NetApp's ONTAP Data Management Software is a storage and data management and protection solution. ONTAP 9 allows users to build an intelligent hybrid cloud that is the foundation of a NetApp Data Fabric that spans flash, disk, and cloud. Flexibly deploy storage on a choice of architectures—hardware storage systems, software-defined storage (SDS), and the cloud—while unifying data management across all of them.
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Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure
Score 8.9 out of 10
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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.
I have highly benefited from the performance of this great tool. Storage and data management programs have been running as planned since we deployed this system. Under NetApp ONTAP Data Management Software our data and customers contacts are always secure. It has helped our company in reducing storage costs as we can safely use cloud storage services. It gives us continuity guarantee even after our systems fail to function due to strong backup system.
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.
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!
More details on network interfaces are available in CLI. Would like to see similar visibility on the GUI.
Deleting volumes that have been snapmirrored have to be released at the snapmirror destination first. Would be nice to have that feature at the source where you are deleting the volume.
When creating a volume in the GUI it adds to the default junction point. Would be nice to choose the junction point as you were creating the volume (this is a feature available in the CLI).
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.
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
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.
NetApp support is always second to none. That being said I have never once had to contact support for the NetApp System Manager software. It is simple, stable and easy to use. Given that their support is stellar in all other areas I don't see how this would be any different
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.
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.
I have only used NetApp ONTAP Select platform in our organization in data storage and file management. It has efficiently managed all data-related problems and gives us the right roadmap of managing data from all sources effectively. Data migration from our company to the cloud storage datasets has been easy and secure. It provides reliable intelligence from all information gathered from our data sources that enhances better operations and smart decisions.
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.
Previously were were running with just locally attached storage across all of our estate. With this tool we are not able to simplify the management of storage saving on resource usage across our Ops teams allowing us to focus on "more important" tasks.
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.
