Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) Valuable Features

Rakesh Sarak - PeerSpot reviewer
Cloud Consultant at Swan Solutions & Services Pvt Ltd.

Single-click upgrades are the most valuable feature. In the sector in which we work, it is tough to have downtime and arrange firmware upgrades. If something goes wrong, you need to do a fallback or troubleshoot more. That can be totally avoided if you are using Nutanix in the backend for your hypervisor or clustering part. That is one thing.

Another thing is that you get CVMs similar to the number of nodes. CVM handles your backend storage infrastructure. It is underlying your hypervisor. If you have seven nodes, you will get seven CVMs, which is a good thing.

The availability of your data is also valuable. Whenever you shift or migrate your virtual machines inside a cluster, your data also follows that. It creates multiple copies of the data and keeps it ready in the backend for redundancy, which is another good point.

With Nutanix Prism, you get a single dashboard for everything. It shows you whether your data resiliency is okay, whether your nodes are okay, or whether your networking part is okay. It is another USP.

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Sisir Ghosh - PeerSpot reviewer
Addiotinal manager at a recreational facilities/services company with 10,001+ employees

A lot of features are there, but for us, on the server administration side, creating a clone of the VM is valuable because many times, we have to deploy security patches. For deploying these patches, it helps to have a clone so that if something goes wrong, we can discard that VM and put back the clone VM. That is a very cool feature.

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ES
Senior Advisor PH Facility, IT Consultant

We've had a really amazing experience since my organization was able to really, really simplify all orchestration. I'm talking about automation and a precision hybrid cloud. The visualization is excellent. We do not just see the small tip of the iceberg above the water - we see the whole iceberg. 

The simplicity when it comes to building your own automation has been excellent. They provided us with professional services and we were able to acquire the necessary skills and knowledge to make automation ourselves. We started from a few workloads and from there we were able to automate a lot in order to reduce total cost.

NCI provides us with a single platform to manage your databases. It is quite difficult to start as you have to know the new logic. You have to understand the environment, to take a deep dive into the different functionality. However, once you have acquired the knowledge, it becomes really easy to move fast and go forward with automation. There’s also very helpful service management.

We started with non-critical DBs and then we transformed our full stack Oracle IDs and IDs based on MongoDB and SQL and other DBs moving across different applications.

NCI's features helped us to reduce downtime. The native solution that we are managing, was in a full redundancy. It was a resilient solution that was provided by Nutanix. 

Nutanix is a software appliance. We have to work with Nutanix to arrange up to the hardware and test for network and security, and then for server storage.

NCI helped our organization consolidate its applications. They make the operation easy for people. People don’t have to be specialized. This is a good advantage.

We built a DB as a Service for a particular telecommunication application to share mobile and WiFi into the server environment. Then, we applied the integrated storage provided by Nutanix to visualize all of the information for the private cellular device. We’ve automatically improved security by moving into an environment where we are able to apply logical security insights to the platform to make decisions and check product information. We use Nutanix to make a container where we can put a cloud and a single person can check to make sure the data is compliant with the data policy of the enterprise. They are brilliant in sales operations and resilience. 

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Buyer's Guide
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI)
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI). Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
767,667 professionals have used our research since 2012.
JA
Manager IT at SunTec Business Solutions

We like that it is cloud-based. It allows us to have a cloud-based ecosystem.

It's helped us reduce downtime by 50% approximately. It helps us consolidate our applications. It reduces processing time and administration. We can move faster. We don't have to wait for hours to process. We can do it in a few clicks. 

We were able to eliminate some of our legacy structures. We were using VMware. We are working to move away from it. We also are in the process of migrating other applications over. 

The provisioning is very easy. The live upgrades are useful. There is no need for downtime. It's very easy to manage things. We can reduce a lot of time with infrastructure upgrades.

It's easier to use for beginners. 

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MahendraPanchotiya - PeerSpot reviewer
Infrastructure Manager at ER Tech Pros

One-click setup is a valuable feature because it allows us to set up a server automatically with a single click.

The update process is smooth.

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Faisal Shaheen - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Administration Manager at Elsewedy Technology

The most valuable aspect of Nutanix is the performance of the storage, which is excellent. And controlling compute, storage, the network, and security all together in one box is very efficient for us. It gives us a single platform to manage all our infrastructure.

It's so easy to configure anything on Nutanix. We have had Nutanix for more than five years and all our products are on it. It's really easy to manage them. We can monitor our servers and get notified if there is any issue with a server and correct it before a problem happens.

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Sudheer Narayanan - PeerSpot reviewer
Vice President Technology at a media company with 1,001-5,000 employees

It gives us a single dashboard to control multiple sites and multiple zones. It helps to do things on a single platform and data sharing is quite easy. The network and the security are easy to manage.

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SM
Evangelist / CTO at FGNext / FGN GmbH

This is a way into cloud consumption. Because the cloud is not about a vendor; it is an operational model, you can have your cloud in your data center, and later on, you can extend to a public cloud, which is a different approach. A few customers say that they have a cloud-first strategy, which means everything from the data center is brought to the cloud. Another approach is lift and shift, but it will cost you a lot of money in the public cloud. If you want to leverage and use a cloud, why not start with a data center? You can implement your cloud use case there, and if you want to extend your multi-cloud or hybrid cloud to public cloud suppliers or CSPs, such as Azure, GCP, or AWS, you have the same workbench in their cloud, so what Nutanix offers us is that in their public clouds, there is dedicated hardware, and they run the same infrastructure links that are in your data center. This way, it is easy for you to move workloads from your own data center to the cloud, which is a real benefit because there is no cloud login. It is not easy to move from AWS to Azure if you use their products, but Nutanix offers this flexibility and scalability.

It is easy to use. One of the things they have as a design goal is to reduce complexity and simplify things.

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Linkoln King III - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Network Support Specialist at a educational organization with 5,001-10,000 employees

The most valuable feature is the solution's ease of upgrading. We can upgrade everything on one screen with Life Cycle Manager.

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AG
IT Operations at a engineering company with 5,001-10,000 employees

The most valuable features are the RBAC, role-based access control, and the reporting.

NCI also provides a single platform, a single pane with a dashboard, to manage the entire infrastructure. We have complete information about overall utilization, performance, and a forecast for our platform in that single pane.

NCI has also definitely improved our efficiency with better visibility into our operations, better reporting facilities, and a single-pane dashboard where we can place different types of widgets to help us look at the key aspects, per our operational requirements. It has extensive capabilities to integrate the alert-based system with third-party monitoring tools. As a result, we haven't seen challenges due to the teams not being able to see particular alerts and those alerts being missed. If that were to happen it would cause a loss in productivity or some type of financial loss. We haven't faced those types of challenges at all.

And because NCI has the capability to host any type of application and any vendor's solution or platform, and it integrates with most of the major providers, that makes this platform quite flexible and easy to use.

Another very important feature is that it offers a variety of cloud operating models across on-premises, edge, as well as multiple hosted, managed, and public clouds. As an organization, our intention, most of the time, is to go with the different cloud providers to reduce costs. When we are in the evolution phase or when we are into the renewal phase and looking for those vendors that are providing more benefits in terms of cost optimization and more add-on features, if Nutanix expands its portfolio into multiple clouds, that is beneficial to our organization and to other organizations.

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FL
Business Manager at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

The administration console, automation, and the first cluster are all valuable features.

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MP
CTO at DPD south AFrica

The tool is simple, stable, and easy to upgrade. It also requires few resources to manage, which simplifies our work. The solution's ease of upgrading is its valuable feature. AHV, provided by Nutanix, is excellent in performance and ease of use. It's based on an open-source product called KVM, which I also use for other services.

Data protection and disaster recovery features have been beneficial for our work. With these features, we're able to create a high-availability environment where if one node goes down, another one takes over.

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CM
Sr. Systems Administrator II at a consultancy with 10,001+ employees

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure's most valuable feature is the flexibility to move the VMs easily, keeping everything together. They really help with the administration side of things. Rather than having a bunch of admins, only a few admins really need to work on it.

