We performed a comparison between Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) and StarWind HyperConverged Appliance based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Software Defined Storage (SDS) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."StarWind Virtual SAN is a very easy-to-use solution that can be quickly and easily deployed and configured without intimate and specific knowledge in the virtualization sphere."
"The most valuable feature is the reliable storage replication, which enables me to create a robust infrastructure to run our business."
"StarWind Virtual SAN can improve an organization's storage infrastructure by providing high availability, scalability, cost-effectiveness, performance, and ease of use."
"Given the high availability of the server cluster, we were able to reduce separate physical servers onto one hyper-converged cluster - this saved in OPEX and CAPEX costs immediately, along with licensing costs of the Windows Server licenses."
"The product's core feature of virtualizing our storage is by far the most valuable."
"The StarWind Virtual SAN provides a clever and unique solution to the Computing Split Brain problem."
"The software is easy to setup and manage, and the support is excellent."
"The ease of reaching the support team and their promptness for support is great."
"It's quite easy to scale, and you have the option to have distributed nodes everywhere around the world that work as one. You can also have a solution for small branch offices with only two nodes for redundancy, and that's good enough to start."
"The initial setup was quite straightforward."
"The ease of deployment is very good."
"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."
"Hyper-convergence is the most valuable feature for me as it allows me to scale the hardware according to project requirements."
"SRM capabilities for replication have been proven reliable and very useful for our organization."
"The most valuable feature I have found to be the Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV)."
"Most beneficial feature is simplicity, ease of use."
"Having this all backed up by pro-active support gives us good peace of mind."
"The solution has easily deployed instances for multiple fast-paced projects."
"Repair efforts have been reduced to nearly nothing."
"Customer service has been excellent. Any questions we have had have been answered quickly."
"The customer service has been the most valuable feature of the product to me."
"It did not hurt that the price for the hardware and three years of support cost less than the disparate hardware the cluster used to run on."
"The most valuable feature is the high-availability. We have three nodes, and all data will be synched instantly through all the nodes. Even if we had a disaster where two nodes failed, containing dozens of critical machines, almost automatically, all the loads would be run on the remaining node."
"Reliability and overall uptime are key as we're also hosting client environments in addition to our own."
"A mobile app to sync up for overview and status would really be helpful."
"An update caused a syncing issue and it took over a month to resolve it"
"I would like to see some additional, and possibly clearer, implementation videos with some slower and possibly more detailed descriptions of what the various steps of implementation are for someone who is unfamiliar with high availability and failover clustering in Windows."
"Besides not being able to use any filesystem, I do not have any additional cons."
"The most disappointing side of the application is the free edition. There used to be GUI attached. That has recently changed to only CLI management of the application."
"It should reclaim white spaces after big files are deleted."
"A great feature would be a wizard and to include a new disk in the SAN. At the moment, including a new disk requires several steps - some that must be done at the OS level and others in each node."
"We would like to see the documentation more fully developed."
"The licenses for Nutanix are very complicated."
"It was not a great fit for really large databases that required high-end or lots of compute. They might already have addressed this concern around very high-end databases that require high-end compute. In the past, it wasn't a great fit for them."
"I think some of the tasks that must be done using CLI could be added to the web interface."
"Could have better visibility with the main OEM backup integrators."
"In the next release, I would like better and more competitive pricing."
"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."
"There could be better support for high power ESX and other cross platform applications."
"In the future, I would like Acropolis to add support for publishing external storage."
"CSVs require the storage to be configured through iSCSI, even though the storage is local."
"We'd like an easier setup for Windows updates on the Hyper-V servers so you don't have to use a script to ensure auto-updating is done."
"Possible new features could be CSV-level snapshot capability, Veeam integration, and maybe a more straightforward setup. Granted, you don't have to worry about setups with the HCA, but if you want to implement StarWind vSAN in a lab to test it is a tedious setup process."
"The only thing that can use improvement is the StarWind Management Console and Command Center."
"The monitoring and reporting console can be improved in the sense that it can have more information on it."
"Shipping options should be explained in detail and offer more white glove delivery options even if it comes at an additional cost for some SMBs without docks."
"I would request that the terms and conditions be reviewed and made more acceptable to corporate security so that we could finally turn on the proactive support feature, as it is included with our support agreement."
"The only issue we have had was the issue of performance, however, that is only due to the fact that we purchased a mix of SSD and regular spindle drives, and restoring databases was slow as it was trying to restore the database using the spindle drives."
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Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is ranked 2nd in Software Defined Storage (SDS) with 194 reviews while StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is ranked 5th in Software Defined Storage (SDS) with 65 reviews. Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is rated 8.6, while StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is rated 9.6. 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 StarWind HyperConverged Appliance writes "Straightforward to use with good remote management and a simple GUI". Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is most compared with VMware vSAN, VxRail, HPE SimpliVity, VMware vSphere and Hyper-V, whereas StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is most compared with VMware vSAN, Dell PowerFlex, VxRail, StorMagic SvSAN and HPE SimpliVity. See our Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance report.
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