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 fact that I can now count on a true failover solution is what is most appealing."
"It has great free trials that allow end users to test a large variety of their products before deciding to buy the full product."
"It allows me to configure High Availability and failover clustering with some fault tolerance, at a cost point that doesn’t break the bank for a small business budget."
"The primary purpose of this software is to create a virtual SAN between local storage on Hyper-V hosts. I find this feature most valuable since it accomplishes this quite well."
"The ProActive support gives me peace of mind because I am a one man shop, but with the technical support behind me, I feel like more than just one person. We spent two to three hours, depending on what we have to do, always on the phone, and they do not push to end the call."
"StarWind Virtual SAN for vSphere is a software-defined storage solution that has reduced administration time for storage. It's pretty straightforward to install and setup it and so far it has been robust and worked as advertised from StarWind."
"Virtualizing data infrastructure with StarWind Virtual SAN improves efficiency and reduces operational costs."
"The instant failover, with vSAN copying data to the second node, allowed for the continuous availability of our applications."
"This is a very flexible solution that you are able to run however you want."
"The solution is very stable. We haven't had any issues."
"One-Click Upgrade and Foundation is the most valuable feature. One-Click Upgrade makes upgrades and LCM a breeze. Prior to Nutanix One-Click Upgrade, upgrades and LCM were overly cumbersome and time-consuming. Foundation provides an easy, yet very structured, approach to cluster modification (adding or removing nodes)."
"The feature that I have found most valuable is its software Move, which we use to migrate virtual info from another platform to the Nutanix platform."
"I like NCI's dashboard. If there are any infrastructure issues, we'll get alerts inside the dashboard. NCI provides a single platform for managing all of our databases. We are running SQL and Linux databases."
"It is less expensive than VMware products. It is also a little bit more flexible, but it really comes down to price for us."
"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."
"Prism Central allows managing the cluster from a single pane of glass, and it allows a deeper dive into the solution."
"I would say data protection and easy management are the most valuable features of the product...I rate the technical support a nine out of ten."
"It is very easy to use and very cost effective."
"The integration is excellent."
"The management interface is the most valuable feature for us."
"Its user-friendly interface makes it an attractive option, especially for customers who may not be highly tech-savvy."
"We saw an ROI. We have saved both time and money by using it."
"We are able to easily back up our data and send it to an offsite location."
"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."
"The product can include a more simple way of synchronization after a forced shutdown as the current process has a few more steps to check that hosts have synchronized and this can be automated."
"It is difficult to control all of the hardware components."
"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."
"It would be nice to add the ability to use raw partitions instead of file containers."
"We would like to see the documentation more fully developed."
"It would be nice if we could designate pools, or tiers, for storage of different speeds, and then assign rules to new VMs that would automatically place them into the proper pool."
"The documentation is good yet is still lacking in a few areas."
"The documentation can be better for the free tier."
"In the next release, I would like better and more competitive pricing."
"I think some of the tasks that must be done using CLI could be added to the web interface."
"I would like better integration of XenServer into the AOS and Prism Central."
"I would like to see official compatibility with Red Hat in the future."
"We did have some integration issues."
"The self-service side of the product needs to be improved. We should be able to add two-factor authentication and more security layers to it."
"To have internal stability, we needed to network the solution ourselves. Performance depends on the application. Performance could be the lack of IOPS, memory and CPU and configuration issues."
"It would be fantastic if there was a built-in layer, in Nutanix, that acted like a cloud interface. So far, we need to integrate a cloud interface on top of Nutanix for billing the usage for specific customers' domains. It would be great if a cloud gateway was built-in, inside Nutanix."
"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."
"The dashboard features are not in the free version."
"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."
"An improvement would be if they reached out to education customers with other available products."
"With StarWind Storage Appliance, it would be better to have an overall easier setup with a little bit of configuration changes since, currently, even a small mistake may cause the setup process to go wrong."
"StarWind no longer sells HDDs for primary storage."
"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."
"They could improve by providing integration with HP."
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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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