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VinodYadav - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Manager at Cyfuture India Pvt Ltd

We like the pay-as-you-go model. 

The solution has many valuable features. There's 24/7 support and a dedicated account manager.

The solution is easy to use and the pricing is affordable. 

It provides a single platform from which to manage the databases. Applications of any category can be run on Nutanix. 

It's reduced downtime for our customers. We can monitor all of the servers from one place and get notifications and alerts to help with workflow.

The product has helped us prevent and block attacks effectively.

Applications are consolidated thanks to Nutanix. It's nice to have consolidation. We were able to eliminate some of our client's legacy infrastructure.

We're able to use VMware and Nutanix infrastructure in parallel with ease.

We have been able to migrate services to Nutanix easily. It's helped clients save money. Clients who have not been satisfied with the costs and high expenses have been pleased with the cost savings by moving to our Nutanix cloud. 

It is important for our customers that Nutanix Cloud offers a variety of cloud operating models across on-premises, Edge, as well as multiple hosted managed and public clouds. It provides good security. We can effectively prevent attacks. There's less chance of hacks or threats. 

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YL
System Administrator at Holon Institute of Technology

The most valuable features of Nutanix Acropolis AOS are storage and hyper-converged. The solution is easy to use and the administration is very good.

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Nagendra Nekkala. - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Manager ICT & Innovations at Bangalore International Airport Limited

One valuable aspect is its efficiency as a robust platform. It can also be updated with a single feed. Mainly, there is an ease of managing all processes. It effectively minimizes downtime with features like container management and robust networking capabilities. Additionally, the data recovery process is remarkably fast, enabling us to swiftly retrieve and restore information within a short period.

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Giovanni SHOLAY - PeerSpot reviewer
System Engineer at MUA`

The management is very easy. You can see everything within a single platform to manage your databases. Everything is there on a single dashboard. 

NCI's features helped our organization reduce downtime greatly. We use it effectively for replication as well. 

The ability to restore within seconds is great. It takes a few seconds to rewind back to a previous marker and have everything up and running again. 

We migrated other services over to Nutanix. For example, we migrated over from Microsoft Hyper-V. This allows us to manage everything from one single platform and to save on licenses. We no longer have to license all of these different types of hardware. 

It's easy to launch on demand if you are using a newer OS. 

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Janak Bhatt - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Infrastructure Manager at a consultancy with 201-500 employees

HCI and DR are very valuable to us. It is very easy to clone systems using the solution.

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Bhupal Ghimire - PeerSpot reviewer
Officer at YETI

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. 

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EL
IT Infrastructure Architect at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure's most valuable features are all the cloud facilities or benefits it provides for my data center. Everything that I do in the cloud, I can virtually do in my own data center. NCI provides other benefits like elasticity, upgrading, expanding the cluster, and growing the cluster. Since NCI is non-disruptive, we don't have any downtime when we add new nodes. Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure's stability and flexibility are just awesome.

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KK
Owner at a computer software company with 1-10 employees

There are a lot of features but the main ones are related to storage. Nutanix provides a software-defined storage solution for virtual servers.

It also has a lot of available services when it comes to infrastructure, and our customers use most of them. It provides a redundant set of data. The snapshots, cloning, and replication are all effective in helping to reduce downtime. It can replicate cluster data for disaster recovery and it provides high availability in case a node or a disk fails. Nutanix's availability feature set is bigger than that of other solutions.

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MJ
Senior Director - Technology at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

The architecture of Nutanix is the best, and the virtualization we get, out of the box, is an advantage. Also, dedupe and compression are done natively, inside the platform, so there are no additional licenses. That adds value to it.

In addition, it provides us with a single platform, which is pretty user-friendly, to manage our databases. It doesn't take much to manage the console.

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BM
IT manager at a transportation company with 51-200 employees

One of the most valuable features of Nutanix is that it's easy to use. I love this solution—it's easy to maintain and update, and I think it's almost perfect. 

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Steffen Hornung - PeerSpot reviewer
Administrator at Neuberger Gebäudeautomation GmbH

The most valuable feature is the integration of all parts in Prism Element, the browser-based management tool. It gives you detailed information about the environment, helps you drill down on alerts, and keeps the solution up to date with LCM (Life Cycle Manager).

When using Nutanix AHV as a hypervisor, it is the management tool for that too. When you chose another hypervisor it just does basic tasks like VM creation, reconfiguration, and start/stop. It is just enough to keep everything in this "single-pane-of-glass" tool.
Going AHV is just easier. No additional management for VMs. Everything you need is done with Nutanix Prism Element or through an SSH connection.
We are beginning to leverage Powershell and their REST API to do things which integrates more tightly with our own process.

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MF
Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer at VertitechIT

It is less expensive than VMware products. It is also a little bit more flexible, but it really comes down to price for us. 

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AB
Senior Manager at RP Sanjiv Goenka Group

One of the most valuable features is how well this solution performs. It's stable, aside from some patch issues, but it's great from a virtualization and scalability perspective. 

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Prasath Ravindrarajah - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Consultant at MIT ESP

The scalability, performance, and licensing model are the most valuable features.

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HA
Senior IT Manager at a financial services firm with 51-200 employees

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure's most valuable feature is its low cost, guaranteed to failover and failback with only a few clicks.

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Mithun Nidiyenga - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Infrastructure Engineer at NCS Pte Ltd

The Lifecycle Management (LCM) for upgrades is a very fantastic feature that I have observed from Nutanix.

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.

Nutanix is easy to learn for someone new to the system. It has more flexibility in its handling. If you are familiar with another hypervisor, Nutanix is easy to learn.

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GJ
IT Manager at Q4 Fuel

The features that I have found most valuable depend on the scenario. The nice thing with the Acropolis design is that in a specific situation where you've got either the problem or you need to adapt quickly in connection with the setup in the environment, they really work through everything. 

The total solution is valuable, you can't split it up. The nice thing with the AOS, as well as basically the entire Nutanix system is that you are not time bound to increase your entire node or service setup. You can add additional nodes as time goes past. It's not like VMware, for example, where it looks like you've got a time period where you have to finish your entire setup, otherwise the upgrades and the newer hardware and that kind of stuff become a problem. Nutanix is very, very backwards compatible, as well as forwards compatible.

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Lipaz Hessel - PeerSpot reviewer
Integration Manager at Gilat Satellite Networks

One of the most valuable features is the One-Click Upgrade. When I need to update the system, I do it with one click. This product is amazing because everything is easy to manage, from network management to snapshots. 

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AY
Chief Manager Corporate IT at Reliance Communications

The features that I have found most valuable include its HA facility, viability, robustness, flexibility, it's time to go live is very short, and it has a friendly user interface.

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Atif Najam - PeerSpot reviewer
Chief Information Officer and Program Lead at Gatron Industries Ltd

There are a lot of features in Nutanix that are different from other hyper-converged solutions, such as site-to-site replication. VM-based site-to-site replication is bundled with the software licensing. For the DR, it has the availability groups, which is one of the key features that Nutanix provides.

Its performance management is pretty good, especially the software-defined storage that Acropolis provides is pretty good.

As far as the availability is concerned, it has RAID nodes, so the availability is pretty good. In case of failure, the system automatically shifts machines from one node to another. Their failure debugger is very good.

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it_user545409 - PeerSpot reviewer
Data Consultant at Neuberger
  • Single click actions is definitely the most important. They were not even aware that they wanted this.
  • Performance was the main point for buying it. 
  • No virtualization-vendor lock-in is another main point.
  • But if you ever had good support, Nutanix Support will overwhelm.
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RK
Business Unit Manager at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees

Hyperconverged Infrastructure is the most valuable feature of Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure.

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VS
Nutanix Lead Administrator at Kyndryl India Pvt. Ltd.

There are a lot of things I really like. Perhaps the best part is taking a snapshot of a virtual machine. It's very quick. Another useful part is replication and creating a protection domain: using the protection feature to replicate a machine to a remote site for DR purposes.

