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.
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SANsymphony
Score 9.1 out of 10
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DataCore SANsymphony software-defined storage aims to deliver flexibility, scalability, and cost-efficiency in a HCI platform. Powered by a block-level storage virtualization technology, SANsymphony is designed to provide flexibility to control how data is stored, protected, and accessed. The vendor states users can ensure business continuity with just 2 nodes, easily scaling out to 64 nodes, and achieve productivity for performance-demanding workloads by improving I/O processing and reducing…
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.
This product is very well suited to companies that use SANs and wish to secure their data in another room on another physical medium, regardless of whether the SANs or servers come from different suppliers. It will work with all types of data storage and transport layers (FC or iSCSI). This solution is very economical for small infrastructures with all the functionalities of the leading manufacturers on the market.
"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.
There's very little that I can find in their software that I would say needs to be improved. Sometimes the updates are too frequent and just as we finish updating all our sites another update comes out. Due to the many, many various options for what hardware to use, sometimes it is difficult trying to figure out what hardware options are the best for the money. DataCore can help a bit with this but because they only are the software side of the solution they tend to not prefer one hardware vendor over another (they get along with everyone). They do have good documentation that covers known issues with various hardware items.
While they support de-dup, it is recommended that you not de-dup the storage used for operating systems, or high change rated type data. The requires some planning to ensure the storage that is targeted for de-dup only have data that end users would be using (such as MS Office files etc.). Also, their de-dup console is not yet integrated inside their main SANsymphony console. They are working on it but it's not there yet.
While their console allows you to connect to each of the nodes without closing the interface you have to log out and in when you switch between a different storage server groups. It would be nice if they had an interface more like vCenter to where you see all server group in a list and can just click on each group. It would be nice to be able to see multiple groups at the same time. So having more of an Enterprise approach (v/s a local storage cluster) view would provide better management of the environment. For example, their current reports can only run for each storage server group. There is currently not a way to run the same reports or look at performance across the enterprise (only the local site).
Having an enterprise "Storage Dashboard" that could show capacity, usage, performance and any issues would also be very beneficial. Currently, DataCore does not have this.
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'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.
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.
In the 3 years I have been running this, I have contacted support around 4 or 5 times and that was for minor questions with exception of one time when I was performing an update on the system. And in that one time, they were very timely in assisting me with correcting the problem. Top notch customer support!
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.
We reviewed DotHill, EMC, HP, Dell-Compliant, Left-Hand, NetApp and VMware's vSAN offerings and after reviewing costs, performance, and features, DataCore came out on top. We discovered that DataCore's solution allowed us to save about 50%, as compared to other SAN vendors but maintained a rich set of features that we needed for current and future growth.
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.
