Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs StorMagic SvSAN comparison

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.

StorMagic SvSAN is simple hyperconverged storage used to eliminate downtime. It provides high availability with two nodes per cluster, and boasts users among thousands of organizations to keep mission-critical applications and data online and available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

SvSAN is a lightweight solution that has been designed specifically for small-to-medium-sized businesses and edge computing environments such as retail stores, manufacturing plants and even oil rigs at sea.

SvSAN provides organizations with a simple, 'set and forget' solution that enables lightweight high availability as a virtual SAN (VSAN) with a witness VM that can be local, in the cloud, or as-a-service, and support up to 1,000 2-node clusters. It provides a low barrier to entry with capacity-based licensing and minimal hardware requirements, allowing organizations to use existing equipment. Plus, any IT professional can deploy and manage 1,000 sites as easily as 1, with automation tools and scripts.

SvSAN gives organizations choice and control by allowing configurations of any x86 server models and storage types, even mixed within a cluster, while vSphere, Hyper-V or KVM hypervisors can be used. It is built to perform, with code that eliminates performance bottlenecks and caching features to boost performance and prevent over-provisioning. SvSAN accommodates future growth and technologies too, with support for containers and VMs, and allows compute and storage to be scaled easily and independently.

SvSAN's additional features help to deliver 100% uptime with synchronous mirroring and no single point of failure, even with poor, unreliable networks, and non-disruptive hardware and software upgrades. Disaster protection is provided with capability for stretched clusters that reduce risk, plus extensive integrations with backup and DR providers and the option to add a third node to clusters. SvSAN also ensures data security with FIPS 140-2 compliant encryption, software RAID options and the elimination of split-brain risk.