I also like Nutanix Flow. It is quite a control mechanism. Other than external firewalls, Nutanix Flow is a good feature to control your traffic and not allow the infra to create two-way contact with any location other than what we specify.

Nutanix Files is also good. It's a little immature but it's still good. I use it more than Windows for files.

And the fact that Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure offers a variety of cloud operating models is also significant for us. Based on the good number of application products that we are using, having multiple options is going to be a benefit for us.

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Sisir Ghosh - PeerSpot reviewer
Addiotinal manager at a recreational facilities/services company with 10,001+ employees

The solution has single-window management, the ability to create VMs and monitor their usage on the fly, and the ability to add more resources if required. There are a lot of tools the solution comes with and the performance is good.

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HT
IT Specialist at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees

What I like best about Nutanix Acropolis AOS is its simplicity. It's simple to install and simple to understand.

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JH
Solutions Engineer at Grainger

In general, being able to patch and not having to pay for SanDisk is the best thing about hyper-converged.

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GJ
IT Manager at Q4 Fuel

I definitely find the reduced power consumption very valuable. Another aspect I really like, when one compares Citrix to VMware, is the interface where you talk directly to your VM from the present software. We have found that it is a lot more responsive using VMware compared to Citrix.

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AS
Business Development Manager at Thakral One (Pvt) Ltd

The technology of Nutanix Acropolis AOS is the most valuable feature. You don't need multiple screens to manage.

This solution is better than its competitors.

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PN
IT Project Manager at United Conveyor Corporation

A great feature involves real-time hardware changes. There is no need to shut down any VM during the hardware changes.

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reviewer1475787 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. Systems Administrator at Enercare

There are lots of great built-in features such as the one-click upgrade, data protection, data locality, very fast and non-disruptive snapshots, single pane of glass, etc.

We are applying patches and upgrades every quarter using the one-click upgrade feature and we have never run into an issue. The updates go smoothly with no outages at all, and we do everything including firmware updates, AOS updates, foundation updates, hypervisor updates, all at once and it goes perfectly fine.

The data protection is also a great feature that is very easy to set up and includes lots of options for snapshot retention. The consistent snapshots are great for Windows application and database servers.

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budiezeddin - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager at Metrodata Electronics Tbk PT
  • Nutanix Distributed File System
  • Multi-hypervisor support
  • Erasure coding
  • Protection domain
  • Acropolis File Sharing
  • Acropolis Block Service
  • Strong support
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MC
AVP-Datacenter Practice at a computer software company with 201-500 employees

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure has a simple, user-friendly GUI, and I also like the remote recovery capabilities. It provides a single platform for managing databases. They have Nutanix-validated designs for databases that optimize them for performance. They have some guidelines and designs for best practices. It has helped us improve the performance of transactions.

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it_user343836 - PeerSpot reviewer
Chief Technology Officer at PBG Networks
  • Small footprint: Our datacenter was already pretty full and we would have had to increase its size and add more electrical and cooling. None of that had to be done when we went to Nutanix. We now increase the capacity of our datacenter without having to add more square footage, while increasing its horsepower, allowing us to run more servers utilizing less space than before.
  • High performance
  • Many hypervisors supported: Supporting more than one hypervisor allowed us to test different scenarios and didn’t lock us into just one option, like VMware.
  • Has its own Hypervisor Acropolis
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it_user516468 - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Administrator at CityServiceValcon

The level of statistical performance data it is able to report in real time is extremely useful. I can see what my VM’s hosts and guests are doing form a single pane of glass and identify issues before they would otherwise become apparent.

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CH
Senior Expert Solution Architect at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

One of the good features of Nutanix Acropolis AOS is the Prism Central. It's a well-designed system. It's a central installation and management tool for more than one cluster. If you have several clusters crossing Europe, you'll have a very fancy, smart, and tiny tool to orchestrate this.

Another feature I find valuable in Nutanix Acropolis AOS is technical, e.g. the rebuild time from the resynchronization between the clusters is fast. If you have an outage caused by a disk failure or a server failure, the system works well and is very fast, because the technology of Nutanix Acropolis AOS is even better than other systems. The system works faster than others.

Whether this system is worth the money will really depend on your goal, on what you want to achieve. The flexibility of Nutanix is very, very good. You have the freedom to use any kind of major vendor, to use it for a hyperconverged installation.

You have the Acropolis hypervisor based on KVM, e.g. the Kubernetes virtual machine. You can also use OpenStack. The system also supports VMware and Microsoft Azure. It also has integration with a hybrid cloud, e.g. AWS. There's also a good integration between the system and Google GCP Cloud. Nutanix Acropolis AOS has finesse. It's very, very good.

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FC
Corporate Infrastructure Manager at Emak

We are very satisfied with the speed, compression and duplication. The solution is transparent. The speed of the operations and of creation of VM is fantastic.

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TH
Manager IT Security & Infrastructure at Currimjee Jeewanjee & Co. Ltd.

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.

Then you have the Prism Central Core, the user management consoles, for managing most of the VMs. And there are a few options which I bought, including for the reporting.

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Vuong Pham - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Solutions Architect at Nth Generation Computing

Our clients like several features including the micro-segmentation flow, the one-page management through Prism, and the LCM (Life Cycle Management) that Prism offers.

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it_user537774 - PeerSpot reviewer
Infrastructure Program Manager at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees
  • Speed of acquisition and ease of deployment
  • Shorter timeline from PO, to delivery, to operation than converged infrastructure solutions like Vblock
  • Able to grow with smaller, more linear increments of investment
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SK
National Sales Manager at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

Its most valuable feature is simplicity. It is so easy to use. Upgrades are easy. It is easy in terms of disaster recovery, failover, database provisioning, and reporting. Everything about it is just simple.

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Michael Tsang - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Consultant Manager at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees

They have OEM partnerships.  

They've got their own developed OS, which is an advantage, if you can save on some licensing, of course. 

The solution is a bit cheaper. The pricing is pretty good.

The stability is very good.

The solution can scale well.

Technical support is helpful.

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MI
FD at Alpha 55

The features that I have found most valuable are the user-friendliness of that hypervisor. Also, people who are not agnostic about the hardware can go with Nutanix. It has a user-friendly dashboard and interface.

Pros, it's an OEM kind of a hypervisor. It can fit to any size. Pros are that any enterprise company can fit in with it, and that budgets are also not heavy on their pockets. So, these are the pros of Nutanix.

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it_user199092 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Systems Engineer at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The converged storage infrastructure is a great benefit that removes the necessity of a separate storage network.

The web-based management portal (Prism) is very robust and easy to understand.

There is very little to manually configure, for the Nutanix or (in our case) VMware OS, once the scripted installation has completed.

Very knowledgeable support engineers.

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CB
Solutions Architect at a computer software company with 51-200 employees

There are lots of different pieces. From a Disaster Recovery perspective, it is very valuable. Some of my customers are getting into Flow. We don't use Flow, however, we're testing it. Flow is their micro-segmentation, which is very useful for protecting your VMs and the traffic that goes to them. From an automation perspective around deploying virtual machines, Calm is pretty good as well.

The initial setup is straightforward.

The solution is very stable. 

The product scales very well.

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TW
IT Architect, Senior at American Electric Power Company, Inc.

Prism Central allows managing the cluster from a single pane of glass, and it allows a deeper dive into the solution.

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it_user300495 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior DevOps Engineer at a hospitality company with 10,001+ employees
  • Ease of installing the hyper-visor
  • Out of the box High Availability
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SR
CTO Enterprise Cloud at Amanox Solutions (S&T Group)

Some years ago when we started working with Nutanix the solution was essentially a stable, user-friendly, hyper-converged solution offering a less future-rich version of what is now called the distributed storage fabric. This is what competing solutions typically offer today and for many customers, it isn't easy to understand the added value (I would argue they should in fact be a requirement) Nutanix offers today in comparison to other approaches.

