Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure

Nutanix AOS makes the basic operations (adding recourses and performing updates) a lot easier.

50/50, not much in it, to be honest. Nutanix AOS wins on the support, training, and certification ease but Dell / EMC has the name and integration support with its other products (e.g., Nutanix not supporting Networkers hot add mode).

By far, in my opinion, Nutanix AOS is heads above VMware. From the creation of a VM to updating the nodes themselves, Nutanix AOS is so much easier, faster, and just an overall better product. I would choose Nutanix AOS over VMware any day.

vSAN on VXrail and a Cisco Flashstack was our two existing systems before bringing in a Nutanix cluster. The performance of Nutanix HCI was far better than vSAN's performance (hybrid vs. hybrid and AF vs. AF.) However, Pure does deliver on its claim of being the fastest storage possible, which is true. However, the flashstacks management and complex setup do not compare to the ease of using Nutanix HCI.

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!

Hyperconverged infrastructure

Nutanix AOS easy to use, easy to deploy.

We initially were managing our storage and virtualized appliances through a couple of different software. When we switched to Nutanix AOS, we were allowed a single point of entry for ease of management. This allowed us a more efficient process in regards to ensuring stability and ease.

We used UCS before, which is a little complicated to setup. There are multiple devices need to connect together (for example two FIs and main process chassis needs to cross-connected first), and there is no storage built-in. But once all setup and configured, it is good. The setup and configuration take quite bit time, it's complicated. Then we used Cisco UCS manage it. The interface is of UCS is good, but had some compatiblities issue with Java applets.
While Nutanix AOS is fairly easy once the chassis turn on the network connected. the Interface is very straightforward. No compatibilities issue like Jave.

Enterprise Cloud (EC) is made of three core components: Prism, Acropolis, and Calm. Prism is the management plane that provides a unified management interface that generates actionable insights for optimizing virtualization, infrastructure management, and everyday operations. The Nutanix hardware platform has redundant power supplies, memory, and CPU. The platform is resilient to individual hard disk failures. If a disk fails, data is automatically rebuilt without any impact on the app.

They're on par with each other but it seems like management prefers Nutanix.

The cost of vBlock is just enormous and it is more suited for massive enterprises where you'll need an entire datacentre in a box.

Easy to use, performace and new features

The only other hyper-converged I have used is Rubrik so my comparison here won't be very good I am afraid.

The two products seem comparable in terms of them just being a service in a box but of course one of them is a very good backup solution and the other is a very good infrastructure solution.

Vmware , Cisco HyperFlex

VMware ESXi has been around much longer and because of this is much more fully featured. However, on the flip side, it then makes Nutanix AOS much less complicated to operate. Nutanix AOS online support (and knowledge base articles) are very well written and comprehensive. The VMware support site is more complicated to navigate.

Nutanix [AOS] is a hyper-converged solution, and in the vSphere it was originally designed for the use of SAN, although they also have a hyper-converged solution. But the architecture and load testing showed the inconsistency of the hyper-converged solution from VMware.

Quickly other companies have joined the Nutanix ecosystem to be able to integrate solutions and offer companies adaptation to new technologies.

Simply put Nutanix AOS is in another class. It is so much better, faster, easier to use, train, etc. I would recommend Nutanix every time.

Nutanix [AOS] is the preference as it has good management tools but may be a bit more costly.

Unlimited VM without extra licensing. The AOS is based on KVM.

I have never used any other HCI like products

Other HCI products used or evaluated have been Acuity, HC3, Hyperflex, Maxta, Overt, Proxmox, Simplivity, Symphony, VXRack. Nutanix was really first to market and has had many first features available in their product, familiarity with the product, and our organization's track record with Nutanix's stellar support keeps us going down the HCI path with Nutanix. If it were up to only my decision we would only move away from Nutanix and to a completely open-source Ovirt or Proxmox if our organization architects and administrators would be willing to go self-support only.

I've been a big Nimble fan and would consider it if I was deploying in a green field site (it always comes down to price of course).
Nutanix are an existing supplier so for now it makes the choice easier.
We did look at VxRail but again for the VDI solution Nutanix won out.