Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) vs. Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure

Suitable for companies that are looking for performance at a competitive price, flexibility to switch instance type even with RI, flexibility to add-on IOPS, option to lower running cost with the regular introduction of new instance type that comes with higher performance but at a lower cost.

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

• Huge Diverse range of machine shapes are available which cater to our demand.
• Ability to combine the machines and integrate them with any other service in AWS (Ex: RDS, S3)
• Handling performance and scalability using auto-scaling, ELB configuration and high performance machine shapes.

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

• The choices on AMIs, instance types and additional configuration can be overwhelming for any non-DevOps person.
• The pricing information should be more clear (than only providing the hourly cost) when launching the instance. AWS DynamoDB gives an estimated monthly cost when creating tables, and I would love to see similar cost estimation showing on EC2 instances individually, as not all developers gets access to the actual bills.
• The term for reserving instances are at least 12 months. With instance types changing so fast and better instances coming out every other day, it's really hard to commit to an existing instance type for 1 or more years at a time.

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

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

You an start using EC2 instances immediately, is so easy and intuitive to start using them, EC2 has wizard to create the EC2 instances in the web browser or if you are code savvy you can create them with simple line in the CLI or using an SDK. Once you are comfortable using EC2, you can even automate the process.

Incentivized

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.

AWS's support is good overall. Not outstanding, but better than average. We have had very little reason to engage with AWS support but in our limited experience, the staff has been knowledgeable, timely and helpful. The only negative is actually initiating a service request can be a bit of a pain.

Incentivized

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

Amazon EC2 is super flexible compared to the PaaS offerings like Heroku Platform and Google App Engine since with Amazon EC2, we have access to the terminal. In terms of pricing, it's basically just the same as Google Compute Engine. The deciding factor is Amazon EC2's native integration with other AWS services since they're all in the same cloud platform.

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

Incentivized

• It reduced the need for heavy on-premises instances. Also, it completely eliminates maintenance of the machine. Their SLA criteria are also matching business needs. Overall IAAS is the best option when information is not so crucial to post on the cloud.
• It makes both horizontal and vertical scaling really easy. This keeps your infrastructure up and running even while you are increasing the capacity or facing more traffic. This leads to having better customer satisfaction.
• If you do not choose your instance type suitable for your business, it may incur lots of extra costs.

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