Over the years Nutanix has added lots of enterprise functionality like deduplication, compression, erasure coding, snapshots, (a)-sync replication and so on. While they are very useful, scale extremely well on Nutanix and offer VM granular configuration (if you don't care about granularity do it cluster wide by default). It is other, maybe less obvious features or I should say design principles which should interest most customers a lot:

Upgradeable with a single click

This was introduced a while ago, I believe around version 4 of the product. At first, it was mainly used to upgrade the Nutanix software (Acropolis OS or AOS) but today we use it for pretty much anything from the hypervisor to the system BIOS, and the disk firmware and also to upgrade sub-components of the Acropolis OS. There is, for example, a standardized system check (around 150 checks) called NCC (Nutanix Cluster Check) which can be upgraded throughout the cluster with a single click independent of AOS. The one-click process also allows you to use a granular hypervisor upgrade such as an ESXi offline bundle (could be a patch release). The Nutanix cluster will then take care of the rolling reboot, vMotion etc. to happen in a fully hyper-converged fashion (e.g. don't reboot multiple nodes at the same time). If you think how this compares to a traditional three-tier architecture (including converged generation 1) you do have a much simpler and well-tested workflow which is what you use by default. And yes it does automatic prechecks and also ensures what you are updating is on the Nutanix compatibility matrix. It is also worth mentioning that upgrading AOS (the complete Nutanix software layer) doesn't require a host reboot since it isn't part of the hypervisor but installed as a VSA (regular VM). It also doesn't require any VMs to migrate away from the node/host during and after the upgrade (I love that fact since bigger clusters tend to have some hiccups when using vMotion and other similar techniques especially if you have 100 VMs on a host) not to mention the network impact.

Linearly scalable

Nutanix has several unique capabilities to ensure linear scalability. The key ingredients are data locality, a fully distributed metadata layer as well as granular data management. The first is important especially when you grow your cluster. It is true that 10G networks offer very low latency but the overhead will count towards every single read IO so you should consider the sum of them (and there are a lot of read IOs you get out of every single Nutanix node!). If you look at what development is currently ongoing in the field of persistent flash storage you will see that the network overhead will only become more important going forward. 

The second key point is the fully distributed metadata database. Every node holds a part of the database (the metadata belonging to its current local data for the most part and replica information from other nodes). All metadata is stored on at least three nodes for redundancy (each node writes to its neighbor nodes in a ring structure, there are no metadata master nodes). No matter how many nodes your cluster holds (or will hold) there is always a defined number of nodes (three or five) involved when a metadata update is performed (a lookup/read is typically local). I like to describe this architecture using Big O notation where in this case you can think of it as O(n) and since there are no master nodes there aren't any bottlenecks at scale. The last key point is the fact that Nutanix acts as an object storage (you work with so-called Vdisks) but the objects are split into small pieces (called extends) and distributed throughout the cluster with one copy residing on the local node and each replica residing on other cluster nodes. If your VM writes three blocks to its virtual disk they will all end up on the local SSD and the replicas (for redundancy) will be spread out in the cluster for fast replication (they can go to three different nodes in the cluster avoiding hot spots). If you move your VM to another node, data locality (for read access) will automatically be built again (of course only for the extends your VM currently uses). You might now think that you don't want to migrate that extends from the previous to the now local node but if you think about the fact that the extent will have to be fetched anyhow then why not save it locally and serve it directly from the local SSD going forward instead of discarding it and reading it over the network every single time. This is possible because the data structure is very granular. If you would have to migrate the whole Vdisk (e.g. VMDK) because this is the way your storage layer saves its underlying data then you simply wouldn't do it (imagine vSphere DRS migrates your VMs around and your cluster would need to constantly migrate the whole VMDK(s)). If you wonder how this all matters when a rebuild (disk failure, node failure) is required then there is good news too! Nutanix immediately starts self-healing (rebuild lost replica extends) whenever a disk or node is lost. During a rebuild, all nodes are potentially used as sources and targets to rebuild the data. Since extends are used (not big objects) data is evenly spread out within the cluster. A bigger cluster will increase the probability of a disk failure but the speed of a rebuild is higher since a bigger cluster has more participating nodes. Furthermore, a rebuild of cold data (on SATA) will happen directly on all remaining SATA drives (doesn't use your SSD tier) within the cluster since Nutanix can directly address all disks (and disk tiers) within the cluster.

Predictable

Thanks to data locality a large portion of your IOs (all reads, can be 70% or more) are served from local disks and therefore only impact the local node. While writes will be replicated for data redundancy they will have second priority over local writes of the destination node(s). This gives you a high degree of predictability and you can plan with a certain amount of VMs per node and you can be confident that this will be reproducible when adding new nodes to the cluster. As I mentioned above, the architecture doesn't read all data constantly over the network and uses metadata master nodes to track where everything is stored. Looking at other hyper-converged architectures you won't get that kind of assurance especially when you scale your infrastructure and the network won't keep up with all read IOs and metadata updates going over the network. With Nutanix a VM can't take over the whole cluster's performance. It will have an influence on other VMs on the local node since they share the local hot tier (SSD) but that's much better compared to today's noisy neighbor and IO blender issues with external storage arrays. If you should have too little local hot storage (SSD) your VMs are allowed to consume remote SSD with secondary priority over the other node's local VMs. This means no more data locality but is better than accessing local SATA instead. Once you move away some VMs or the load on the VM gets smaller you automatically get your data locality back. As described further down Nutanix can tell you exactly how much virtual disk uses local (and possibly remote) data, you get full transparency there as well.

Extremely fast

I think it is known that hyper-converged systems offer very high storage performance. There is not much to add here but to say that it is extremely fast compared to traditional storage arrays. And yes, a full flash Nutanix cluster is as fast (if not faster) than an external full flash storage array with the added benefit that you read from your local SSD and don't have to traverse the network/SAN to get it (that and of course all other hyper-convergence benefits). Performance was the area where Nutanix had the most focus when releasing 4.6 earlier this year. The great flexibility of working with small blocks (extends) rather than the whole object on the storage layer comes at the price of much greater metadata complexity since you need to track all these small entities throughout the cluster. To my understanding, Nutanix invested a great deal of engineering to make their metadata layer extremely efficient to be able to even beat the performance of an object-based implementation. As a partner, we regularly conduct IO tests in our lab and at our customers and it was very impressive to see how all existing customers could benefit from 30-50% better performance by simply applying the latest software (using a one-click upgrade of course).

Intelligent

Since Nutanix has full visibility into every single virtual disk of every single VM it also has lots of ways to optimize how it deals with our data. This is not only the simple random vs sequential way of processing data but it allows to not have one application take over all system performance and let others starve (to name one example). During a support case, we can see all sorts of crazy information (I have a storage background so I can get pretty excited about this) like where exactly your applications consumes their resources (local, remote disks). What block size is used random/sequential, working set size (hot data), and lots more. All with single virtual disk granularity. At some point, they were even thinking of making a tool that would look inside your VM and tell you what files (actually sub-file level) are currently hot because the data is there and just needs to be visualized.

Extensible

If you take a look at the upcoming functionality I wrote about further down you can see just some examples of what is possible due to the very extensible and flexible architecture. Nutanix isn't a typical infrastructure company but is more comparable to how Google, Facebook, and others engineer and build their data centers. Nutanix is a software company following state-of-the-art design patterns and uses modern frameworks. Something I was missing when working with traditional infrastructure. For about a year now they heavily extended what they call the app mobility fabric which comes on top of the distributed storage fabric I mentioned above. This layer allows moving workloads between local hypervisors (currently KVM<->ESXi) and soon between private and public clouds as well. You can for example use KVM-based Acropolis Hypervisor clusters for all your remote offices to get rid of high vSphere licensing costs without losing the main functionality and replicate the VMs to a central vSphere-based cluster. The replicated VMs can then be started on vSphere and Nutanix takes care of the conversion. The hypervisor is a commodity just like your x86 servers.

