Likelihood to Recommend 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 I would recommend it to anyone who has three or more servers. We just received another quote as I am about to deploy Scale at City Hall as well. This will replace my 8-year-old VMware cluster that hosts 20 servers.
Read full review Pros 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 Snapshots are lean and fast, so restore time is simply amazing. When you don't have time to wait after a crypto attack to restore, I have found nothing faster! Clients can never fully know their growth for years to come, and sometimes it is only a year after the original install. This is no problem we can build on to the system like Lego blocks. Just simply adding a node or two and there is no downtime! There are many functions that can be done while servers are running that help to maintain the most uptime, as an example disk size on the primary disk can be expanded without shutting down the server. Read full review Cons 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 It exposes no backup API. You have to treat VMs as physical machines, with all the drawbacks. This is a huge problem, since the official partner Acronis can't deliver. If you ever worked with Veeam you want it back very very badly. Assigned RAM is used RAM. The hypervisor can't share memory or only allocate what is used etc. It's wasted RAM most of the time. No logging and auditing. (There is, but not visible to the customer). The GUI is quite bad. It looks like done by a designer instead of an IT expert. But it's improving constantly. The company relies heavily on KVM, but seems to have no developer in the open source community. This leads to answers like "we can't do anything about QEMU drivers". Yes, you can. Have delevopers working on it. You can't do basic things like list all of your VMs and see how much RAM/disk, etc. they are using (e.g. in a list view). No rules on which VMs start on which nodes, which VMs to prioritize, etc. Read full review Likelihood to Renew 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 Since I have had no issues with downtime; easier management of my cluster and the ability to lower the number of devices in my Infrastructure, I will gladly renew my support contract with Scale Computing HC3 and upgrade my equipment with them when it comes time for it.
Read full review Usability 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 Everything you need to do is point-and-click easy. If you are the kind of admin who wants to edit every config file and endlessly customize your environment, then Scale may not be for you. On the other hand, if you just want it to work really well, and do what they told you it will do, then Scale is the ideal system.
Read full review Reliability and Availability Never had an outage or an error. Once a hard drive failed, but Scale kept on working flawlessly without interruption.
Read full review Performance 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 Performance has been just as outstanding as reliability. I have never experienced delays in any aspect of usage.
Read full review Support Rating 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 The support team deserves major props for how cordial and professional they were with our implementation. We were assigned a project manager and engineer. Everything was scheduled with our kick-off call, and our engineer got us up and running in no time.
Read full review In-Person Training I did not do in-person training.
Read full review Online Training Because Scale is so simple, the training is just as quick and easy.
Read full review Implementation Rating The implementation was very easy. We had Scale support on standby and they were ready and eager to help if needed. The process went so fast the employees in the organization did not even know it was done.
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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 At the end of the day, and in the environment we are in, Scale just fits the bill, both price-wise and functionality-wise. Upgrading our VM environment was always a week-long process, now, it is a twenty-minute process, implementing, converting VMs, and rolling everything over to Scale was completed in less than a week's time, and that included training.
Read full review Scalability HC3 is one of the best products I have purchased for our district. It is unbelievably reliable to the point that they shoot themselves in the foot on support contracts.
Read full review Return on Investment 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 0% downtime or loss of revenue due to downtime. The simplicity of testing backups in a live environment in the event of a technical catastrophe. Ease of mind and a lot less stress worrying about a raid system within a standalone server dying in the middle of the night. Read full review ScreenShots Scale Computing Platform Screenshots