the controlling of the storage where they lack segmentation and federation."
"NetApp could improve the speed of the rebuilding rate."
"We need a center related to NetApp in Egypt so that we can deal with them directly."
"The management interface, while very reliable, it seems a little old now and could maybe use a little modernization."
"I would like to see higher-capacity drives, as they come out; I have heard that 15 TB are out on a different NetApp series. Getting those on the EFs would be nice."
"Things like the FlexClones, SnapVault, SnapMirror, all of that. Some of it's available on the EF series, but we like what we have in the FAS system."
"There could be an improvement when it comes to SLA support, it could be faster."
"They could improve overall scalability through performance. Denser capacity, which is doable, it is what the competition is doing."
"AHV is a great hypervisor but still limited compared to VMware. AHV is the one product they must improve."
"We would like to see a cloud version of Acropolis AOS. Currently, we're trying to implement an AWS environment for some solutions, but we would like to use another technology also to enhance our organization, so we are looking for another technology for this, especially a cloud solution."
"Nutanix Acropolis AOS could improve by adding some NAS features, similar to the ones that are available in the NetApp solution."
"In terms of what I would like to see improved, I would say the life cycle management. I don't know if it is because they changed to an LCM from the previous way of upgrading the hardware or software but sometimes it feels that it needs a wizard that says, "Check this, check this," telling you your options. The only thing that's a bit frustrating for me is the life cycle management interface. That's the only thing on the entire system that frustrates me."
"Nutanix needs to improve network features like Passthrough – SR-IOV. It could be improved by supporting SR-IOV, if they had that support, I would not have needed to implement the VMWare vSAN."
"Nutanix could streamline Acropolis' advanced management to keep pace with its competitors. For example, in VMware vSphere ESXi Hypervisor, you can directly put a host into maintenance mode via the GUI. However, it takes several steps to do this with Nutanix Acropolis, and you need to use the command-line interface for most of the steps."
"The product requires a lot of resources."
"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."
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NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays is ranked 23rd in All-Flash Storage with 38 reviews while Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is ranked 2nd in HCI with 194 reviews. NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays is rated 8.6, while Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays writes "A storage solution that offers great stability, resilience, and support". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) writes "A powerful solution with easy deployment, upgrades, and management". NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays is most compared with NetApp AFF, Dell PowerStore, Lenovo ThinkSystem DM Series, Huawei OceanStor Dorado and HPE Primera, whereas Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is most compared with VMware vSAN, VxRail, HPE SimpliVity, VMware vSphere and Hyper-V. See our NetApp EF-Series All Flash Arrays vs. Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) report.
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