Visionary

When Nutanix released version 1 of its hyper-converged product in 2011 it was a great idea and a good implementation of the same. Most people in IT didn't however expect that it will become the approach with the highest focus throughout the industry. Today the largest players in IT infrastructure push their hyper-converged products and solutions more than any other and while there are still other less radical approaches (e.g. external all-flash storage), it is foreseeable that they will be less and less important for the big part of IT projects. Nutanix is the leader in the hyper-convergence space but having converged storage within your x86 commodity compute layer is by far not the only thing Nutanix has done since then. Their own included hypervisor is a pretty interesting alternative for all those who don't want to spend lots of dollars on vSphere licenses. While it will not yet suit all of your use cases you might actually be surprised at how much of the functionality vSphere offers today (distributed switch, host profiles, guest customization, HA etc.) you care about is already included out of the box with the added value of greatly reduced complexity (yes I am calling vSphere complex compared to Nutanix Acropolis Hypervisor).

Standardized

Since Nutanix is purchased solely as an appliance solution (even though they are only making the software on top). You are always dealing with a pretested, preconfigured solution stack. You do have a choice when it comes to memory, CPU, disk, and GPU and you get to select from three hardware providers (Nutanix directly, DELL, and Lenovo) but they are all predefined options. This allows to guarantee a high level of stability and fast resolution of support cases. As a Nutanix partner this is worth a lot since the experience we get from one customer is valid for any other customer as well. It also allows us to be very efficient and consistent when implementing or expanding the solution since we can put standardized processes in place to reduce possible issues during implementation to a minimum. Once the Nutanix hardware is rack mounted at the customer their software automatically installs the hypervisor of choice (KVM, Hyper-V or ESXi) and configures are necessary variables (IP addresses, DNS, NTP etc.). This is done by the cluster itself, the nodes stage each other over the local network.

And last but not least: With outstanding support

The support we get from Nutanix is easily the best from all vendors we work with. If you open a case you directly speak to an engineer who can help quickly and efficiently. Our customers sometimes open support cases directly (not through us) and so far the feedback was great. One interesting aspect is the VMware support we receive from Nutanix even if the licenses are not sold by them directly. They analyze all ESXi/vCenter logs we send them. If the bug isn't storage related we also open a case with VMware to continue investigating. They do have the possibility to directly engage with VMware by opening a support case directly (Nutanix->VMware) which we saw on multiple occasions. The last case we witnessed was a non-responsive hosted process (vCenter disconnects) where the first log analysis by Nutanix pointed out a possible issue with the Active Directory Integration Service. We then opened a VMware case which was handled politely but after two weeks when there wasn't much progress other than collecting logs and more logs we remembered what the Nutanix engineer suggested and there was our solution. Disabling Active Directory Integration did the trick. I wouldn't say VMware support isn't good as well but we are always glad that Nutanix takes a look at the logs as well because at the end of the day, you are just happy if you can move on and work on other things, not support cases. 

Note: I strongly encourage you to take a look at the Nutanix Bible (nutanixbible.com) where all mentioned aspects and many more are described in great detail.

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DS
Especialista en ventas de productos at Adistec

My experience with the Nutanix Acropolis is good from both a reseller and end-user experience.

The automation is excellent.

The product offers a quality hypervisor.

The solution offers very good customization.

The administration with the prem solution is very good.

Overall, it's quite a comprehensive solution.

The user experience is very good.

The product has a very nice user interface.

It's easy to use and has a very smooth onboarding process.

We find the performance to be excellent on this solution.

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reviewer1439661 - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Administrator at U.S. Naval War College

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). Prior to something like Foundation, the process to scale out additional infrastructure was also cumbersome and tedious. Nutanix has completely simplified both of these processes and has made it very easy to focus more time on other things.

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CK
Head - UICT and Associate Professor at MIT Pune

We like that the size of the box is 1U or 2U only, and all the servers are fit into that box. The ease of operation is there. All the servers and the SAN storage are inside the box. So there are no wires, cables to manage. Secondly, since it is a hyper-converged infrastructure, we can scale up very easily. Suppose, for example, we were using 24 TB SAN last year, and now we are increasing up to 96 TB SAN. That is very easy to do with Nutanix. Just install the hard disk, enterprise-grade SAS or SSD, and expand that particular SAN. So within a short span of time, we can increase the capacity of the RAM or the hard disk. With how compact the equipment is it saves us a lot of space in the racks. 

In previous years we had six to seven server rooms, those are consolidated to only one server room now. We have only one server room and the space of that server room is hardly is 200 square feet. Cooling is easy, the amount of cooling needed is also reduced, so the administration becomes very easy. Reports are generated very easily. Additionally, we can configure the machines, we can create the VDI, for example, at a fast pace. Within four, five minutes, we are able to create the machine.

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it_user276675 - PeerSpot reviewer
Unix Systems and Storage Manager with 1,001-5,000 employees

Nutanix provides an all-in-one solution for operating our datacenter. Nutanix also provides out-of-the-box redundancy, built in storage savings with compression, deduplication, and erasure coding. All administrative functions are clustered and require no other hardware or software.

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it_user234780 - PeerSpot reviewer
Virtualization Architect, Office of the CTO at API Systems, Inc.
  1. Ease of administration
  2. Monitoring and alerting features through Prism Web UI
  3. Acceleration of non-persistent VDI through the shadow clone feature
  4. Localization of I/O makes boot and login storms a thing of the past
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JL
Network Specialist, Information Technology at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees

The most valuable features are simple management and one-click upgrades. The ability to upgrade during the day, although not recommended, works and is fantastic.

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mikkisse - PeerSpot reviewer
Chief IT Engineer at a cloud provider with 10,001+ employees

We really love the Lifecycle manager and one-click upgrades. All you need to do is run the upgrade procedure and watch it go.

You don't need to update firmware, software, hypervisors, and so on by yourself. LCM can do it for you. It really can save a lot of time. LCM will install only compatible firmware and software, so you can't install (for example) unsupported firmware and break down your system.

LCM is a really cool feature and one of the best in the market. I have never seen anything like this before. 

View full review »
OS
CEO at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
  • Service portal
  • Self-service restore
  • Single pane of glass for management.

We are a Managed Service Provider and these capabilities make our platform agile and easy to use for our customers.

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it_user504840 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior System Administrator at a energy/utilities company with 501-1,000 employees

Scaling is very easy and no limitations are set.

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CI
Pre sales manager at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Database as a service (ERA). The value of Nutanix AOS embedded in ERA can be seen In the course of doing some cumbersome  database operations, such as database provisioning, snapshots and patches. The solution gives our customers the ability to provision databases faster and perform patching. With Nutanix, I have seen a database instance that took less than 15 minutes to provision as compared to the normal one that actually takes 30 minutes or more.

For their Time machine which is also a great feature of their DBaaS Solution, you are able to recover DBs quickly even with less backups and hence, this saves you money from a storage perspective.  

In terms of scalability, customers can scale in/out utilizing a plug and play approach. When there's need for compute or/and storage, you can acquire a compute-only node or a storage-only node and insert it like you would in a blade chassis. 

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FK
Senior Infrastructure Engineer at a computer software company with 201-500 employees

The solution is much faster. The performance is very good - much better than VMware. It's much easier and faster even when you want to create a server from a template or clone. 

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Ryan Uy - PeerSpot reviewer
Solutions Architect at Strategic Synergy Inc

In addition to the hyper-converged infrastructure, most of our clients are pleased with Acropolis' built-in replication in terms of the DR setup. Our clients also like Prism Central's advanced management and analytics, and many find Nutanix Flow and playbooks incredibly useful.

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LP
CEO at ISG

The most valuable feature is the one-click to update the firmware and software. This is a very good feature for me.

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MS
IT Infrastructure Manager at a retailer with 11-50 employees

Some of the most valuable features of Nutanix Acropolis are that it's free from Nutanix and it's very stable. 

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HB
Head Of Hardware Department at a university with 201-500 employees

The best feature of Nutanix Acropolis AOS is the central management of all of our resources. Additionally, it is easy to use

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PS
Owner at a computer software company with self employed

Its low maintenance is a key feature. It is easy to install, upgrade, and scale by adding more blocks. 

Compute analysis is really easy. It takes hours instead of days.

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ET
IS Assistant Manager at a legal firm with 501-1,000 employees

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.

