Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) vs. Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure vs. StorPool

It provides the optimized storage performance and cost for your workload and these options really work with SSD-backed storage and it improves the database performance. Keeping backups of your EC2 resources, including EBS volumes is a little bit tricky and its takes some more time and increase through put is also a tiring job to do.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Storpool performs well on block level (and that is what we use it for). It is not yet supporting a kind of distributed filesystem or object storage - a filesystem layer needs to be built on top of it.

• Raw storage capacity attached to your instance operative system
• Frequent data rewriting (mission critical for reporting)
• Low latency connectivity (14 reporting subsidiaries in different time zones)
• Videly spreaded for implementation
• Fast accessible drive
• Block storage are core for Java, Net mobile applications

Incentivized

• One-click upgrades; whether it's hypervisor, firmware, disk or other updates. This feature has drastically decreased complexity and administration time.
• Data Locality. Not all hyperconverged technology is created equal. When I first purchased Nutanix they were the only vendor (and as far as I know, still are) that made sure the storage a VM used was on the same host that VM was running on. Given a normal operating state, the [storage] network is literally only used for replication data.
• They got rid of traditional RAID. Nutanix uses software to determine where a VM's storage should be written and replicated to. This dramatically decreases I/O when changing the number of nodes in a cluster, be it on purpose or during a failure scenario. Ex. adding a new node: If one uses RAID arrays then enough space has to be set aside to create a new array that includes the new node, then all the information has to be copied over, and the old array destroyed. RAID arrays do not grow and shrink gracefully so Nutanix has designed a better solution.
• The Nutanix management interface was built on HTML5. No more flash headaches!

Incentivized

• Distributed Storage array with very high throughput in terms of reading & write operations.
• Horizontal scaling without much complexity of management.
• Easily integrate with OpenStack cloud.
• Doesn't depend on proprietary hardware, integrates with commodity hardware.

• Creating too much EBS can be disaster if you are not properly organized by tags
• In terms of pricing it's a bit on higher side.
• In terms of performance, there is room for improvement as sometimes reading or saving the data can be painful.

Incentivized

• Can be priced high at times.
• 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.

Incentivized

• Graphical interface is for monitoring and stats, but not for operations.

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.

Incentivized

Amazon EBS is a great tool and fairly easy to use as long as you are familiar with the Amazon Web Service ecosystem. It allows a great way for you to move storage around easily and allows you to quickly provision storage as needed based on the business requirement. For us, it's easy to move between our EC2 images that had been linked with EBS storage between these Amazon accounts.

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

Incentivized

So far no issue on availability during no issue on network or power outage

Incentivized

The performance is nothing short of amazing. This is an HCI solution, and as any all-flash HCI solution is amazingly fast, Nutanix AOS fills local IO requests until its local IO is saturated before reaching out over the network. This lowers latency substantially compared to vSAN.

The support for Amazon Elastic Block Store is great as long as you can articulate your needs. Like most tools, there may be some back and forth before you find a support person that is knowledgable in the tool and can provide you with necessary insights.

Our implementation team were great and worked with us and got the program up and running very easily. Every time we called post implementation we immediately talked to an Engineer, which is so unusual in dealing with companies. Everything they have promised they have full filled. I think their support is top notch.

Incentivized

We requested more training than typical which was very in depth

Incentivized

A lot of online training courses, most of them are free.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

So far I have only used Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) and Azure but comparatively [I] prefer AWS elastic Block store as its having more advantages than Azure and I found it quite satisfactory and it helped a lot for information storage. We are not looking for any other hosting provider at this time.

Incentivized

Nutanix integrates very well with Rubrik for backup and protection of the environment. Nutanix gave us simplicity and scalability compared to VMware and allowed us to extend our infrastructure into the cloud using EC2. One unified management pane for all our workloads, unlike VMWare.

Incentivized

We made a very careful selection of our storage vendor and solution. After researching the newest technologies, our team decided to deploy a software-defined storage solution from StorPool.

We have scaled our products over the years and continue to do so very easily.

Incentivized

• When your application needs high IOPS storage, this is a great solution that will keep your business functioning.
• Without Amazon Elastic Block Store you could try spreading your data across several standard drives, but that introduces complexity and still has IOPS limits.

Incentivized

• We find that return on investment is probably a better metric in most cases.
• ROI analysis is more than an exercise. Companies must outline what their future looks like, even if it’s vastly different from what they’re used to and comfortable with.
• As good as your financial analysis might be, displacing status quo infrastructure has a lot of emotions tied to it.

Incentivized

• We have not calculated precise ROI. We focused on getting the best solution at a reasonable price, based on market research. Initially, we didn’t need a lot of capacity, so we invested in servers and network, which could handle several times more capacity, but bought smaller drives to keep the investment low. We achieved a starting price of $3.2/GB usable and $1.4/GB logical. Later we expanded the capacity by adding more drives to the system. Currently, the system has a price of approximately $2.3/GB usable and $0.99/GB logical and a price of $0.09/IOPS.