Likelihood to Recommend I'd strongly recommend IBM Power servers to anyone who has the budget for it. A Power Virtual Machine, what is generally called FlexTB VM, can support as many small VM of 256GB, and scale up to 32TB on the fly. If IBM recommended architecture is combined with your organizational reference architecture, then forget about running into unplanned downtimes.
Read full review I think Nutanix AOS is a great product and, I would recommend it to anyone. The only reason I did not give it a 10 out of 10 is because I don't do that for any product. Every product has room for improvement.
Read full review Pros I love how it supports a mix of operating systems protection of our sensitive energy data and ensuring compliance with industry regulations. It provides a flexibility that ensures that we can accommodate increased workloads without a complete overhaul of our infrastructure. Read full review One component to support both compute and storage needs for virtualization. Easy expandable as business needs arise both at the node level and larger with blocks. Well outlined interface with good historical data. API tools are available to obtain logging information from Nutanix that can be used with other monitoring tools such as Splunk. Read full review Cons A solid IDE for editing programs. SEU was simple and solid. Then it became outdated and support for it ended as the language continued to evolve. That's fine. But RDi is expensive and shaky at best, and VS Code, while free, is severely lacking even the modicum of features RDi has. Read full review Nutanix has a huge learning curve. We purchased the on-line training course when we moved to the platform and it was literally weeks of instruction. It was so extensive, in fact, that we ran out of time to complete it before the test. Operations that cannot be done from the browser require running commands from a terminal emulator; perhaps owing to the newness of the platform, documentation is not robust. I highly recommend you buy the tech support. Software updates are sometimes rushed to release. I've gotten to where I wait at least a few weeks after release before installing them, as I've run into significant issues with buggy software. Such installations have required time-consuming tech support calls to resolve. While the promise of perpetual VM uptime is being fulfilled, the dashboard frequently reports issues that need to be resolved. Because of significant hardware redundancy, the cost per byte of storage capacity is high. Read full review Likelihood to Renew This is one of the best systems on the market. You can have Flash/Copy which created another LPAR to look like the system you are copying. This takes seconds and not minutes. Then you can use BRNS to do full system backups nightly with no downtime. I am ready for us to upgrade to a Power 10.
Read full review We made a huge financial investment with this platform (four clusters, all-flash storage array), so we're in it for the long haul. Luckily it's a beast. I've had to use support more than any other platform I've administered, but the help has been very good. Nutanix continues to add features and innovations which increase the ROI
Read full review Usability They are very easy to set up and use once you re knowledgeable enough to deal with it. They are continuously enhance the user experience on the HMC and operations on the systems. Once setup it's like a beast, going on and on. I have experience with servers that are not being rebooted for more than 1000 days
Read full review While you are going to have to comfortable with CLI to perform a lot of functions, the truth is most of the day-to-day work is done right through the web interface. That's one area that has improved a lot in the two years I've had it: how much can be done through the browser as opposed to the command line. And I still would like to see the system better documented. The articles often seem to presume a high level of knowledge about the system, making it difficult sometimes to complete tasks that I would like to be able to perform without contacting tech support.
Read full review Reliability and Availability In all of the years I have used various Power System, I have never had any problems at all. Even when hackers were attacking our email servers and many users PCs, the IBM Power System came out completely unscathed. I haven't even had any application errors that were able to take the system down. Nor have I ever experienced an unplanned outage
Read full review Performance The IBM Power System is built for integration. It supports multiple operating systems and you can run multiple OS's on the same box with no problems at all. It also supports a number of open source languages such as PHP, Java, Python, and Perl which helps you continue to grow and integrate with lots of other systems.
Read full review Due to the cool DFS architecture, Nutanix has good read performance for loads. In general, everything works well. We only ran into problems with very specific workloads that did not allow multithreading. It is also worth noting that loads should be tuned according to best practices for best performance, which is not always an easy task.
Read full review Support Rating On large-scale systems, the rating would have been 10. However, I have seen some cases in more rural areas where the IBM onsite support is not as available or of the highest quality as in the past. For software support, there are sometimes instances of language barriers.
Read full review Nutanix [AOS] is a leader in the HCI industry and it becomes evident after deploying the software. The solution runs effortlessly and can scale seamlessly. We ran the Nutanix solution on Lenovo Servers and since Lenovo has a close working relationship with Nutanix, you can procure the Nutanix software directly from Lenovo as part of your Lenovo HCI solution. The advantage of going this route is that the hardware has been tested and verified by Lenovo that it is thus certified for Nutanix. The support is then also directly with Lenovo for both hardware and software.
Read full review Implementation Rating Systems are robust and you need to know exactly what your are going to do with them. There are multiple configurations possible and you need to gather your requirements first, before going on with the implementation. Tuning is a must before migrating production systems
Read full review Alternatives Considered Power server do not need a stack of software for viruses, spam and others... Power server do not need to have release often power server are much more strong then other manufacturer Power server do not need to restart offen
Read full review We looked at both Simplivity and Cisco
HyperFlex . Both are pretty good in their own right. Simplivity was very 'efficient' in the way they handled data, but we didn't like the idea of a propitiatory hardware card. Cisco's
HyperFlex was our second choice, but we were so impressed with what Nutanix had done for us already, that we were already leaning toward that.
Read full review Scalability This system can work in a small factory with a few users and easily scale out to thousands of users. It is truly amazing on how much you can throw at this box and it will just keep humming. It is great for use across multiple departments and even across multiple corporations. I worked at one company where we were hosting multiple corporations on just one large Power System and had ZERO problems.
Read full review Return on Investment In the event of a crash, IBM Power servers offer a variety of simple options to recover the operating system. With the flexibility offered by IBM Power servers, the production business can be improved by making the most of its physical servers. Read full review It is a highly redundant solution Nutanix [AOS] provides a simple easy to manage HCI platform with a reduced TCO and an increased ROI Centralized management solution of consolidated sever and storage solution in a virtualized environment which minimizes wastage of valuable resourses Offers businesses the agility and flexibility to run other virtualized platforms on the Nutanix environment Read full review ScreenShots