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AJ
Executive Vice President with 201-500 employees

Nutanix has given me an opportunity to create multiple VMs and it's really very resilient for failures. Even if there is a single node failure, the VM gets migrated automatically to the healthy node. I can also take any number of snapshots and restore them at any point in time. The solution offers cloning and it's very simple to create a clone of any server. These are the great features of Nutanix. In addition, it's user-friendly, and in contrast with some solutions, you don't need to know about the technology. Anyone knowing the basics of VMware or hypervisor can start creating VMware, adding the server, and deploying it on the go within a few hours.

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PA
Manager at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

Many clients use the solution in order to move the data center in-house or to a data center in the entity itself. It helps them reduce their footprint.

The solution is stable.

It's scalable. It's software-defined storage.

The initial setup is very easy and the implementation happens quickly.

Technical support is okay.

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reviewer1439442 - PeerSpot reviewer
Associate Engineer at Secure Meters Limited

I definitely find the reduced power consumption very valuable. Another aspect I really like, when one compares Citrix to VMware, is the interface where you talk directly to your VM from the present software.

On-demand scaling is the most valuable feature, I can keep on scaling on-demand.

With Nutanix, if I do three or four nodes if I look at the traditional environment I have to really figure out the wave concept. Connect wave one, wave two, wave six, wave five. In Nutanix I don't have any of these issues. Lastly, deduplication. Deduplication and erasure coding

View full review »
JB
Consulting Solutions Architect at a tech services company with 5,001-10,000 employees

Nutanix has several feature sets that we like. For example, everything's core centralized on the UI. You don't have multiple interfaces that you have to jump between like in some other solutions. It's more integrated for the overall management of the infrastructure. The other part too which is very attractive, is the fact they provide an option if you're not leveraging your OEM hypervisor like VMware or HyperV. That was a significant cost saver for us as well as enabling us to look at alternatives to the VMware tax. 

View full review »
MU
Co-Founder at Mero Reading Room
  • The level of statistical performance data that it can confirm in real-time is extremely useful. I can see what my VM’s hosts and guests are doing from a single pane of glass and identify issues before they would otherwise become apparent.
  • The informatics support for this graphical software is up-to-date with the latest infographic web trends.
View full review »
it_user323556 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. Systems Engineer at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees

The features that are most valuable to our company would be the ease of use and configuration. The Nutanix software automatically balances and vMotions the VMs to other nodes on the cluster as resources are needed. The Nutanix Cassandra intelligently moves around the metadata as needed. it’s practically a set it and leave it product.

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MarcMermuys - PeerSpot reviewer
ICT System Administrator at College of Europe

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. I'm very happy with Nutanix.

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KT
IT Manager at BEST VALUE CHEM PVT LTD

The product provides a complete and wonderful package. The best feature is the level of user-friendliness the solution offers, it's a class apart.

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Ricardo Daniel Machuca Welcomme - PeerSpot reviewer
Coordinador Data Center at INFRAESTRUCTURA UNIFICADA SA DE CV

The solution has a strong foundation.

The support of the infrastructure is very good.

It offers very useful data protection. It's one of the best features. 

We've had very few problems converting this solution with the iOS or virtual iOS. 

The stability is pretty good.

View full review »
DA
Cloud Sales Executive at Laberit

I advise my customers to have a unique management operation center for the three layers. The primary reason is to convert the storage, computation, and hypervisor into one frame. Of course, you have to replicate the data between all the nodes to have redundancy, so you have two or three nodes in case of failure, depending on the resilience you want. I advise my customers to use this kind of technology when they want to focus on their business and don't want to talk about the layers of the subsequent infrastructure that is matched to their business.

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Sergio Simao - PeerSpot reviewer
Analista de Storage at Columbia Storage

The most valuable feature is Move, which allows you to migrate virtual machines from VM to AHV.

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GJ
Project Manager Estonian Government Cloud at State Infocommunication Foundation (RIKS)

The solution is well integrated with other vendors.

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MS
Co Founder & Chief Operating Officer Executive at S2 Consulting Services

One of the most beneficial features that a customer would get from this solution is simplicity and ease of use. Another major benefit is the simplified licensing, where you can buy based on your needs. The third benefit is definitely since it's a leader in its technology, people have the comfort of depending on that technology for their critical business models.

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DT
IT Director at Elite Semiconductor Memory

The solution offers impressive performance.

We don't have to pay for extras.

The interface of the solution is good. I like the UI.

The stability of the solution is quite decent.

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GT
Consultant at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

The fact that there is only one interface to deploy a complete solution for maximum storage is fantastic.

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MA
Direction Générale des Impôts at a sports company with 201-500 employees

I think that the most interesting features are the replication and redundancy.

It is a good solution and it is easy to work on a Nutanix platform.

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Farhan Parkar - PeerSpot reviewer
Product Consultant (Presales) at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

The Nutanix Prism interface is the most beautiful interface I had ever used in any software. The simplicity and fluency of the HTML 5 interface gives a one-of-a-kind user experience. It provides full visibility into and management of my complete virtual infrastructure. The integration to VMware vCenter gives added value, so you don't have to rely on different interfaces for basic VM management.

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CB
IT administrator at a consultancy with 51-200 employees

The dashboard of Nutanix Acropolis AOS allows for simple management. The dashboard has all the information online about what's going on at any given time.

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Andres Arenilla - PeerSpot reviewer
Business Development Consultant at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

I found the most important feature to be the flexibility that the solution offers in adding nodes to the clusters. Nutanix provides a level of scalability and flexibility that you don't get with any other solution on the market. 

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SR
CTO Enterprise Cloud at Amanox Solutions (S&T Group)
  • Very easy management (e.g. daily tasks and also major upgrades)
  • Simple and fast to implement as a partner
  • Very mature and stable with outstanding Nutanix support if needed (we are a L1 and L2 support partner as well)
  • Potential to replace 80-90% of all customer use cases we see in Switzerland
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it_user237264 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Administrator and Sr. VMware Engineer at a retailer with 501-1,000 employees

One of the most valuable features that can be found, is the inclusion of a hypervisor for free. This allowed us to direct the investments and the budget towards other types of aspects, generating a lot of added value.

With the cost we saved on hypervisor licenses, we were able to invest in more nodes and blocks for our platform. In this way, our environment is now prepared to grow much more without having to re-invest in hardware. On the other hand, automation managed to redirect the time of IT staff to other projects, thus increasing productivity.

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it_user941724 - PeerSpot reviewer
Enterprise Technical Consultant at Datacentrix (Pty) Ltd

The most valuable feature would be the ease of deployment. That is the most significant feature for me because I've worked with multiple vendors and it's always been very complicated to install the software and get everything running. It has better software to get everything up and running.

It has a simple interface.

View full review »
BL
System Adminstrator at Twin Disc Inc

Simplified storage management. Therefore, we do not have to rely on others to manage storage, which removes wait times in getting tasks done.

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it_user747537 - PeerSpot reviewer
System Administrator at a energy/utilities company with 501-1,000 employees
  • One-Click upgrades
  • Software defined storage
  • The capacity savings

One click upgrades are an absolute godsend. Being able to upgrade our entire cluster with the click of a button during business hours with zero downtime has made managing our infrastructure so easy. Previously, we had to schedule downtime to perform upgrades on our infrastructure and that quickly becomes painful and time consuming.

Because the entire Nutanix system is contained in a VM, we don't have to reboot physical hosts to apply patches. It's just a restart of a guest VM and we're off. This also brings amazing space saving capabilities (given that it's software-defined) across the hot and cold tiers by way of compression, deduplication, and erasure coding.

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DJ
System Administrator for virtual platforms at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The consolidated storage: no need to use central storage that has a performance penalty. For example, while using central storage that enables file-sharing NAS services & SAN services, when one VM had an IO overload, all the VMs in the same data store in the VMware environment on the same LUN suffered from I/O latency. Now, in the new consolidated storage, this does not happen.

