We performed a comparison between Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) and StarWind Storage Appliance based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two HCI solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The most valuable feature is the reliable storage replication, which enables me to create a robust infrastructure to run our business."
"User friendly interface and straight forward implementation."
"It has reduced the amount of switching, network connections, etc., because the converged StarWind Virtual SAN allows us to connect high-speed network interfaces between different boxes instead of having to connect SANs via the network, then connect those two clusters together."
"The product's core feature of virtualizing our storage is by far the most valuable."
"Having the ability to scale horizontally if needed is a huge plus for future growth."
"We are able to do maintenance by bringing down one node at a time, rather than having to schedule a complete shutdown."
"vSAN we found was simple to set up, easy to configure and manage and allows us to achieve storage redundancy."
"The solution offers easy one-click PowerShell scripts that are ready to run."
"One-click setup is a valuable feature because it allows us to set up a server automatically with a single click."
"It has a user-friendly dashboard and interface."
"Nutanix Acropolis AOS is stable. We didn't receive any concerns regarding any problems, The customers have no concerns about the reliability."
"Technical support is okay."
"I can use VMware or Hyper-V license, if I already have. But if I use a similar solution as Nutanix Acropolis hypervisor (AHV) that comes embedded in Nutanix solution, I can manage all my virtual environments with everything I need without spend more money on licenses."
"Nutanix does a superb job with technical support."
"We have had good feedback from our customers about this solution."
"This is a complete, very user-friendly product."
"Another good feature is that you can pause the appliance if you want to move it from one location to another and then once it's moved you can resume it, this way you can physically move the whole cluster or storage without any downtime. Its really easy to use, if you have a good foundation in storage and clustering then you will need less then one hour to figure out how to operate it."
"They call us when monitoring shows a possible issue and are very flexible in working with our schedule to troubleshoot when it is convenient for us."
"The integration is excellent."
"Having instant failover redundancy helps me sleep easier at night."
"Its user-friendly interface makes it an attractive option, especially for customers who may not be highly tech-savvy."
"It is very easy to use and very cost effective."
"We saw an ROI. We have saved both time and money by using it."
"The management interface is the most valuable feature for us."
"StarWind Command Center's single-pane management solution only works with Hyper-V."
"The Command Center, a free guest VM for management and monitoring, leaves something to be desired. It could have more accurate real-time information and better reporting visuals, which seem to be an afterthought."
"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."
"I'd love to see native export of metrics (via Prometheus or something of that nature) to allow us to get more metrics available on our existing dashboard software."
"StarWind doesn't really have any performance reporting, especially compared with other vSAN products we've used."
"StarWind really needs to market its product more."
"I want to suggest that the complexity of the startup and shutdown procedure needs to be reduced."
"A better overall view of the different deployments could be beneficial, although this is difficult due to how flexible the solution is."
"Deployment could be more user-friendly - currently, it requires certain skills with the network and nodes."
"Nutanix should improve AHV to support migration VMs between clusters and storage containers. Migration between containers is possible, but it requires shutting down the VM. The procedure is long and there is no migration between clusters at all."
"We ran into an issue as a managed service provider because Acropolis isn't designed to be used the way we are running it. For example, if we want to deploy a Kubernetes service, the customer networks need to reach our protected cluster network. We have isolated our customers in separate VLANs. However, our customers' networks must access our cluster network to get features like iSCSI or Kubernetes to run. It's challenging."
"They could improve the graphical user interface."
"The scalability of the solution had some issues because there were many VMs and the replication ran into some bottlenecks. It was an issue that was known to Nutanix and it was not disclosed to the customer."
"In the licensing, it needs to be clear about features because it is not clear whether Flow is integrated or not."
"The price could be lower."
"It would be great if they could improve the GUI features."
"They could improve by providing integration with HP."
"The dashboard features are not in the free version."
"They offered onsite installation, but we chose to do it ourselves. That took longer and was more work for us but saved us a ton of money in the end."
"StarWind no longer sells HDDs for primary storage."
"It needs more integration with backup vendors so there is native integration with it that will allow storage level backup/snapshots. I would love to see integration with Veeam and Commvault so it can be recognized by them directly and added as network storage."
"StarWind should improve the synchronization time of its product. There should be a standard operating procedure (SOP) for synchronization to reduce the time it takes."
"An improvement would be if they reached out to education customers with other available products."
"Other solutions, such as StorMagic, offer more flexibility in terms of handling caching and moving data between additional nodes."
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Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is ranked 2nd in HCI with 194 reviews while StarWind Storage Appliance is ranked 10th in NAS with 9 reviews. Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is rated 8.6, while StarWind Storage Appliance is rated 9.2. 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 Storage Appliance writes "Offers stable performance even with a single node failure and manages everything with just two nodes". Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) is most compared with VMware vSAN, VxRail, HPE SimpliVity, VMware vSphere and Hyper-V, whereas StarWind Storage Appliance is most compared with FreeNAS, StoneFly VSO NAS, StorMagic SvSAN and VMware vSAN. See our Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs. StarWind Storage Appliance report.
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