EMC VNX (Discontinued) vs. Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure

• EMC VNX is suited for VMware environment as it integrates with vCenter.
• Integrates well with SolarWinds storage monitoring software.
• It is well suited for enterprise-level organizations with 100+ servers.
• It is not suited for small businesses as it requires specialized administrators and has relatively high license cost.
• It is not suited for businesses that host most of their servers on the cloud.

Incentivized

I would highly recommend using Nutanix HCI for any of your infrastructure needs. I would highly suggest saving money and using the free included AHV hypervisor. The performance is incredible, and the data reduction capabilities are on par with vSAN. I would only recommend using ESXi with Nutanix AOS if AHV does not yet support some one-off configurations or if you still want to use horizon while the frame is still growing.

• VNX has had very solid uptime. Over the course of the last 5 years, we have had very little if any downtime.
• We have also used it for our home directories, and with the data dedupe on the file side it has saved us a lot of space.
• Adding additional drive space has also been really easy.

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

• It occupies a large floor space in the data center.
• Unisphere management interface uses Java, which is problematic to run.

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

The learning curve on it is very low and easy to use. It is very user friendly and easy to understand.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Modernizing with HCI, which creates private cloud-like data centers, is, for many organizations, the first step in their digital transformation. Companies that have kept their eye on the long game and made decisions based on a fully-developed ROI analysis have found themselves uniquely positioned to make the critical operational changes the COVID-19 situation has demanded.

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

• Dell EMC Unity is the improved version of EMC VNX. It has all the features in VNX with better performance.
• NetApp all flash is faster and more expensive. It performs better with Citrix systems and VDI solutions.
• HP MSA storage system is less performant and less expensive. It works better for file and CCTV data storage.

Incentivized

We've decided to go for both VxRail and Nutanix AOS to make sure we can get the best deals from both sides. I appreciate this may not be a path most companies can go down, but always good to have a bit of healthy competition between vendors to ensure you're getting the best pricing from both sides!

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

Incentivized

• I think it has provided improved reliability and performance [compared to] our previous solutions.
• The lack of performance metrics has led us to need a 3rd party tool that integrates into our Vsphere environment to give us feed back on performance.

Incentivized

• We save money with an all-inclusive pricing model and cut out of extra pieces we no longer need
• The management of this product is minimal and save time and resources.
• We found that the N+1 portion is working well but not identified well.

Incentivized