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it_user292611 - PeerSpot reviewer
Assistant Technical Manager with 51-200 employees

There are many features that catch our attention. The most valuable one is it’s distributed file system with the data protection and storage auto tiering. This feature promise a high redundancy for our data while maintaining the high IOPs for traffic intense applications.

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VB
Technical Presales - Server & Storage at a computer software company with 51-200 employees

The most valuable feature of Nutanix Acropolis AOS is it has centralized management.

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JM
Director of Information Technology at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

One of the nicest features was the migration tool. Being able to take any application and migrate it over even while it was in use, and then cut it over without any downtime was very helpful.

Everything ran pretty smoothly, from what I recall.

The initial setup was quite straightforward. 

The solution was very stable. 

I found the pricing to be very reasonable.

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it_user1201536 - PeerSpot reviewer
Virtualization, Data Center, Networks, Linux System Administration at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees
  • DSF with reduction techniques - more storage resources.
  • Resiliency - self-healing, handling a failure.
  • One manage interface - Prism. It's easy to use and monitor your workloads.

Monitoring:

  • Anomaly Detection
  • In the world of IT operations, there is a lot of noise. Traditionally, systems would generate a great deal of alerts, events, and notifications, often leading to the operator either a) not seeing critical alerts since they are lost in the noise or b) disregarding the alerts/events.

Nutanix Software Upgrade:

  • Performing a Nutanix software upgrade is a very simple and non-disruptive process.
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it_user748716 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Systems Technical Specialist at a government
  • Storage snapshots and replication
  • One-Click upgrades
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it_user748257 - PeerSpot reviewer
Development Engineer at a university
  • Overall performance of the platform
  • Scalability
  • Ease of implementation
  • Management GUI Prism

On storage side, these features are very useful:

  • Deduplication
  • Compression
  • Erasure coding
  • Snapshots
  • Asynchronous replication.

The One-Click upgrades are awesome and work well.

The standardized system check using NCC (Nutanix Cluster Check) performs over 150 checks to determine potential issues.

AFS and ABS are just great!!

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it_user245241 - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Manager at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
  • One-click updates
  • Auto-/self-healing
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RV
Presales Consultant at taktik

The support is quite good.

We have found the solution to be stable. It offers good performance. 

The scalability is great.

The product offers a general easy configuration of disaster recovery. That's the major thing. Disaster recovery and business continuity are very good.

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PJ
Global Manager at a mining and metals company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Nutanix Acropolis AOS is flexible and has helped people to work from home during the pandemic.

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LD
IT Project Manager with 5,001-10,000 employees
  • One-click upgrade
  • Data locality for performances
  • Prism central administration console
  • Metro availbility.
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it_user478728 - PeerSpot reviewer
AGM IT Delivery at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
  • Compression, deduplication, and erasure coding
  • Central management using prism
  • Capacity management and planning using prism central
  • One click upgrade to the Nutanix OS as well as for hypervisor
  • Easily scalable with no downtime
  • Provides WAN optimization for replication to remote sites
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CM
Chief Executive Officer at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The solution is easy to use.

The product is quite scalable.

I have found the solution to be stable. 

The product is very easy to install.

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AB
Manager, Operations at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

One of the most valuable features is that it can be applied at any scale. 

The value you get for the price is quite good.

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YN
Senior Information Technology System Engineer at State Informatics Limited

I haven't been there to test everything, but I have been to the Nutanix presentation two weeks back on Nutanix cloud. The cloud features an in-site offering, which I found to be very interesting.

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it_user1104888 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr IT Consultant at Vision Insurence

Nutanix helped us to install hardware and taught us how to deploy with a reset. We learned how to install the Nutanix OS, and run a network.

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KS
Enterprise Systems & IT Architect at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
  • Management is simple
  • There is easy configuration
  • The solution is scalable
  • The product has a compact size that greatly reduces the HW/Datacenter footprint.
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it_user298428 - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Engineer at a government with 501-1,000 employees

The reduced complexity of the overall system is a major plus, especially for smaller IT teams. Nutanix eliminates the need to have a “storage team” when using virtualization.

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it_user232989 - PeerSpot reviewer
System Engineer II at a computer software company with 501-1,000 employees

I valued the high performance I/O and the high availability (HA).

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DD
Responsible MCO at a energy/utilities company with 501-1,000 employees

Nutanix Acropolis AOS makes it easy to use and manage projects and it has a good reputation.

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FG
Senior Account Executive - All Things Software Defined at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

There's a mix of multiple features that I like. A lot of our clients like the fact that it is easy to update and upgrade their clusters via an interface using LCM. 

The initial setup is quite simple. 

The solution remains stable across versions. 

Technical support is great.

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TL
System Engineer at Cloud Vision

The most valuable aspect of the solution is the fact that it doesn't need any downtime even when you are updating the product. 

The solution offers HA, high availability.

The solution is easy to set up.

We find the product to be very stable. 

The scalability is quite good.

Nutanix offers good pricing.

Technical support is helpful. 

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RG
CEO at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

The management interface of this solution is great. We really enjoy not being locked into VMware as the app adviser vendor. The latest version of Acropolis has a very handy micro-segmentation feature, which we use very often. Overall, I think the most significant upside is the great support provided by Nutanix.

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SJ
Storage Analyst at Fidelity National Information Services, Inc.

SRM capabilities for replication have been proven reliable and very useful for our organization. 

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it_user749733 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Infrastructure Manager at a comms service provider with 51-200 employees
  • Availability
  • Scalability
  • Performance
  • Redundancy
  • Excellent Monitoring and Admin Portal
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it_user692262 - PeerSpot reviewer
Ingegnere it senior at a tech services company

The solution's performance and high density are most valuable.

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FH
IT Admin at Felda Prodata Systems Sdn Bhd

The most valuable features are Prism and Acropolis, as they simplified our jobs and give us the opportunity to lower operational costs without reducing the current day-to-day operation performance.

We are using VMware 3-TIER architecture since 2006. Up until this day we’re still using the architecture until we could not expand the cluster anymore. Thus, we need to find a way to migrate our VM servers before it’s too late. The architecture using old traditional SANS storage and AMD processors platform. We’re stuck with VMware version 5.1 and can’t be upgrade to latest version due to the hardware limitation. Maintaining this architecture is not cheap also, as we need to pay annual maintenance to hardware vendors and VMware. It keeps increasing every year.

Our customers demand more processing power and more storage, and then we came across Nutanix, which could solve all burden that we have.

1. We hosting a lot of SAP wintel apps, and this kind of apps is storage and processor hungry. We keep facing downtime when we hosting the VM servers on our old architecture. When we decide to migrate the VM servers to Nutanix , we no longer facing the issue and no more complaint from our customers.

2. The maintenance contract is lower compared to annual maintenance/support contract that we must pay to VMware and hardware vendors. We will get the ROI back in short time if we move to Nutanix.

3. Can be manage through one single console (PRISM) oppose to SAN switches , SAN , VMware , Hardware consoles on old architecture.

4. We experienced a nightmare in term of support on old architecture, where we need to gather VMware engineer and Hardware vendor to solve an issue, and it takes a long time to solve. Nutanix assure us that they can solve Hypervisor and hardware issues within a single call log.

5. Nutanix offer features like data deduplication on its storage, which are not available on our old SANS storage.

6. We hosted our DC on 3rd party DC (leasing based on square feet), we can decom a lot of old servers (which can fill up the space and increase the rental) when we moved to Nutanix. 3 racks of old servers with SAN storage can be consolidate to one rack (still have a lot of spaces to put Nutanix boxes).


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MC
AVP-Datacenter Practice at a computer software company with 201-500 employees

The console and managing are user-friendly.

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LA
Senior Solutions Architect at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

Nutanix has the best virtual desktop infrastructure.

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IZ
Lead Engineer at IBS Platformix

Acropolis' main advantages are high performance and availability.

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AP
Nutanix ,Vmware & AWS Admin at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The most valuable features of this solution are the storage feature on the File Server. 

The hyperconvergence service, as well as the DR solution, are game-changers for Nutanix.

