HPE SimpliVity is a hyper-converged infrastructure solution. HPE acquired SimpliVity for its Omnicube line of products in January 2017.
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Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure
Score 8.3 out of 10
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Nutanix in San Jose, California offers their software-defined Enterprise Cloud as a hyper-converged infrastructure solution. The Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure solution combines the Nutanix Acropolis virtualization solution, Nutanix AHV hypervisor (though Acropolis works with other hypervisors), Prism cluster manager, Nutanix Calm and Nutanix Flow server management, and is available on the Nutanix NX series of server hardware appliances, as well as third-party OEM appliances.
SimpliVity Omnicube is well suited in any environment. Especially if you are not currently using any VMware or Hyper-V products. It is a great gateway into the virtualization of your data center. For environments where VMware is currently being used, SimpliVity will be a great addition. Less cabling is required. Better performance is guaranteed. Two boxes are required as they work as a high availability pair. As the years go by you can simply just add a box or two to grow your environment. You can also get them configured with NVidia Grid cards to bring graphical performance to the VDI environment.
For an organization that requires top-notch performance HCI, Nutanix is the best. You may start with 3 nodes and expand the cluster as required. The management through Nutanix Prism Central and Element was so easy that even a Junior Engineer was able to handle it. The Nutanix platform is not suitable for organizations with a small budget and fewer requirements for high-performance infrastructure, as the Nutanix solution itself is suited for enterprises.
"Nutanix is an operating system playing inside an existing, rich IT ecosystem." Listen to Wendy M. Pfeiffer, CIO of Nutanix, as she shares game-changing results with the implementation of infrastructure-as-code.
With one-click simplicity, Nutanix AOS streamlines IT operations and relieves budget pressures by integrating storage, networking, and compute services into a single solution managed by IT generalists. Start small and scale without limit to meet business demands.
Deliver applications with the highest possible performance throughout the full lifecycle, not just day one. Provide reliable performance SLAs without worrying about workload changes or growth in application demands.
The one downside I have working with Nutanix is the sales team. They seem to try to add in extra goodies to sales quotes or push for extras that you don't really need and you have to tell them to take them out. Don't be afraid to push back on them.
Need to analyze sizing with sales team to ensure right sizing.
AOS definitely make our dev/test virtual environment management much easier than before. And the consolidation the test/dev environment from Azure and Cisco UCS, we have less need to transfer large amount of data between different hardware platforms which was very big challenge. To expand the capacity is very easy to archive as well.
It sits nicely ontop of VMWare and is easy enough to use. Some improvements to the UI could be done, such as placing buttons where it is expected to have them not in unusual places, so you have to hunt for them. The backup and restore is intuitive and makes things super easy if you need to do a quick rollback. Space savings on multiple VMs and backups means we are backing up more than we need which gives us confidence in what we do. Updating the system is also fairly easy and their support has always been fantastic. They will contact us if they detect any issues, usually before we notice them!
It's not out of the box easy, but once you get the fundamentals the steep learning curve flattens out and the processes to get things done and how it works becomes very apparent. It's wrapping the slight change in workflow from prior VM management methods took time to unbox and apply the Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure way
Nutanix AOS performance is light years ahead of HPE. We were nervous about using Nutanix AHV but it has been a vast improvement and saves on cost. Applications has been much improved and end users have commented. It has also freed up time for our Network Administrators and made their lives easier.
Support is very good. With proactive support, you are supported by an engineer in North America who answers the phone and immediately begins assisting with your issue. The folks I have dealt with in the last several years have been very skilled and it is rare to have a ticket open for more than a day or two. Issues affecting production are dealt with appropriately and are escalated within the support organization.
Nutanix provide top tier support - their only rival in this field in my experience is Rubrik. Their sales and the aftersales team really put the effort in to make the initial install an easy process to complete and support we've required post that has been expertly handled. Their support's first point of contact is the equivalent of 3rd line at other vendors and they're always more than willing to explain concepts to help us better understand the issue/solution provided.
IPv6 is needed for link local discovery. We do not have IPv6 configured on our network so the easiest way to get our nodes configured and discovered by foundation was to configure the IPv4 addressing within the node prior to trying to discover with foundation.
vSAN on VXrail and a Cisco Flashstack was our two existing systems before bringing in a Nutanix cluster. The performance of Nutanix HCI was far better than vSAN's performance (hybrid vs. hybrid and AF vs. AF.) However, Pure does deliver on its claim of being the fastest storage possible, which is true. However, the flashstacks management and complex setup do not compare to the ease of using Nutanix HCI.
Found an immediate reclamation of time. SAN's are a pain to manage and update - Nutanix made turned a couple hours of work into one click.
They are a software company. Every Time they come out with an update I find my performance improving, or a new feature added. Soon I'll be able to give my developers controlled self-service capabilities. I originally bought hardware and it's evolving on me into a private cloud in a box.