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AG
Senior Program Officer at a non-profit with 5,001-10,000 employees

Nutanix Acropolis AOS is easy to use, integrates with other hardware configurations, and is simple to manage.

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it_user768270 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director of IT at a hospitality company with 51-200 employees
  • Prism 
  • One-Click
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it_user600720 - PeerSpot reviewer
Cyber Security Engineer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Hyper-convergence is the most valuable feature for me as it allows me to scale the hardware according to project requirements.

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it_user692274 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Infrastructure Architect at a wellness & fitness company with 501-1,000 employees

One-click upgrade and data locality are valuable features. The one-click upgrade provides simple management and upgrades. Data locality provides super-fast data access and ultra-low latency.

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it_user388365 - PeerSpot reviewer
Hyperconverged specialist with Nutanix & CEO at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
  • Distributed storage fabric
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it_user327513 - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Director at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
  • Metro availability
  • Fingerprinting
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it_user302127 - PeerSpot reviewer
Network Engineer at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

All the software-defined, hyper-converged, and cloud-based infrastructure provide our network with VMs and storage.

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OE
Enterprise Solutions Executive (AWS Certified Solutions Architect) at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

The most valuable features of Nutanix Acropolis AOS are ease of management, hyper-convergence platform, and it has robust operations.

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it_user292980 - PeerSpot reviewer
Solution Consultant at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees
  • Shadow clone
  • Deduplication fingerprint on ingest
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JE
system administrator at a comms service provider with 51-200 employees

Nutanix Acropolis AOS is easy to use, it is a great platform.

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VH
Technical Manager at ISIT AE FZ LLC

The most valuable feature I have found to be the Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV).

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MA
Consulting Solutions Architect at a tech services company with 5,001-10,000 employees

The tool for operations is pretty easy to use. It has a single pane of glass and you don't have to jump around various toolsets.

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MA
Senior System Engineer at a comms service provider with 201-500 employees

What I like the most are the high-availability and scalability.

I am comfortable with all of the features.

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MM
Solutions Architect at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

- Support Calls are being answered directly by L3 Support team who are capable to solve not only Acropolis issue but hypervisor as well. 

- One-Click Updates.

- One Management Console for Cluster Management ( Compute, Storage ) and VMs operations as well.

- Storage Only Nodes.

- Having multiple HW Vendors & Hypervisors in the same Data centre and manage all with one management tool.

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JN
Sr. Associate Vice President at Hitachi Systems, Ltd.

The solution brings a lot of convenience and ease of use for the customer. 

The product is easy to manage.

It has easy scalability, which is one of its great advantages. A customer will often look for this feature. 

The solution is highly compatible with other platforms.

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it_user1260648 - PeerSpot reviewer
Directeur Technique at INFONECS

Karbon is a must-have as it drastically simplifies the deployment of Kubernetes.

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AS
System Administrator at De La Salle-College of Saint Benilde

The most valuable feature is the analytics. It gives us a projection of our usage and we can easily justify any request that we have for improvements.

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it_user653052 - PeerSpot reviewer
Works at a consultancy with 1-10 employees
  • Data protection in its various flavours.
  • Overall performance of the platform.
  • Scalability.
  • Ease of implementation.
  • Great GUI.
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MM
Senior System Engineer at a comms service provider with 51-200 employees

The HCI environment itself is very intuitive. Everything is centralized under one solution. And, they also have a fast server built-in in addition to a network analyzer.

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NN
System Analyst at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees

This is a very flexible solution that you are able to run however you want.

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AA
Expert System Engineer at a comms service provider with 51-200 employees

The ability to integrate with other products is fine.

This is a flexible solution.

The interface is okay.

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AW
Anonymous at a manufacturing company with 11-50 employees

Acropolis AOS's networking concept is excellent.

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RL
Driftchef at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Acropolis has a great interface and lots of management features packaged with it at an affordable price.

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AT
Managing Director at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

The solution is very stable.

The ease of deployment is very good.

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JS
Infrastructure Architect at a manufacturing company with 5,001-10,000 employees
  • Single pane of glass view for all components.
  • Excellent after-sales support.
  • Easy updates and upgrades.
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CB
Senior EVP at Hitachi Systems, Ltd.

The most valuable features are the user-friendly dashboard and that we don't need to move resources manually when adding new nodes into running clusters.

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MA
Senior Pre-Sales Engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

The configuration is easy and it's flexible.

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it_user892704 - PeerSpot reviewer
Solution Architect at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

Flexibility. We're able to mix performance nodes with storage nodes easily. Unlike other vendors where, if we start a hyperconverged solution with them, we have to stick to a specific model, to a specific series with specific capabilities, with Nutanix it's very easy to mix and match the best solution, especially for a dynamic infrastructure like ours.

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it_user517800 - PeerSpot reviewer
Chef du service informatique at a healthcare company with 501-1,000 employees
  • Simple to use
  • Ergonomic
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it_user303024 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. Systems Engineer and Tech Lead at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
  • Small footprint
  • Scalability
  • Price when compared to other computer/storage solutions is better value
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it_user290346 - PeerSpot reviewer
Account Executive with 51-200 employees

It's an all-in-one solution.

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it_user630414 - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical director at a tech services company with 1-10 employees

Hypervisor agnostic. 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 spending more money on licenses.

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SP
Presales Engineer at VSS Myanmar

You need to send commands through the command-line interface(CLI). This could be improved. The commands are done better in VMware.

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MS
Technical Head at eSky IT

Any feature related to the performance, like data locality, compression, and deduplication are all very important features.

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it_user772293 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Business Analyst with 51-200 employees

On-demand scaling is the most valuable feature, I can keep on scaling on-demand. Secondly, Nutanix allows me to create my own configuration. I can create my own configuration and I can get all of it as per my configuration. Number three is that in Nutanix if I do three or four nodes if I look at the traditional environment I have to really figure out the wave concept. Connect wave one, wave two, wave six, wave five. In Nutanix I don't have any of these issues. Lastly, deduplication. Deduplication and erasure coding.

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PC
Owner at SiS International Limited

The most valuable feature is its data locality, as well as the solution's performance. 

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SK
System Engineer at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

Their Google operating system is more mature, so their results are much better.

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it_user756093 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Engineer

Nutanix Prism.

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it_user8178 - PeerSpot reviewer
Product Manager at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees
  • One-click hypervisor and firmware upgrade
  • Snapshots and clones
  • Compression and deduplication
  • Backup and disaster recovery
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TS
Enterprise Account Manager at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

The most valuable features are easy cloud administration and management. Acropolis also has a very good response time with our database applications.

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TS
Sr. Systems Engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
  • Price
  • Ease of use
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it_user751839 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Engineer at a tech company with 51-200 employees

Hypervisor-agnostic: I can use a VMware or Hyper-V license, if I already have one. But if I use a similar solution as Nutanix Acropolis hypervisor (AHV) that comes embedded in a Nutanix solution, I can manage all my virtual environments with everything that I need without spend more money on licenses.

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it_user692310 - PeerSpot reviewer
System Architect at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

The Prism interface is valuable. It is very easy to manage, is based on HTML5, and all CVMs are able to assume the management role. They are not the SPOF.

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RS
Senior Director at a tech vendor with 201-500 employees

One of the main features of the solution is that it works on many hypervisors. It is a big advantage. Additionally, the solution is compatible with VMware and Hyper-V, and the management interface, which is called Prism, is very intuitive and user-friendly.

The solution upgrades very easily with the one-click upgrade feature. There are no hassles, it can upgrade the firmware and all the software. The management is very easy.

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RR
Presales Consultant at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Nutanix has many features.

It supports multi-cloud integration that includes AWS, Google, and Azure.

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it_user511536 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sales Engineer at a tech company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Prism and Clustering.

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it_user1052997 - PeerSpot reviewer
IS Manager with 51-200 employees

The most valuable features are its ease of use and its good performance.

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it_user692268 - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Architect at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

Scalability is the most valuable feature because it is easy to scale-up and scale-out without impact in performance since it is always online.

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Buyer's Guide
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI)
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI). Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
767,667 professionals have used our research since 2012.